Less than a block from Times Square and close to all Midtown tourist attractions
Around the corner from the Times Square subway station
Within walking distance of Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal, and Port Authority Bus Terminal
Our room had a large closet
There’s a desk in the lobby for arranging tours and car service
New management has cleaned up the place and improved it from its nadir as a den of crime
Low rates for such a central location in Manhattan
New York City history buffs will enjoy its status as an artifact of a Times Square that’s now mostly vanished
On a seedy stretch of block; guests may have to fend off approaches by touts for the strip club next door
Bare-bones accommodations: no free Wi-Fi, no breakfast, no in-room music or stereo, a handful of channels on the television, no coffeemaker, no fridge
Lobby is rather shabby, and is the only common area
Bed had busted springs, our bedsheets had tiny bloodstains, shower curtains had mold
Despite the recent makeover, the buildings and furnishings are showing their age
No visitors allowed
Hotel hasn’t entirely shed its aura of notoriety and seediness
Guests at the Hotel Carter may feel as if they’ve stepped into a time machine to yesteryear—though whether they’ll enjoy the decade they’ve landed in depends on their personal taste and appreciation for the heyday of Times Square seediness. The location is unparalleled—Times Square is literally down the block—and the price is (for Manhattan) competitive, but those who consider a hotel even a smidgen more than a place to lay your head and take a shower, and those who prize cleanliness, will want to move on.
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Scene
Common area evokes more of a train-station waiting area than a hotel lobby, and it’s impossible to ignore the adjacent strip club even there
Guests get their first evidence of the Hotel Carter’s overriding philosophy—thrift—as soon as they mount the stairs from the street level to the lobby, where they’re greeted by an aquarium swimming not with actual live fish, but stuffed plush toy fish. Inside the lobby, with its mirrored-glass ceiling and pink and blue neon accents, the feeling is one of transience: Couches are aged and worn, a vending machine dispenses Internet access by the minute at the bank of computers that serves as the business center toward the back, and an endless procession of budget travelers of various degrees of exhaustion and surliness shuffle in and out. Shades of the hotel’s nefarious past are still present: Guests’ first sight of the lobby is generally of the hawk-eyed security guard stationed facing the door, and there’s a sign warning “No visitors” by the elevators. In a wing past the tourist-information desk and by the public bathrooms, there’s a connecting door to the strip club next door, which is advertised with a glowing sign. (The door is locked.)
Location
As central as it gets in New York City, though on a gritty, unattractive stretch next to a strip club
Less than a block from Times Square, and around the corner from Manhattan's central subway station, the hotel is within walking distance of Theater Row and most of Midtown's tourist attractions, and most of the rest of the city's usual attractions are less than a half hour by subway. The hotel, however, is located on one of the remaining scuzzier stretches of Times Square, with a strip club as its neighbor, an underground garage that opens up right by the entrance, and all that in addition to the usual bustle of the area. On each return trip, guests should prepare to run a gantlet of strip-club touts, cars entering and exiting the garage, and a cloud of cigarette smoke from nicotine-deprived Europeans outside the hotel entrance.
Rooms
Ours was a basic, aged room with an unexpectedly large closet, and could have been better-kept.
The rooms are as basic as they get without being a hostel, with a bed; a bathroom; an unfortunate color scheme of beige, maroon, and mint green; and a lockable door (consider the TV with its handful of channels a freebie). Coffeemaker, stereo, small fridge, safe, or even a desk are nonexistent, though the ottoman could be used to scribble out postcards in a pinch. Our room, with a view of an alley, was quiet except when fans from neighboring buildings kicked in. Maintenance and cleaning standards are not high, from the poor tiling, mold spots, and cracked paint in the dimly lit bathroom to the old spots of blood on the bedsheets and busted springs in the mattress. On the plus side, our room had a closet almost large enough to serve as a separate bedroom for small children. (Please do not make your children sleep in the closet.)
Features
As bare-bones as it gets in this colorful artifact from a long-gone Times Square
“All you get here is the room,” the front-desk clerk says at check-in: There’s no breakfast, no common area besides the lobby, no fitness center, no parking, and no restaurant or room service. There is a business center on the far end of the lobby, but guests must purchase Internet access by the minute from the nearby vending machine, just as they have to pay for Wi-Fi. A tourism desk at the front of the lobby can arrange tours of the city and car service to the airport. The hotel is also an institution of local lore, with a colorful, and mostly unflattering, history (think of the setting of the first scene from every episode of “Law & Order”) and an atmosphere that harkens back to the Times Square of "Taxi Driver"_ -- _which new management hasn’t been able to scrub away. The shades of the nadir of Times Square history will appeal to those nostalgic for the Gotham of old, but few else.
