This Is What It Takes To Get Kicked Out Of The Cheapest Hotel In Manhattan

Robert Johnson — Business Insider

This is the only sign that marks the Vigilant Hotel.

There are not many places to stay in Manhattan if your prospects are dim and your funds are low.

It wasn't always this way. Once, Manhattan was pocketed with unseemly dives that for a few bucks a night would keep you dry and off the street.

One of the last of those is the Vigilant Hotel at the north end of Chelsea on 8th avenue between 28th and 29th.

Wedged between a small cafe and a Chinese restaurant, the Vigilant offers rooms for 40-bucks a night, or $140 a week. More or less anyone with an ID can get a cubicle within a large room, with no windows and no ceiling but a screen, to call their own. 

Anyone except journalists. 

I was prepared to spend the night at the Vigilant, but made the mistake of taking pictures of the entry on my way in. I didn't realize there were video cameras in the clerk's office, or that he would be so opposed to cameras — until I started taking pictures and a man started screaming.

"We don't want you here. Get the hell out or I'm calling the police."

I didn't think it was directed at me until I saw him. Halfway up the stairs a bald white man, about 70 years old, with no shirt and a flowing ascot of white hair around his neck leaned from a hole in the wall, pointed at me and hollered "Get the f*** out."

Clearly he was talking to me. I pushed onward.

"I have a reservation," I said, like this would somehow make him calm down. It did not.

"We don't take f******* reservations!"

I'd stopped in before to quickly look around and see what was what, so I knew what I was getting into, even when I'd called the day before to make sure there would be a room for me.

The clerk had needlessly warned me that the rooms weren't pretty, that what he offered were "Bowery style" rooms. No ceilings, little privacy, and no windows. "Like solitary confinement," he'd said on the phone.

"I feel properly warned," I'd replied before hanging up the phone in the office.

Robert Johnson — Business Insider

The rules at right are posted upstairs next to the office as well. Even if I'd seen the surveilance notice, don't think I would have believed it.

I wasn't there to write about the bedbugs or be a sanctimonious voyeur, and I wasn't prepared for him to be screaming at me. I was there to see how this one facet of the city looked before it was gone forever. Feeling justified I continued up the stairs to the clerk's window stuffing my camera into my backpack.

By the time I stood in front of the thick iron bars that secured him from the guests, he was apoplectic.

The bars were ornate, covered in what looked like 100 coats of tan paint. Without the semi-gloss, they looked like something from the movies shielding an Old-West bank teller from a pistol toting outlaw.

"I want to write a story on this place. On you. I know you've been here for 25 years. Don't you want to tell your story?" I spewed out between his threats.

"There ain't no story," he said leaning back in his chair and rubbing his bare, beach ball belly. "And I been here more than 25 years."

And he started talking. That bit about the 25 years, I'd picked up from dated stories about the place online. Obviously, he was concerned about more bad press. Fair enough.

"I just want to spend the night and see what it's like," I told him when he appeared to be calming down. 

"No you don't," he said. "This ain't a good place. The only people that stay here need to stay here," he said leaning forward. "And I ain't got nothin' to say."

For the next hour or so he told me that the Vigilant has been around since 1911 when they let rooms to mostly sailors and soldiers for five cents a night, doing a banner business between the World Wars.

After World War II, he told me that the garment industry put a lot of people in the hotel. "There used to be a lot of push-cart traffic," he said. "From the district over to the storefronts at Times Square. But all those jobs went to Asia."

The garment workers were gone by the late eighties and then the rooms were taken by "messenger types," he said. "But those jobs disappeared in the '90s after email and faxes came along."

Who stays here now?" I asked. He flared up. 

"People with no other f****** place to go. I ain't got nothin' to say."

About every fifth sentence was him telling me he had nothing to say. 

"It used to be this was a place people came on the way to something better," he told me between my questions. "Now it's the end of the line."

"We got a lot of people that lost their jobs a few years ago, but those benefits ran out. Our rates have gone up from $100 to $140 a week." He threw his hands up, and brought them back down to his round stomach, caressing its shiny round surface as he thought.

Robert Johnson — Business Insider

As far as I got with the camera.

"Forty bucks is a lot at this level," he said. "At this level even a little is too much."

His office was cluttered with aerosol cans of bedbug spray, takeout containers, and empty prescription bottles. A 17" monitor with the nine small surveillance screens that had given me away sat on his desk.

At one point a well-dressed, dark-skinned man, came up and told me. "This is a good place, and..."

The clerk re-ignited. "Arthur this f****** guy is not welcome on this property and I'll call the cops on both of you if you talk to him." Arthur shut up, and stood to the side for a while, holding a half-empty spray bottle in his right hand.

The clerk told me he didn't know how long they'd be able to stay open. The building is owned by a corporation that apparently works with the Vigilant, "But Con-Ed is putting us out of business," he said.

Utility rates may be what does the Vigilant in after over 100 years.

Feeling like all that was to be said had been said, and he wasn't going to let me a room, I stepped back as a man with dreadlocks, wearing a North Face shell and bike pants, excused himself to get past me.

He said the clerk's name and asked that his spray bottle be refilled. It was the same as the one Arthur held before he wandered off.

He hung the empty from the metal grate, and said he'd pick it up when he came back.

On the side in black marker, it said, "bed bug spray."

I said, "Everyone gets one of these when they check in." More a statement than a question, pointing to the empty bottle.

"Yeah," the clerk said reaching for the phone. "I told you, this ain't a good place. Now get out. I'm calling the cops."

He picked up the handset on an old black, push-button phone, and I stepped away holding up my hands.

"OK," I said, "Thanks for your time."

"Yeah, sure thing."

I faced a hallway of rooms on the way back to the stairs. Old wooden doors closing off a string of spaces about six-and-a-half feet high. Just bi
g enough for a foam mattress and a cot. Open at the ceiling with black window screen peeking from the edges that faced the hall.

"Robert Johnson, right?" the clerk said through the hole in the wall on my way back down the stairs.

"Yes, sir." I replied looking up.

"Don't f****** come back."

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This Is What It Takes To Get Kicked Out Of The Cheapest Hotel In Manhattan