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Bad news first: By the end of next year, lodging experts expect the cost of the average Manhattan hotel room to reach $200 nightly, a record for any American city.
Blame it on the dwindling crime, the tidier subways, the ratings of "Seinfeld" and "Friends," the cleansing of Times Square and the rising tide of out-of-towners--more than 31 million last year--who blanket the city, doing business, seeking pleasure, trying to figure out why there's no 6th Avenue between Fifth and 7th.
And even with room prices so high, hotel occupancy is at better than 80%, which means that if you enter the city without a reservation, you are basically flirting with the prospect of an evening in Central Park. Or New Jersey.
Now the good: Seeing so many travelers arriving with so much money, the entrepreneurs of New York are now in a mad scramble to increase and improve the city's inventory of hotel rooms, many of them, happily, beneath that daunting $200-a-night figure.
Since 1995--those good old days when the average Manhattan hotel cost only about $154--more than a dozen hotels have opened, reopened or taken on essentially new identities through major renovation. Meanwhile, some travelers are cutting costs by renting "unhosted" apartments, also known as "bed & breakfasts," although they don't fit that stereotype. (For more on New York B&B's, see the box on page L15.)
These new and improved hotels range from the industrial-chic of the Soho Grand to the quasi-Moroccan calm of the Casablanca in Times Square, from the affluent Japanese flavor of the Kitano to the cozy circa-1900 confines of the Mansfield, both in Midtown.
Not all these new (or newish) lodgings looked like winners to me. After a single night in each, I was happy to flee the 59th Street Bridge Apartments (no elevators, sky-high phone charges, marginal location) and the Amsterdam Court (stinky elevator, tiny rooms and shattered glass in the door's peephole, so that as I looked out to the semi-renovated hallway, I felt like the point-of-view camera in a cheap horror movie). Conversely, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, a very pricey 168-room tower that opened early this year at the southwest corner of Central Park, showed every sign of being quite luxurious. The lobby was...