With No. 1 finishes again in 2008 and 2009, the Carter won a triple victory that is not likely to be equaled, since TripAdvisor no longer compiles a “dirtiest” list.
But the Carter would probably be out of the competition anyway. It has been under new management for eight months and will be offered for sale in 2014.
As a result of legal battles among the many survivors of Tran Dinh Truong, who owned the hotel from 1977 until his death in 2012, the Carter has been placed in the hands of a temporary administrator, Stanley Parness. He is a former presiding justice of the appellate term in State Supreme Court in Manhattan whose rulings 24 years ago cleared the way for the redevelopment of Times Square.
“Our direction from Judge Parness has been to focus on correcting all life-safety issues,” said John J. Cruz of GF Management, who took over the Carter in April. He said 15 outstanding building code violations were “in varying stages of being addressed.”
What Mr. Cruz walked into was a $ 99-a-night, 615-room mess.
Any hotel can have bedbugs. The Carter had insects that greeted guests in the lobby.
The hotel’s cryptic motto — “You Wanted in Time Square & Less” — was the least of its problems, but it did suggest that things were out of control.
Fire extinguishers had not been recharged since the 1970s, Mr. Cruz said. Exit signs were not illuminated. Elevators in the 24-story building broke down repeatedly and were overdue for maintenance and inspection. Discarded hospital linens were used on guests’ beds. The housekeeping staff, working in street clothes, cleaned rooms every third day. On weekends, there were no doormen. Insurance coverage was insufficient, Mr. Parness said. Loans had not been repaid.
Progress has been made on all fronts, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Parness said. Occupancy has increased to 74 percent, from 68 percent. And on TripAdvisor’s 1-to-100 customer satisfaction index, the Carter has increased to a 73.6, from a 67.6 in 2012.
Mr. Cruz and his colleagues have instituted modest cosmetic changes to make the place more comfortable and, not incidentally, to allow them to raise room rates, which are now typically in the $ 120-to-$ 150 range.
Thirty rooms on the fourth floor have been inexpensively renovated with new Ikea furniture and framed artwork bought from sidewalk vendors.
“We offer value and a clean room,” Mr. Cruz said. “We don’t have expensive tiled floors, chandeliers and snooty bellmen.”
And bedbugs? Mr. Cruz said that after any report of infestation, the mattress from that room was discarded and a new mattress was installed, wrapped in a protective cover. Pest controllers from Steritech come through weekly, he said.
Housekeeping is now done every other day, and the staff is in uniform.
“Whoever is going to buy it doesn’t care whether the staff is uniformed or not,” Mr. Parness said. “But it’s just the right thing to do. And it increases the income.”
The need for a temporary administrator became evident as Mr. Tran’s surviving family members fought one another for control of the estate, principally the Hotel Carter.
It is not entirely clear who Mr. Tran’s survivors are. One paid death notice named a wife, Nguyen Kim Sang, and four children. Another paid death notice listed 16 children by name, “their mothers” and 15 grandchildren. Some relatives still live at the Carter. Some are employed by the hotel.
“Our expectation, when we sell the hotel, is that there will no longer be family members residing there,” said Lawrence B. Wolfe, a senior managing director of Eastdil Secured, which will market the property.
Mr. Wolfe imagines the Carter as a three-star hotel, a bump up from two stars. “My intuition is that positioning yourself as one of the less expensive hotels in a great location is where it’s going,” he said.
The Carter opened in 1930 as the Hotel Dixie. Its chief distinction was the Central Union Bus Terminal, below the lobby. It had a 35-foot-diameter turntable on which arriving buses could be spun around for departure. (The terminal closed in 1957, but the turntable can still be seen in the hotel garage.)
In October 1976, the hotel’s name was changed to Carter by the Carter Hotels Corporation, which had owned it since 1942. Coincidentally or not, Jimmy Carter, of Georgia, was elected president less than two weeks later.
The paradox is not lost on Mr. Parness that the Carter was, until recently, a throwback to an era that his rulings helped end — when Times Square hotels were bargain priced, handily located and sometimes life threatening.
“I just can’t get away from 42nd Street,” he said.
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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