It turns out Mayor Adams in NYC has made another mistake. It wasn’t enough to thoughtlessly keep celebrating his city’s “sanctuary” status while the lunatic Joe Biden was opening the floodgates down south. Once the invading masses made their way to New York, Mr. Mayor made the second mistake of putting the newcomers up in digs that were too fancy.
Now they’re refusing to leave.
The Watson is a three-star hotel located in central Manhattan that, before being repurposed as a shelter for illegal migrants, had commanded something between $300 and $400 a night. Since that time, it’s no doubt received a bit of rough treatment, perhaps similar to that suffered by one of its competitors, the Row NYC at 700 8th Avenue. The Row, which we reported on on January 12, was also repurposed as a shelter, and the result has not been pretty. One employee described the migrant residents as “drinking all day, smoking marijuana [and] consuming drugs. Others were having sex on the hotel stairs, trashing the rooms, and leaving unwanted food out to spoil.”
If the Watson has been similarly ill-treated, you might think its residents, composed largely of single men, would be ready to seek out new worlds to conquer and new shelters to pillage.
Apparently, not so. Yesterday, although rousted out of their rooms–often inhabited individually, complete with private bath–and locked out of the hotel, several dozen refused transfer to a new shelter at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook (H. P. Lovecraft fans, take note). Instead they set up a tent city on the sidewalk fronting the hotel and vowed to remain until re-admitted. That created a problem for the mayor and his minions, in that a new bunch of migrants–women and children–were already slated to move in.
The Terminal shelter, while described officially as up to the city’s usual standards for shelters, is nothing like a hotel. It consists of a large, chilly, barracks-like space filled with up to a thousand cots, each covered with a green blanket and a single white pillow. Bathroom facilities, complete with maybe 90 commodes and communal showers, are provided by mobile trailers outside.
The Ritz, it is not. It’s not even the Watson.
One of the dispossessed who did make the transfer complained that while he had had a room to himself at the hotel, now all he has a cot in a cold space and communal bathroom facilities. “The hotel had so many services they have just [now] taken away,” he said.
A volunteer similarly complained on behalf of the displaced/entitled: “Everybody who comes to New York, for whatever reason, deserves to live in places that are safe and have dignity.”
And that, apparently, means room service.
This sanctuary business has turned out to be more trouble than Mayor Adams anticipated. How sad.
For more, see the NY Post.