Hotel Carter

When it opened in 1930, the Dixie Hotel contained a thousand rooms (later downsized to 700 rooms). The hotel had been planned as a 22-story building with either 650 or 700 guestrooms. The plans had also included an underground bus terminal. Bus terminal The hotel originally contained a bus depot, which opened in 1930 and operated until 1957. The terminal occupied the entire ground floor of the hotel, although its loading platform and waiting room were below street level. The facility was accessed by two arrival and two departure ramps, which could accommodate up to 40 buses per hour; these ramps led to both 42nd and 43rd Streets. The center of the terminal contained a bus turntable with a diameter of 35 feet. The center of the turntable was below the rim, preventing buses from rolling off the turntable by accident. Bus drivers pulled forward into the slip, allowing passengers to alight and board at the widest part of the loading platform. To prevent buses from rolling backward onto the turntable, each loading slip sloped downward from the turntable. The loading platform itself was about above the slip, allowing level boarding. Buses leaving the terminal would reverse onto the turntable, which would rotate toward the exit ramp. The loading platform wrapped around each of the bus slips. Two sets of doors, one on either side of the terminal, led from the loading area to the terminal's waiting room. The terminal was arranged so all slips were within of the waiting area. Nightclub and theater The hotel's first story contained the Dixie Lounge Bar, a nightclub that opened in 1942 and was decorated in the Southern Colonial style. The space was designed by Jac Lessman and could be accessed from the lobby, the dining room, and directly from the street. The Bert Wheeler Theater opened at the hotel in 1966, ten steps above its entrance. or 225 seats; ==History==

Development and foreclosure Harris H. Uris, who cofounded the Uris Buildings Corporation with his son Percy, acquired the land lots at 241 West 42nd Street and 250–262 West 43rd Street in September 1928. The acquisition gave the Uris family a site of , on which the family planned to build a 25-story hotel with 700 guestrooms. The Uris brothers acquired a four-story building at 266 West 43rd Street in August 1929. This land lot was separated from the hotel's site by another building at 264 West 43rd Street,{{efn|The building at 264 West 43rd Street was used by the Loft Inc. store at the hotel's base, then sold to Jacobowitz & Katz in 1951. as well as a beauty parlor and barber shop. A concession was also awarded for the hat rack in the Dixie Hotel's lobby. Scarr Transportation Service was hired to managed the bus terminal, Two bus operators began using a temporary bus terminal on the site on December 9, 1929, The Dixie Hotel was originally supposed to open on May 1, 1930, and the bus terminal was planned to formally open at the same time. The Bowery Savings Bank gave a $350,000 mortgage loan the same month to the Jerrold Holding Corporation, a holding company led by Harris Uris, which owned the hotel. This mortgage loan, along with four others on the site, were consolidated into a single lien totaling $1.85 million. The bus terminal formally opened in May 1930. The Central Union Bus Terminal was known as the Short Line Bus Terminal by July 1931. of Manhattan.|alt=Nighttime view of the Hotel Carter. There are four illuminated signs in the picture: two signs reading "Hotel Carter" to the right, and two signs for the Hilton Theatre (now the Lyric Theatre) to the left. In October 1931, the Bowery Savings Bank moved to foreclose on the hotel's mortgage, for which the Jerrold Holding Corporation owed $1.98 million. A federal judge appointed the Irving Trust as a receiver, and James B. Regan, former proprietor of the Knickerbocker Hotel, was another appointed receiver. The Bowery Savings Bank scheduled a foreclosure auction for the Dixie but withdrew the planned auction in February 1932. The auction for the hotel was rescheduled to March 1932, at which point the Uris family owed the bank $2.06 million. The bank ultimately bought the hotel for $1.8 million at the end of the month. In April 1932, the Southworth Management Corporation (headed by Roy S. Hubbell, former manager of the Hotel Commodore and the Hotel Belmont) took over the hotel's operation. Hubbell only managed the hotel for a short period; he died in October 1932 in his bedroom at the hotel. The hotel started hosting big bands in November 1933, when Art Kahn's band began performing there. Carter Hotels operation The Bowery Savings Bank sold the hotel in March 1942 to Kings Hotel Inc., subject to a mortgage of $1.125 million. To accommodate executives and business couples who lived at the Dixie, its managers converted some rooms to studio apartments. The hotel was planning to add another room for live performances by 1945. The Plantation Room began hosting live music shows in 1946, replacing what Billboard magazine called the "silly hat-nursery rhyme phase at this room". In the room's heyday, its performers included Al Trace's band and Teddy Powell's band. The Plantation Room stopped hosting shows in early 1947 because it was losing money. Meanwhile, most of the bus lines that had served the Dixie Hotel's ground-level bus terminal relocated to the nearby Port Authority Bus Terminal after the latter opened in 1950. The Dixie terminal's operators had signed a ten-year lease for the space in 1947; the bus terminal ultimately closed in 1957, The Walter Ballard Company converted the Dixie Hotel's former bus terminal into a parking lot for the hotel's guests in 1961. The space included a secondary lobby with features such as a registration desk, baggage check-in area, and a communications system; In 1964, local civic group Broadway Association proposed demolishing the Dixie Hotel, as well as ten nearby theaters on 42nd Street, to make way for a large convention center between Seventh Avenue, 41st Street, Eighth Avenue, and 43rd Street. Carter Hotels finished renovating the Dixie Hotel in 1965; the project included restoring all 700 rooms, as well as adding a CCTV system and automated elevators. By the mid-1960s, the hotel was managed by William Benson of Carter Hotels, who ran the hotel until his death in 1967. An off-Broadway venue, the Bert Wheeler Theater, opened at the hotel in October 1966 with the musical comedy ''Autumn's Here''. At this time, the Dixie was renamed the Carter. Tran ownership 1970s and 1980s Vietnamese businessman and former ship owner Tran Dinh Truong purchased the hotel in October 1977 He formed a holding company, Alphonse Hotel Corporation, to take title to the hotel. Upon acquiring the Carter, Tran closed the hotel's 42nd Street entrance and hired Walter Scheff as its general manager. Over the next three decades, many of Tran's children, grandchildren, and wives lived in the hotel. and the musical Ka-Boom! in 1980. Although the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), an agency of the New York state government, had proposed redeveloping the area around a portion of West 42nd Street in 1981, the Carter Hotel was excluded from the project. The Carter was used as a welfare hotel during the 1980s, housing homeless families; the Times reported in 1984 that the area around the entrance was filled "with teen-agers and young children who play sidewalk games into the night". The city government paid $62.62 per night to house a family in a small single room. The Carter housed 190 families by December 1983, when it was cited for its "consistently low rate of compliance in correcting health and safety violations". After hotel officials failed to correct numerous building-code violations, the city government sued the hotel in 1983 and 1984; a judge found Tran in contempt of court. The hotel's physical condition was so bad that the New York City government stopped referring homeless people there in 1984, and an official for the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation called it "Nightmare Alley". New York City removed all homeless families from the Carter in 1988 due to difficulties with plumbing, electricity, security, and vermin. The conditions at the Carter and at Tran's other hotels had dissuaded the American Red Cross from opening a shelter there. The hotel's bar, known as Rose of Saigon, was closed in early 1989 after city officials found that crack cocaine was being sold openly at the bar. An official for the New York City Office of Midtown Enforcement called it the "worst bar" he had ever seen, saying that it reminded him "of the bar scene in the Star Wars movie with the worst dregs of the solar system gathered together". and the Penthouse Hostel leased the 23rd and 24th floors of the Hotel Carter in July 1990. Despite the revitalization of Times Square in the 1990s, the Carter remained dilapidated in character. The New York City Department of Buildings issued a building-code violation against the hotel in January 1998 after inspectors discovered bulging masonry on the facade. The hotel was temporarily closed in December 1998 because an emergency fire exit was damaged. The hotel was still dilapidated in the mid-2000s. According to The New York Times, guests variously reported problems with cleanliness, as well as equipment that sometimes did not work. Online travel company TripAdvisor ranked the hotel as the dirtiest in the United States in 2006, Additionally, in January 2009, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sued the operators of the Carter and four other Midtown Manhattan hotels, alleging that each of the hotels violated the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). Among the complaints were that the hotel's main entrance, public restrooms, registration desk, and guestrooms were all inaccessible to disabled guests. Tran's lawyer claimed that some rooms were already ADA-accessible and that a wheelchair lift at the main entrance had been temporarily removed to allow a carpet to be installed. Erwin M. Lumanglas, the manager of the hotel since 2006, renovated some of the rooms by 2010 at a cost of $5,000 per room. The hotel did not rank among the ten dirtiest hotels in the United States in 2010, but it was ranked fourth in the country during 2011. TripAdvisor stopped ranking the dirtiest hotels in the U.S. in 2012, but CNBC reported that guests continued to raise complaints about the hotel's cleanliness. John Cruz of GF Management took ownership of the hotel in April 2013 and renovated it. The New York Times reported at the time that the hotel had broken elevators; 40-year-old fire extinguishers; non-functional exit signs; no weekend doormen; "discarded hospital linens" atop beds; inadequate insurance; and overdue loans. The hotel was offered for sale in early 2014 after an extensive renovation. CNBC, which reported that the hotel could be sold for up to $180 million, said that a potential buyer would have to spend $100 million to $125 million on renovating the hotel further. The developer Joseph Chetrit won the right to buy the hotel in September 2014. A gentlemen's club that had been located in the hotel, Cheetah's, filed a lawsuit in December 2014 in an attempt to halt the hotel's sale to Chetrit. Chetrit finalized his acquisition in February 2015 and closed the hotel down. The Athene Annuity and Life Company gave Chetrit a $129 million loan for the renovations. JPMorgan Chase provided a $152 million mezzanine loan in February 2018. JPMorgan Chase's loan replaced in August 2022 with $185 million in construction financing, provided by Mack Real Estate. The city government sued the hotel's owners in early 2024 to force Chetrit to disassemble the sidewalk shed outside the hotel, which had stood there for a decade. That September, the Chetrit Group defaulted on one of the hotel's mezzanine loans. Mack sued the Chetrit family in January 2025, claiming that the Chetrits owed $223 million and threatening to foreclose on the property. The city government separately sued the Chetrit family in July 2025, claiming that the hotel had incurred more than 150 building-code violations. == Critical reception ==

In 1980, a writer for Newsday wrote that the hotel was a "large, un-self-conscious, family-oriented kind of place" with "simple and spotlessly clean" rooms. By the 2000s, media reports frequently criticized the hotel's cleanliness. For example, during July 2009, the Glenn Beck Program highlighted the reports of the filth and disrepair of the Carter Hotel, while USA Today wrote that the hotel was filled with "roaches, rats, black mold and stains of dubious origin". == Deaths ==

The hotel has recorded several homicides. A 25-day-old infant was beaten to death at the hotel in November 1983; her father, a hotel resident, was charged with murder and child abuse. In 1987, a woman was thrown to her death out of a window from one of the top floors after witnesses heard arguing from room 1604. The hotel's night manager was killed in July 1999 during a brawl near the front desk; a clerk who lived at the hotel was charged with the night manager's murder. In August 2007, a housekeeper found the body of aspiring model Kristine Yitref, wrapped in plastic garbage bags and hidden under a bed in room 608; sex offender Clarence Dean was charged with her homicide. ==References==