Four years ago, an entrepreneur named Urs Jakob bought a welfare hotel in Manhattan on 27th Street east of Fifth Avenue, renamed it the Gershwin, and transformed it into a very hot property. Charging $75 to $100 a night for a single and $22 a night for a shared room, he attracts an international clientele of artists, writers, models, actors, musicians, and other big dreamers. Guests have included documentary-makers from the BBC and Austria, models including Miss International Petite Teen, even the king of Rwanda.

Such entertaining guests make the Gershwin seem very much the sort of place even a native New Yorker might like to drop in on, perhaps for coffee in the cafeteria to see who might want to chat, but in the long history of Manhattan, many other glamorous hotels have flourished, and been forgotten. Who now remembers the Palm Garden at the old Waldorf-Astoria? If the Gershwin is likely to be remembered, in my opinion, it may well be because, in addition to boarding artists, it exhibits memorable art in its art gallery, and in particular the work of a modernist painter by the name of Randy Bloom.

Jakob, of course, makes no immediate claim to immortality. Raised in California and schooled at UCLA, Jakob, now 41, has built a career in what he calls "budget accommodation" by buying or leasing properties "that no longer function for their owners" and converting them into facilities where "creative travelers can be comfortable" and indulge in "spur-of-the-moment communication." He avoids "hospitality design," the bland decor of most moderate-priced hostelries, because "you can't tell where you are."

In the lobby of the Gershwin, you know you're in New York—at least New York as a Californian sees it. On one wall hangs a huge pop-art relief commissioned by Jakob from a Los Angeles artist. Further back are Lichtenstein-style murals and silkscreen-based pictures of Picasso and Walt Disney by a young disciple of Andy Warhol named Richard Bernstein. In a vitrine by the elevators stands a Campbell's soup can signed by Warhol himself.

The hotel is named for George Gershwin because Tin Pan Alley, the street synonymous with the song industry to which he was a memorable contributor, once occupied the nearby block of 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. In the early years of the century, music publishers there hired pianists, or "pluggers," to play songs to customers, especially vaudevillians. Sheet-music sales and recordings depended on having these songs used in stage acts, but the "pluggers" made so much noise that a journalist named Monroe Rosenfeld said they sounded like somebody banging on tin pans, and the name stuck. Gershwin worked as a "plugger" there when he left high school in 1914, at age fifteen, earning $15 a week.

Jakob describes the Gershwin as "a performance piece" expressing the creativity of New York, past and present. "Gershwin" to him suggests the Roaring Twenties, and/or the Jazz Age, which is especially important to him because he himself is a jazz fancier, has attended meetings of the Duke Ellington Society, and gets to clubs and recording sessions from Harlem to the Knitting Factory downtown. The Jazz Age was also a time when artists and writers and musicians came together in places like New York and Paris and thrived on the creative synergy—the kind of synergy Jakob wants to foster. The Gershwin Hotel stages musical performances and other events in "the living room" behind the lobby, or on the roof. Tito Puente and Steve Loza have participated, but Jakob would like best to reunite Warhol's old gang. In 1995, he threw a party on the artist's birthday that, he says, "built and built." Billy Name, Warhol's photographer, came. So did Ultra Violet.

Among its resident artists, the Gershwin houses Heinz and Gisela Burghard, 42 and 31, from Munich. He's known as "the German Warhol," and she's an interior designer. Typical of Heinz's work is a cheerful poster for the Gershwin using photocopies of appropriate images, from Warhol to a backpack ("because the Gershwin's a mixture of hotel and hostel"). Heinz sees photocopies as the 90's equivalent to the silkscreens Warhol used in the 60's. In the Burghards' room, a glass of plastic strawberries sits on a table: Heinz proposed to Gisela in the Strawberry Fields of Central Park. Doors are painted with decidedly bovine features he calls "cowspots."

Kurtis Armstrong, a 28-year-old actor-singer from Kansas City, has been residing at the Gershwin since August of 1995, except when he's involved with out-of-town performances (such as a four-month tour with a Kansas City company performing children's plays). He heard about the Gershwin through a friend and lives with three roommates (most communal rooms have four beds; some have more). Kurtis likes the Gershwin because he meets many foreigners. "It's like going on vacation," he says. "Educational, too."

Timothy Courtemarche is a 24-year-old model from Chino Park, California, who left college to model and came to the Gershwin in January of 1996 because his agency would pay his bill as an advance against expected bookings. He has gotten some bookings in Manhattan and travels elsewhere for others, but whenever he's in town he stops by the Gershwin. Having once worked in the cafeteria to help cover expenses, he thinks of the hotel as "like a family."

All this makes colorful magazine copy. The Gershwin's publicity manager, Jules Feiler, gets plenty of requests for interviews from students of popular culture in the media who may be unaware that most Manhattan hotels attract many overseas visitors, and who think that one that aspires to be a shrine to Warhol must be the last word in chic. A sizable percentage of the TV documentary makers who make the Gershwin their headquarters seem to go no farther than the lobby for footage. A courageous few, however, ventured last spring into the Gershwin's art gallery. There they discovered not warmed-over 60's Happenings, but actual paintings, acrylic on canvas.

The work was by Randy Bloom, a painter who at forty-one is still fighting to establish a reputation in Manhattan. I've admired her work for years and know that it's particularly hard for her because she's a colorfield abstractionist, which is about as unfashionable as you can get. Even in the 60's, when Clement Greenberg was still around to champion colorfield, meaning it supposedly represented "the Establishment," pop art was already vastly more in evidence. I started writing about art for Time magazine in 1967; it took me a year to discover colorfield existed. Today, pop and its relations and descendants, including minimalism, conceptualism, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo, object art, and Hyperrealism, dominate the galleries, being known collectively as postmodernism. Shows for modernists are as scarce as snowflakes in May.

Under such circumstances, I was impressed by Jakob's willingness to take a gamble on Bloom. Before I became an art critic, I used to research business news for Time and so I'm able to appreciate the fact that, as a businessman, Jakob is especially deft. The occupancy rate at the Gershwin averages 85 percent during its busy season, from April to Christmas, which if not extraordinary is certainly respectable. Jakob is also good at attracting maximum media attention, but frankly, I've interviewed so many businessmen who were both financially successful and good at media relations that these qualities, in and of themselves, no longer impress me. I am also underwhelmed by the fact that Jakob collects art, since buying Warhol at this late date hardly seems daring. If the contemporary Russians and French Canadians he also collects are Warhol-compatible, they are probably not much different from the usual thing one sees in the SoHo galleries. Artists of every nationality today are capable of imitating the latest styles they find in the art magazines.

Showing Bloom, on the other hand, takes both guts and generosity on Jakob's part, since it's neither fashionable nor likely to make him much money, at least in the immediate future. Even vintage colorfield work, by leaders of the school such as Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, has been going at bargain prices in the auction houses this year. By choosing to sponsor Bloom, Jakob also shows humility, as he accepted the recommendation of a subordinate—Feiler, who has known Bloom since they were at Franconia College in New Hampshire together, has watched her struggle over the years, and is convinced that "she'll go a long way."