The historic Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan shuttered three years ago, but it will soon be bustling again — reopening to accommodate an anticipated influx of asylum seekers just as other New York City hotels are being converted to emergency shelters.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Saturday that the city will use the Roosevelt to eventually provide as many as 1,000 rooms for migrants who are expected to arrive in coming weeks because of the expiration of pandemic-era rules, known collectively as Title 42,that had allowed federal officials to turn away asylum seekers from the US border with Mexico.
Across the city, hotels like the Roosevelt that served tourists just a few years ago are being transformed into emergency shelters, many of them in prime locations within walking distance from Times Square, the World Trade Centre memorial site and the Empire State Building. A legal mandate requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who needs it.
Even so, Adams says the city is running out of room for migrants and has sought financial help from the state and federal governments.
“New York City has now cared for more than 65,000 asylum seekers — already opening up over 140 emergency shelters and eight large-scale humanitarian relief centres in addition to this one to manage this national crisis,” the mayor said in a statement announcing the Roosevelt decision.
The storied hotel near Grand Central Terminal served as election headquarters for New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, who in 1948 was said to have wrongly announced from the Roosevelt that he had defeated Harry Truman for president.As the city faces growing pressure to expand its shelter system, it is turning to vacant hotels for those who need a roof and a place to bunk down as they sort out their lives. One of them is the Holiday Inn, located in Manhattan’s Financial District. A few months ago, signs in the lobby windows of the 50-story, 500-room hotel said it was closed.
Scott Markowitz of Tarter Krinsky and Drogin, attorneys for the hotel’s owner, said reopening as a city-sponsored shelter made financial sense.
“They rent out every room at the hotel at a certain price every night,” Markowitz said, adding that it is bringing “substantially more revenue” than normal operations would have brought in.
It’s not new for the city to turn to hotels for New Yorkers without homes when shelters and other options weren’t available.During the pandemic, group shelters made it difficult to comply with social distancing rules, prompting the city to rent out hundreds of hotel rooms as quasi COVID wards. As the pandemic eased, the city became less reliant on hotels.That changed as thousands of migrants began arriving by bus last year.
