The Hotel Carter in Times Square — known for murders, suicides, bedbugs, and winning TripAdvisor’s “dirtiest hotel” award multiple years — is apparently still a hellhole. This week, The Real Deal reports, the city filed a civil lawsuit against owners Joseph and Meyer Chetrit, accusing them of creating a public-safety nuisance with more than 155 violations and abandoning the property after defaulting on their mortgage earlier this year.
The hotel, which opened in 1930, was never one of the swankiest places to stay in the city (there was a bus terminal in the base for nearly three decades), but it wasn’t until the 1970s that things really went downhill. It was rebranded from the Dixie to the Carter in 1976 in an attempt to rehabilitate its image — an effort that, quite evidently, didn’t pan out. As the New York Times put it: “Any hotel can have bedbugs. The Carter had insects that greeted guests in the lobby.”
When Tran Dinh Truong, the longtime owner, died in 2012, the hotel fell into further neglect as his heirs fought over his estate. The Times reported that the court put the 615-room hotel in the hands of a temporary administrator to correct “all life safety issues,” which included fire extinguishers that hadn’t been recharged since the 1970s, unilluminated exit signs, unserviced elevators that frequently broke down, and guest-room beds made up with “discarded hospital linens.”
When a reporter from the New York Observer visited the Carter in July 2014, six months into its cleanup in preparation for a sale, guests told him that their rooms didn’t have toilet paper (rolls had to be picked up at the front desk in the lobby), TVs were broken, and the bed linens and carpets were noticeably dirty. Many of the guests had booked online, swayed by decent-ish looking photos on the website and the cheap rates, only to be taken aback upon arrival: “Were we expecting the Ritz? No. Were we expecting clean and sanitary? Um, yes!” one told him. (Others claimed to like the ambiance, seeing the hotel as a kind of Brigadoon of old, seedy, gritty New York.)
When the Chetrits bought the hotel for $192 million in 2015 it seemed that it might finally be a new chapter for the place — a few years earlier, the developer had also taken over the Hotel Chelsea and the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn Heights, with plans to renovate the properties into luxury hotels. The Chetrits shut the Carter down and, according to the city’s lawsuit, started demo work, but with only intermittent permits, a mountain of code violations, and long periods of doing nothing at all. “We’ll be working with the city to resolve these violations,” a spokesperson for the Chetrits told The Real Deal.
Among the many violations cited in the lawsuit: demolishing the first floor and cellar without properly sealing off the interior to the public, and conditions including disconnected parapet panels in danger of falling, missing panels, hanging wires, rotten plywood, parts of the building listing toward parked cars, and inoperable lights on the construction shed. The city claims that the Chetrits essentially abandoned the building amid financial woes last year — they have, altogether, defaulted on at least $1.6 billion worth of debt. The Hotel Bossert, which also fell into disrepair and neglect during a drawn-out renovation, sold at a foreclosure auction this spring and was quickly flipped to a developer who plans to convert the property into residences — most likely not an option for the Carter.