A sleazy disaster
By A Yahoo! Contributor, 01/29/08
Incredibly seedy-- peeling paint, exposed rotting wood trim, broken glass, stained carpets, malfunctioning and/or disabled smoke alarms, and a unreachable "manager." The place is like a squat you have to pay for. At the advertised $99 a night, it's WAY overpriced.
At first when we "checked in," we figured we’d make the best of it, as it was only for one night. But when we came back in the evening, we found that not only did the light switch by the door not do anything, but of the 3 lamps in the room, two did not work, the third was unplugged (I had to fumble around in the dark to plug it in so we could see), AND the smoke alarm was chirping as if the battery had run down. Several others on our floor seemed to be doing the same. The telephone number for the hotel had been disconnected. (I’d noticed earlier that their website was gone as well.) The manager wasn’t in his office, which was locked and had a wad of paper stuffed in the hole where the doorknob would normally be.
We happened to find the “manager” on the sidewalk outside smoking, accompanied by a young woman. We told him about the smoke alarm, and eventually he went upstairs. He came back down a few minutes later to say he couldn’t fix it and offered to move us to a room on the 2nd floor. We agreed, and he let us down a hallway stacked with crates of restaurant glassware and old furniture to another, slightly larger room with the same peeling paint and stained carpet tiles. And diappeared again. The smoke alarm in this room was hanging off its mount, completely useless, and that there was an odd bolt-like piece of what looked like rebar sticking out of the wall beside the head of the bed—just the thing to bash yourself on in the middle of the night.
I finally had to admit I didn’t want to take my shoes off in this room, much less get into the bed. We could no longer find the “manager,” so we gathered our things, dropped the key through the drop slot in the office door, and left the place for another hotel down the block. The attendant at this hotel told us they often get "refugees" from the Society Hill, and that they've heard it rents by the hour.
I called my credit card company to keep them from paying the place, but two weeks later I discovered they must have charged my card that morning.
I wish I'd read these online reviews before I booked the place. Could have saved myself $100. I've stayed in funky places all over hte world, but this was by far the worst place I've ever been charged money for.