Many memories from this hotel as a teen visiting NYC for the first time. Splitting a room with people I'd only met online. Meeting Jello Biafra in the lobby. Volunteering for HOPE. Trying out a Segway for the first time on a level with floor-to-ceiling windows. Standing on the roof with friends, taking in the city skyline, glancing over at the open login of the NT4.0 Workstation running the elevator motor controls. Walking the back passageways, inspecting ancient NYTel/NYNEX cross boxes, taking the giant service elevators up and down, walking through the abandoned floors covered in dust.
When I came back as an adult, this hotel was the cheapest room in the city, and it showed. Run down and falling apart. It's extremely hard to turn a profit on a hotel this large; the maintenance is constant and expensive, and if you skimp on anything (like shuttering a few floors) they just get worse over time. There was absolutely a time when it was a money maker, but that time is gone. I just wish they could have converted it into apartments. It would have taken a big investment, but I think the city owed it to both the building's history, and the people trying to "make it" in the big apple.
I stayed here in approximately 2010, because it was the cheapest hotel near Madison Square Garden, and I will forever remember it as the filthiest hotel I've ever been in. I slept fully clothed on top of the bed with my coat for a blanket.
I too stayed there in 2010 to be close to MSG. My friends and I knew it was a shithole, and were sending each other terrible TripAdvisor reviews for laughs. Buried a dozen pages in, one review offered instructions for getting up on the roof- go to a certain floor, go into a certain housekeeping door, and take the stairs in the back. We followed the instructions and found an incredible and private view of the city. Fun night!
I also stayed there around the same time; my overriding memory is how grimy the bathroom was. It looked like it had never had a proper clean since it was first decorated.
Did anyone else ever explore the huge multi-level basements of the hotel? In the final sub-basement, I remember there was a passageway that connected into one of the subway tunnels way down there.
RIP. I stayed here the first time I visited NYC, mainly on account of the location and price. It felt enormous and check-in was pretty chaotic given the amount of people checking in but it felt like an authentic intro to the city.
That said, it was pretty grimy. Don't blame them for tearing it down, it's way too big to preserve as some kind of historical boutique hotel.
Had the misfortune of tech directing a conference in a ballroom there once. The distro was literally 3-phase cams coming through a hole busted in the drywall, patched into a residential-style breaker panel which was strapped to a furniture dolly with romex as the ‘strap’ and leaned against the wall, front of house, in the ballroom. You can imagine how the rest of the tech was. Worst gig of my life.
I remember at HOPE when the lobby flooded from a downpour. Felt it was odd considering how many floors it had. Gross place at it's state but so much damn history.
People are always fretting over the low availability and high cost of housing, yet here's a building with 2200 rooms and all the infrastructure needed to service them. It's all so tiresome.
Hotel rooms are not apartments. The lack of kitchen facilities in particular makes them incompatible with long stays, and you can't just retrofit ranges and ventilation and sinks etc into already small rooms.
Every discussion like this people people assume the challenges of converting old buildings are insurmountable and throw up their hands. Nobody living in a tent or car has ever said 'of course I'd like a warm room with a bed but not at the price of altering the building code or compromising on anything.'
I would like for some of my taxes to be used on such conversions. I already help out some homeless neighbors but my personal capacity is limited. I much prefer my taxes go to this end than buying more paramilitary equipment for cops or vanity development projects.
If the rooms are too small, that's one thing, but there's already plumbing for water, and adding a microwave and induction hotplate isn't too difficult. Sure, it wouldn't be as nice as a full kitchen, but it's serviceable living space. I'd rather that than a tent on the street which would have an even worse kitchen setup, although it might have more space.
One (relatively) easy solution is to have one big community kitchen per floor. That’s how my dorm in college worked and it was fantastic. I’d love to go back to that approach. Having a dedicated kitchen area taking up square footage 24/7 that you only use a few hours a week is pretty silly, even more so if you do prefer eating out.
Let’s not perpetuate the myth that being homeless implies a person is unable to engage in basic human activity. Sincerely, a formerly homeless individual who can maintain a pan just fine, thank you.
If anything, experience living with only the bare minimum cookware taught me to maintain it better. There’s no such thing as “I’ll deal with that later”, when that is all you have.
Just because a person does not have a house does not mean they have mental health issues. And even if a person does have mental health issues, it does not mean they cannot live normal lives. The sooner people realize that the better.
You can have something resembling a supermarket or food court as opposed to some Dickensian soup kitchen. People with mental health issues sometimes need autonomy and personal space, but also sometimes need to be sociable or have access to community.
Likely true, but the maintenance can also be done by employees or motivated volunteers. ISTM that providing services is what a hotel does well and what supportive housing for people who end up homeless often needs to do as well. It doesn't need to be luxurious or wasteful, but it seems sensible to take advantage of infrastructure and economies of scale that are already known to work.
Absent of building code, it’s pretty disparaging to dismiss kitchen facilities in a permanent dwelling because someone might be able to afford eating out everyday in perpetuity.
Actually my comment was based on a sample of one couple I knew living in Greenwich. I recall they said something like "we never cooked at home during the years we were there". I wasn't sure if they were representative of inner city NY living - that's why I asked (my question was genuine and not intended to be dismissive - please read guidelines). They both came from cook at home families outside the US so their choice wasn't cultural AFAIK.
Lots or spaces could be converted to housing but there are other plans in mind; plans that make thick profits will always win over helping people people.
We need a continuous supply of new housing, or rebuilding, and in particular NYC should always be building up up up.
There are three ways to deal with shortages: waiting lists, market pricing out the lowest incomes, and building enough new housing to let everyone who wants to live there live their. Only the last option, build build build, is the least bit fair. Every other option is exclusionary and destructive to community.
Not at all. I just have no sympathy for the likes of NYC. Turning old hotels into below-market housing so that a service class of workers can serve Wall Street seems dystopian to me. Seems like Qatar, not America.
Among the odder moments came when a government bacteriologist named Frank Olson plunged to his death from the 10th floor in 1953.
It was later revealed that he had been slipped LSD as part of an illegal mind-control program overseen by the C.I.A. Seventy years later, the circumstances remain murky.
It was an aggressive researcher's interrogation program consisting of constant belittlement. :( Ted was young at Harvard and probably didnt have the wherewithall to refuse or understand what the effects could be.
I get that, but reading up on Pol Pot or just narco states etc and you really appreciate what so many people want(ed) to go to the US.
It’s ok to want things to be better even if you don’t think America is horrible. Improvement doesn’t need justification, it is literally it’s own reward.
> What bar would you judge a society by besides other societies? Idealized futuristic utopias?
Yes, obviously. You have an ideal of where you want to be, and you strive towards it, knowing that you may never get there, but that steps towards it are good. How else would we judge our infinite efforts as a citizen improving our country, and progress over time thereof? Criticizing others and sitting back and feeling good about ourselves for doing nothing but at least we're better off (for the moment) than some hypothetic far-off country that exists under different circumstances?
> I don't really agree we should be most critical of our own society. We should be critical of the society that deserves the most criticism.
I don't really agree that we should focus criticism on where it's unlikely to effect change. Criticism is, at best, a means to an end, and at worst, an attack aimed at others to distract and avoid change ourselves. If we aren't actively working towards that end, our criticism is useless or counterproductive. In the case of a country other than our own, actively working towards that end is unlikely, so the criticism being useless or counterproductive is likely.
> How else would you aim your infinite efforts as a citizen of your country?
The problem with aiming for utopia is you don’t understand the problems. People in 1100 couldn’t really conceive of an obesity epidemic and the founding fathers didn’t understand the issues with political parties or lifetime nomination to the Supreme Court.
Instead you can understand the local situation and aim for something slightly better. Rather than trying to have nationalized healthcare system what if we lower the age for social security eligibility to 60/55 or add kids under 18 etc.
> The problem with aiming for utopia is you don’t understand the problems.
I have never found that to be a "problem with aiming for utopia", so maybe it's purely a personal problem with your ability to aim. Achieving something slightly better is possible whether you're aiming for "something slightly better" or something more, so it's not like aiming high affects your ability to achieve low (it definitely doesn't).
As for understanding the situation, etc., that all comes with what I was saying before, which is that criticism should be aimed at where it can affect change. If you can't effect change with criticism, the criticism is counterproductive.
Politically revolutions are probably the best example where people fought really hard to improve things wholesale and then ended up with Mow, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.
Aiming for Utopia has a terrible track record because we don’t actually know how such societies would function under the hood just superficial details that seem like a good idea. What seems like perfection from far away is often premature optimization.
Smaller changes may not work, but they are much easier to roll back. This isn’t simply criticism for criticism’s sake there real lessons to be learned here and concrete steps we can take. See the constitutional amendment banning alcohol and then it’s repeal and then repeating those mistakes with the drug war. etc etc
I haven't found any of your claims to be true. Aiming for utopia is how we've achieved literally everything as humans from cavemen to now. Though you're cherry picking the worst of humanity, the best of humanity also came from aiming for utopia. Indeed, all the terrible rulers you mentioned could have been from people not aiming for utopia.
Larger aims may not be achievable, but they're how we get smaller changes. There is indeed criticism for criticism's sake (a lot of people use it to distract from improvement efforts). If we stick with that, we'd never have repealed prohibition because people would be worried about, "what if we repealed it the wrong way, we shouldn't aim for a utopia where alcohol prohibition is repealed, we should aim for something smaller, like 1% beer, repealing prohibition is just a utopia we'll never achieve".
Welp, turns out aiming for the utopia is how we repealed prohibition. We imagined the world we wanted, and we made a part of it happen, and none of it was due to criticizing other countries.
Let's just take as an example, a criticism you have of a different country. You can come up with the example. Just explain how your criticism has lead to making our own country better than it was. Remember: that's the only valid positive use of criticism: improving our reality.
> Aiming for utopia is how we’ve achieved literally everything as humans from cavemen to now.
That’s objectively false. Many advancements have come from people aiming for personal prestige, wealth, or a host of lesser goals. Even ugly things like coercion have played a major role in moving humanity forward. The raw materials for the Industrial Revolution were often sourced from less than ethical approaches.
Utopia just isn’t what motivates most people to do most things, it’s lesser goals like lunch or impressing some girl at a party. On the other hand Utopia is often sold as an excuse for people to do unpleasant things today for some future reward. Cults thrive on Utopia, society runs on more concrete objectives.
> Welp, turns out aiming for the utopia is how we repealed prohibition.
False.
Many people who worked to repeal prohibition still thought the world would be better without alcohol, you can read people who actually argued this, they just didn’t know how to make it work. By giving up on perfection they achieved a beneficial change.
Again society is really complex. It’s likely some rule to be part of a perfect society and doing the opposite to be an improvement today. Euthanasia wouldn’t be part of a perfect society because there wouldn’t be pain or suffering in a perfect society. It’s a compromise and an important one.
> Let's just take as an example, a criticism you have of a different country. You can come up with the example. Just explain how your criticism has lead to making our own country better than it was. Remember: that's the only valid positive use of criticism: improving our reality.
I don’t run things. But if you want a real example of a criticism benefiting the USA, how about giving women the right to vote.
> Many advancements have come from people aiming for personal prestige, wealth, or a host of lesser goals
Those are all personal utopias of the people involved. Beyond that, many advancements have come from people aiming for explicitly societal utopias.
> Many people who worked to repeal prohibition still thought the world would be better without alcohol, you can read people who actually argued this, they just didn’t know how to make it work. By giving up on perfection they achieved a beneficial change.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Many people believed the utopia of a repealed prohibition was unachievable. It was only by ignoring these "utopia shunners" that we achieved that aspect of the utopia we set out to achieve, with prohibition repealed.
Again, society is truly complex. It's only by aiming for the better that we get better. Just take, for example, your inability to cite an example of how criticizing another country has led to you improving yours. That just proves my point: it likely hasn't, because it usually doesn't.
Indeed, we've completely abandoned that claim, and are now reduced to a claim about utopian vs subutopian goals, entirely omitting anything about other countries. By doing so, we're now discussing how to improve ours. QED.
Ah, but it is, regardless of your personal word gatekeeping!
> It’s not any improvement but actual perfection.
I'm not confident they preferred just "any improvement" over the ideal state, but rather they set out for the ideal, and what they achieved was just how far they got towards that ideal. They would have preferred the ideal, if it was possible, obviously. What's another word for ideal end state? Utopia.
In any case, your inability to cite an example of how _you_ criticizing another country has led to _you_ improving _yours_, seems to prove my point: it likely hasn't, because it usually doesn't. You hit the nail on the head: We The People don't run things in another country, we run them in ours, which is why criticizing other countries isn't very useful for improving ours.
Indeed, we've completely abandoned that claim, and are now reduced to a claim about utopian vs subutopian goals, entirely omitting anything about other countries. By doing so, we're now discussing how to improve ours. QED.
Suggesting any improvement is aiming for utopia is simply false. Sentencing someone to life imprisonment absolutely guarantees that you aren’t going to live in a utopia while they are alive. Therefore it isn’t aiming for utopia but an imperfect compromise. There’s no gatekeeping involved simply the actual meaning of the word.
As to your suggestion I am backtracking, I am an individual not a country. I can point to cases where my critique of other people improved myself but suggesting I changed the US is kind of silly. Abstractly, I could say my voting habits have been impacted by analyzing failures of other countries. However, having never actually changed any election outcomes such a statement is in effect meaningless.
On a tiny scale I there thousands of minor actions which I think are a net positive but I don’t know. Witnessing the repeated failures associated with exporting plastic recycling, I realized it’s better for the environment to throw plastic into the trash bin than attempting to recycle it. But, while it’s true that’s a net positive for the US and the world it isn’t a meaningful difference.
Self-criticism can be a form of narcissism. And any organization (country, company, sports team, etc.) at the top of the heap is especially prone to looking inward already. When the big boss decides to feel bad about what they’ve done to others, they usually end up reinforcing their self-centered viewpoint.
I think it’s quite healthy for Americans to realize just how messed up the history of other countries often is, and in different ways than the US.
