The last hourly rate hotel in Manhattan’s meat-packing district, the Liberty Inn is just a small triangular block off the West Side Highway. The website calls its rooms the “sexiest” in the city, and for nearly 50 years it has provided a haven for bouts of afternoon passion, clandestine affairs and quick lunches.
So when it was reported that it had been put on the market with hopes of raising about $25 million, I decided to check in, to witness a kinky relic of old New York before it was gone.
The hotel is a nondescript three-storey brick building with a burgundy awning at the entrance. Long before Google’s New York headquarters emerged a few blocks away, the hotel’s tiny building underwent decades of change, continuing through several cycles of Lower Manhattan’s history.
Instead of meat-packing factories and after-hours clubs, there are now brunch spots for the tech crowd and boutique hotels, including the Standard, with its penthouse night spot Le Bain. Across the highway, Little Island, built at an estimated cost of $260 million by mogul Barry Diller, rises from the Hudson.
In the early 1900s it was the Strand Hotel, a boarding house for sailors. When the Titanic sank in 1912 and the Carpathia arrived at Pier 54 with its survivors, DailyExpertNews rented out rooms on the Strand for reporters to submit reports on the disaster. In the late 1960s it was called the Hide-a-Way Motel. And until the mid-1980s, the hotel shared the building with the Anvil, a famous gay nightclub.
When I stopped by last week, a family of tourists bought ice cream from a truck parked outside the door. A vending machine sells condoms, cookies and candy in the narrow lobby, and the reception area is protected by a bulletproof glass window. A sign read the room rates: $95 for a two-hour stay; $155 for six hours.
“Only you?” the concierge asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, fine, but someone can’t get to you after that.”
He let me put a key through the slot and soon I entered room No. 204, a cozy den bathed in red light. The bed had a fake reptile leather headboard. Above it hung a ceiling mirror accented with cloud drawings. Purell packages were on the nightstand. A sign by the door read: “ALWAYS turn the knob on the lock to prevent wrong access!”
A black stump-like object sat against a wall. I soon found it unfolding and realized it was the Liberator, a wedge-shaped device that helps lovers get into imaginative positions. The room was pristine, but I discovered a scribble of passion on the Liberator’s surface: a faint handprint.
When I caught my reflection in the ceiling mirror, I experienced a flashback to my own encounter with the Liberty when I was 21 or so. I was just starting to see someone, but we were both still living at home with our parents, so we took a hazy cab ride to the Liberty one night. What followed is vague, but I remember an iPhone, put in a cup for amplification, being used to play Arcade Fire, and a Jolly Rancher sticking to someone’s hair. The awkward adventure ended two hours later, but it bonded us, and the relationship became the first serious romance of my life.
The phone rang towards the end of my short stay.
“Fifteen minutes,” the janitor said.
On my way out, I hoarded some Liberty Inn products, like souvenir slippers and soap bars, and have since added them to my collection of old New York ephemera: matchbooks from Toots Shor and Maxwell’s Plum, coat-check labels from the Four Seasons, a stirrer from the Waldorf Astoria.
The round
I had been trying to contact the owner of the Liberty, who was named Robert Boyd according to a 2011 Times article, for several days, but I had trouble reaching him. I also got confused, because an article in Crain’s New York Business about the future sale of the building said that the owner was a man named Edward Raboy.
On a return visit to the hotel, I told the concierge that I was the journalist who had called and asked if Robert or Edward was nearby. He made a phone call, told someone I had arrived, and then he grinned and said, “It’s the same guy.”
For a moment, a man in his 70s with glasses and a hearing aid walked down the stairs to meet me. He said he was Mr. Raboy and politely explained that over the years he had used the name Robert Boyd as an alias to help him deal with the quirks that can come with running a business as idiosyncratic as the Liberty Inn.
“What does it matter now?” he told me. “I have nothing to hide.”
Mr Raboy said his father ran the establishment when it was called the Hide-a-Way, adding that he took it over in 1977, when meat processors with bloodied aprons were still operating in the area, and he soon started it with his female. . He said he was reluctant to tell the full story of his hotel because he hoped to tell it in a book one day, but he agreed to give me a tour of the rooms.
First we visited No. 103, which has a hot tub and wall art featuring erotic characters from ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
“As you can see, there is a large wall mirror, which people appreciate,” he said. “We don’t use rugs because they can get the dirtiest.
“Our team is constantly cleaning every inch of every room thoroughly,” he continued. “Cleanliness is next to godliness. Even when we started, we were the cleanest hotel for a short stay in town.”
Room 104 glowed in a soothing blue light. Room 209 had a hand-painted mural on the ceiling depicting a playful couple. The bed in room 210, which Mr. Raboy said was one of Liberty’s most popular suites, had giant red lips for its headboard.
“Every room has something cute and different about it, and we have people who go to certain rooms and keep asking,” he said. “We try to give people a good time here. We don’t follow them to their rooms, but we understand what they’re doing there.”
Reflecting on his years as manager of the Liberty, Mr. Raboy said the decision to put the building up for sale was a bittersweet one, adding that it also just made sense. He cited the desire to retire and the gentrification of the neighborhood as reasons for leaving the company.
“So much has changed since the 1970s, when I called this area the ‘Wild West Side,'” he said. ‘It has now become an almost quiet place. What was then appropriate for a hotel like this no longer makes sense. Above all, the building is now worth more financially to other people, because it is so unique.”
“Hour hotels are like that Rodney Dangerfield quote: ‘You don’t get no respect,'” he added. “But it was a fantastic run.”
After the tour, I sat on the High Line across the street to observe people entering and exiting the Liberty. A man led a woman in with the swagger of someone who had been there before. Another couple entered with some hesitation. As I continued to watch the afternoon couples return to the tumult of the city, I realized they were all holding hands.