Need help finding a hotel :-)

[philip]

Hi, I plan to visit New York City from 3/14 - 3/17. I want to stay at a hotel that is no more than 15 miles away from Midtown Manhattan, and the hotel needs to be close to a subway station (10 minutes walk).

There are 3 people in my group, so we can either have two rooms, or we can all squeeze in to a suite. The room rate per person shall not exceed 100/day. (Edit, so that's $200 per day for a double room, or $300 for a suite)

This is my first time visiting New York, and I will be traveling with 2 girls during my spring break. So very excited, Yah!

[IlEstAndré]

Not really going to happen for under $100 a day.

[IlEstAndré]

From that I mean you are going to get a small room facing another building, with an air-conditionar cooling your room and at the same time being the home of a pigeon family of 4.

Thats what i got for $90 a night 18 blocks away from central park.

[TalB]

If you are looking for a low price range in finding a place to stay, then go to a hostel, which are very cheap.

[philip]

Originally Posted by IlEstAndré

Not really going to happen for under $100 a day.

Guys, I meant $100 per day per person.
So that's $200 per day for a double occupancy room, or $300 for a suite)

[swivel]

i highly recommend the hotel carter.. swanky, yet affordable... heh...

[AndySocks]

Originally Posted by swivel

i highly recommend the hotel carter.. swanky, yet affordable... heh...

Hahahahaha I stayed there for prom. Couldn't afford the hotel most of my friends were staying in, since I had lost my job a few months earlier. Paid a hundred dollars cash at the door. Wasn't too pleasant an experience at the time, now me and my date look back on it and laugh our asses off.

[AndySocks]

You adverse to outerboroughs? I'm sure there's something nice in Forest Hills/Rego Park by the Queens Boulevard line, probably five or something miles from midtown. Not too long a train ride at all if you catch an express.

When I went to Boston, I stayed in fucking Revere Beach for Christ's sakes. So yeah, much worse can be done than Forest Hills.

[JivecitySTL]

Also try Hotel 17 on the Lower East Side. Madonna lived there when she first came to NY and it's very inexpensive as far as Manhattan hotels are concerned.

www.hotel17ny.com

[TalB]

Originally Posted by AndySocks

You adverse to outerboroughs? I'm sure there's something nice in Forest Hills/Rego Park by the Queens Boulevard line, probably five or something miles from midtown. Not too long a train ride at all if you catch an express.

When I went to Boston, I stayed in fucking Revere Beach for Christ's sakes. So yeah, much worse can be done than Forest Hills.

Queens Blvd has a several hotels that are off the 7 train.

[Lili]

Originally Posted by JivecitySTL

Also try Hotel 17 on the Lower East Side. Madonna lived there when she first came to NY and it's very inexpensive as far as Manhattan hotels are concerned.

www.hotel17ny.com

The rooms look a bit tacky.

[philip]

Thanks for all your suggestions. Hotel 17 and Hotel 31 is full. hotel Carter looks a bit too cheap, I am afraid my traveling buddies will not like it.

I am looking for a Holiday Inn/ Holiday Inn Express type of hotels near a subway station.

[swivel]

Originally Posted by philip

hotel Carter looks a bit too cheap

if you only knew...

[AndySocks]

Originally Posted by philip

hotel Carter looks a bit too cheap, I am afraid my traveling buddies will not like it.

That all depends whether or not they like hookers.

[Lili]

Originally Posted by swivel

if you only knew...

So, if I have friends on a budget visiting, I can recommend this place to them? This is a clean place, right? The location is very good.

What is @AndySocks talking about hookers?

[kai]

Hi Philip,

Did you check out the La Quinta Inn in Queens, NYC. The #7 train subway station is about 1 mins and across from the hotel. You wil be in midtown manhattan in 10 to 15 mins. The rate are also pretty reasonable. click

http://travel.yahoo.com/p-hotel-4780...name-la+quinta

Their phone # is 718-729-8775

[swivel]

Originally Posted by Lili

So, if I have friends on a budget visiting, I can recommend this place to them? This is a clean place, right? The location is very good.

What is @AndySocks talking about hookers?

no... stay away.. its filthy.. andy is being literal..

where's dennis at? he and jan both can tell you about the hotel carter.. lol.. so dirty.

[Dennis]

ha we went tot the travel inn hotel @ west 42nd, but jan was a long time ago on the carter hotel! ahah ask him about it! funny stuff!

[Lili]

Is Travel Inn Hotel @ West 42nd good? I can recommend it?

[swivel]

^ yes, from what i remember hearing about their trip, the travel inn is just fine... I would imagine most major chains are.

found this kicking around wiredny....


just to give you an idea of what hotel carter is like......


i mean, look at their sign for example!? that makes no effing sense whatsoever.. and what a facade this place puts up....

What Do You Expect for $99.23 a Night?

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: November 20, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/ny.../20carter.html



Michael Nagle for The New York Times
The 615 rooms at Hotel Carter, on West 43rd Street near Eighth Avenue, are among the city's cheapest.


Michael Nagle for the New York Times
Room 1105 revealed a dead phone, carpet stains and a moldy patch on the bathroom ceiling. The TV, however, was new, and the bed was comfortable.


It was about 4 p.m. when something crawled on the carpet. A large insect of unidentified species made its way across the hotel lobby, and a group of European tourists tracked it with a cheerful curiosity until a gray-haired man in a baseball cap waiting to check in stomped on it.

No one else noticed the dead bug. The lobby - a sensory overload of neon, mirrors, bright lights, televisions, yard-sale furniture and pay phones - was too distracting. Guests streamed in and out with befuddled stares, mild complaints and curious requests. A woman asked a worker for bug killer after finding a roach in her bathroom. She was handed a spray bottle of kitchen cleaner and sent on her way.

In the rooms upstairs, tales of lodging woe unfolded. One guest said his television played the sound from one channel but showed the picture from another. A couple in Room 500 said they were surprised to discover that they did not have a closet. And a businesswoman from Ukraine on the 23rd floor found that she liked her room better in the dark. "If the curtains close, light is off, it's not that bad," she said.

People have been saying for years that the old Times Square - the seedy, lowbrow ancestor of what is now a largely sanitized, Disneyfied tourist haven - is dead. But those people have never spent a night at the Hotel Carter. The 615-room hotel at 250 West 43rd Street offers travelers a cheap room in an expensive city, and something more: an adventure. In the middle of Manhattan and at the neon-bright Crossroads of the World, the hotel has been a little-known source of grimy hospitality, low-budget accommodations and equal numbers of satisfied and dissatisfied customers from around the world.

As a guest of the Hotel Carter, you may or may not have your room cleaned. You may or may not find the multicolored, multipatterned carpet on the floor and the walls agreeable. You may or may not have a working television and telephone. You may or may not have a smooth check-in, since the front desk keeps track of reservations without the benefit of a computer system.

In short, you may or may not have an enjoyable stay. The answer depends on which room you get - the top floors have numerous large recently renovated rooms with splendid views - and on your answer to this question: What do you expect for $99.23 a night?

The Carter, a tan-brick 24-story hotel on a busy stretch of West 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is popular with foreign travelers, students and tourists on a tight budget, and recent guests either loved it or hated it.

Tran Truong, 73, the co-owner of the hotel, and his assistant, Elaine Nguyen, said they tried their best to provide safe, clean lodging at a low price for travelers. Mr. Truong, a Vietnamese businessman who lives in the hotel, bought the Carter in 1977. Ms. Nguyen said they did not have the money or the staff of the big corporate hotel chains, but she defended the hotel's customer service and cleanliness. The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene conducted an inspection for rodents in July and found no cause for action, according to the report.

"We're not a four-star or five-star hotel," she said. What they are, she said, is "the best bargain for the location."

A two-night stay at the hotel last week illustrated the benefits and the drawbacks of bargain lodging in Times Square. The hotel can be humorously disorienting. People have stood on the sidewalk outside the hotel and tried to decipher, without success, the meaning of one of the hotel's slogans, displayed above its bronze-colored awning: "You Wanted in Time Square & Less."

The lobby is a 24-hour people-watcher's paradise. It can feel, in a narrow room that resembles a cross between a D.M.V. office and a Las Vegas disco, like Saturday night on an early Wednesday morning. At one moment, two elegantly dressed women in evening gowns and high heels appeared. At another, a man sat down and drank from a can of Budweiser. "The best show on Broadway," a former guest wrote on one travel Web site, tripadvisor.com, "is the lobby of the Carter."

Room 1105 was not so much a room as it was a place to lie low. It took eight paces to walk from one wall to the next and 21 paces to get from the door to the window. The telephone was dead. It sat on an old desk, its drawer broken and placed on the stained carpet, a copy of the Manhattan white pages, 1994-5, among the contents inside. The room was lighted by a bare bulb on the ceiling, and the headboard of the bed was a rectangle of blue carpet nailed to the wall. There was a big moldy splotch on the ceiling above the bathtub.

The Sharp TV was sleek and new, but the tiles in the bathroom longed for a good scrubbing. The door unlocked using a modern card instead of a key, but the push-button phone - the typewritten number on its beige face disconnected - was of unknown vintage, perhaps from the 1980's. There were hints of the hotel's rich past, sometimes in the oddest places.

A "Church Directory," about 25 years old, remains posted in the lobby in a glass case, amid a row of pay phones ("Manhattan Church of Christ, James R. Petty, minister"). A sign around the corner reads "Dixie Bar & Restaurant," but the door below it is closed.

The hotel was called the Hotel Dixie when it opened in 1930, the same year as the Chrysler Building. It had entrances on 42nd Street and 43rd Street, and the Central Union Bus Terminal occupied the basement. In 1937, the hotel raised its price for a single room, to $2.75 from $2.50. It was later purchased by a subsidiary of the Carter Hotels Operating Corporation but kept the Dixie name. A 225-seat theater opened there in 1966 with the musical comedy "Autumn's Here."

In the early 1980's, the city housed homeless families at the Carter. These days, Ms. Nguyen said, the hotel is undergoing renovations and service improvements - including the addition of a front desk computer system - that are likely to lead to rate increases.

There are certainly other budget hotel rooms in the city that are smaller, shabbier and do not come with their own private bathrooms. The price of Room 1105 - $232 for two nights for one occupant, after taxes - made it among the cheapest of the city's 71,000 hotel rooms. The bed was firm but comfortable, and the room muffled the noise of the city, the only sounds an occasional siren and the drip-drip-drip of one of the bathtub's leaky handles.

Such distractions do not sit well with some. Anders Lindqvist, 33, a lawyer from Copenhagen, said on Thursday that he would probably not return to the hotel after his weeklong visit. "I was surprised that there was still plumbing and installations that bad in the center of Manhattan," he said.

Other Carter guests have a way of looking on the bright side.

"As long as there's a bed and a roof and running water, that's all I really need," said Kee-Hyun Kim, 23, a musician from Boston who checked out on Wednesday and said he liked the hotel's price and central location. "I'm pretty low maintenance, and I think anybody who stays at a place like that has to be."



Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Room 1105 revealed a moldy patch on the bathroom ceiling.

a few from a quick flickr search....