Why is Mayor Adams destroying Midtown? The pulsing heart of the city, the theater, restaurant and tourism district, has not fully recovered from the COVID lockdown yet is already full of homeless hotels with their associated problems.
Now the mayor has announced he’s going to turn yet another hotel into a shelter for illegal migrants in the middle of the theater district.
The Paramount Hotel, a 600-room Renaissance-style gem opposite the Richard Rodgers Theatre where “Hamilton” has been playing since 2015, is the fifth Midtown hotel converted to an “emergency” shelter in as many months. Earlier this month, tourists were paying $330 a night to stay there and prices hit as high as $1,000 around New Year’s Eve.
The Paramount is around the corner from the $400-a-night Italianate Row Hotel on Eighth Avenue, whose 1,300 rooms were handed over to illegals late last year.
Where are the tourists supposed to stay, the ones who actually spend the money the city needs to pay for all the social services Adams likes to splash around?
It’s no kind of life for a family to be living in a hotel room in the middle of Midtown anyway, and Adams doesn’t appear to have any solutions apart from mildly complaining that he’s not getting enough money from the federal government. He estimates the Big Apple will need $2 billion extra and it could bankrupt New York City.
For two years, the Biden administration has been secretly flying illegals into New York and busing them all over the city and the tristate area, with no complaint from Gov. Hochul, Adams or his mayoral predecessor. It was only when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started sending busloads of migrants to New York that Adams began complaining the “city is at its breaking point.”
Sanctuary city
With more than 250,000 illegal migrants crossing the southern border each month, plus another estimated 70,000 “gotaways” who slip past the Border Patrol, cities all over the country have been inundated, but New York bears a larger burden than most because of the sanctuary status that Adams still trumpets.
The city is putting illegals up indefinitely in Midtown’s former luxury hotels, providing three free hot meals a day, baby formula, free clothing, free legal services, free health care and free education.
The cost is reportedly close to $100,000 per room.
But as it’s human nature not to appreciate what you are given for free rather than what you have worked for, some recipients of taxpayer largesse are biting the hand that feeds them.
Take the Row Hotel.
The new residents have been turning up their noses at the free food, with the result that almost a ton of perfectly good meals reportedly have been thrown out daily.
A hotel worker earlier this month provided The Post with photos of trash bags full of untouched sandwiches and bagels that he said migrants refused to eat. Instead, they cook meals more to their liking on hot plates in their rooms, creating a serious fire hazard in the historic building.
Fights, drug use, domestic violence and “sexual harassment abuse” are now added to the list of complaints that now plague Midtown, which has been struggling to recover from the pandemic.
Five days before Christmas, a dozen illegals decided they’d had enough of all this generosity and headed to Washington Heights to protest the quality of the food and lodgings being provided.
“They treat us inside the hotel like a criminal,” one told NY1. A 41-year-old Haitian, he reportedly fathered a baby with a Salvadoran woman he met on his way across the border and now lives in the Row Hotel with her, their baby and her 13-year-old daughter.
NY1 reported that he had a “long” litany of complaints of which “the most severe is the maltreatment he says he encounters by workers daily and the very limited food, if any at all that’s provided.”
“Nobody needs to be treated this way like they are treating us now,” complained the “filmmaker and activist fighting for black and indigenous rights,” because we need more of those.
But judging by all the food being thrown out and wasted at the Row, he wasn’t telling the truth.
In response to the dietary complaints, Adams said the city had conducted a survey at the hotel to learn what the illegals want to eat.
“They said they did not want sandwiches [but] they wanted hot food. We tried to accommodate that,” the mayor said.
Adams called a press conference last week to pointlessly announce: “there is no more room in New York.’ But rather than blaming President Biden’s open-border policy, the mayor complained about websites advertising that “in New York City the streets are paved in gold, that’s there’s automatic employment, that you’re automatically going to be living in a hotel. There’s a conversation among those who are migrants and asylum seekers that are giving the wrong impression that if you come to New York City, everything is fine.”
Why wouldn’t they think that? It’s true.
Embracing lawbreakers
Adams even sent a besuited greeter to the Port Authority to bow and shake the hands of illegal migrants bused in by Texas. The migrants looked embarrassed.
Those who want to work are picking up jobs earning $20 an hour even though it’s against federal law. They broke the law as their first act in this country and were richly rewarded for it. So why wouldn’t they continue?
This week, we heard that four illegal migrants, at least two of whom had been staying gratis at the Watson Hotel on West 57th Street, had been pulled over by cops in a BMW with fake plates and arrested for stealing $12,000 worth of merchandise from a Macy’s at a Long Island shopping mall on Jan. 9. All four were released the next day.
They must think we’re idiots.
