Located in Murray Hill, a quieter, less-touristed area in the middle of Manhattan, the charming, 123-room Hotel Chandler offers nightly turndowns, a sauna, top-notch bedding, and Aveda bath products. It's a fine pick for the price, but it's worth comparing its rates to those at the nearby Carlton and Roger Williams hotels.

A hip hotel in an unhip neighborhood. The meticulously curated, vintage-inspired design will be a turn-off for some -- the Ace doesn't aspire to most conventional notions of luxury -- but the property is as cool, comfortable, and inviting in its own way as any fancy downtown hipster boutique. Rooms are a bit small, and in some cases dark. But service is solid and the rates are usually very fair.

Like its sisters in South Beach, the 72-room MAve hotel (opened in 2009) uses slight style -- and a few treats, like H2O bath prodcuts and a nice, free cheese spread at breakfast -- as a means to over-inflate the price of incredibly tiny guest rooms in Murray Hill. A better boutique? Thompson LES, Ace, Smyth... the list goes on.

Made up of 124 comfortable guest rooms and a cramped gym in the far outskirts of Chelsea (more reasonably, the Flatiron District), this Wyndham is a fair pick, for the price. Its only one block from the locally loved Madison Square Park and its surrounding subway stations, shops, and restaurants, but a long way from Chelsea's famous art galleries.

Despite a unique, avant-garde façade, the 135-room Gershwin Hotel is undistinguished on the inside. Rooms are bare (not in a chic way) and outdated and there are no extra on-site features. On the other hand, it's within walking distance of beautiful Madison Square Park; and it has a few communal dorm rooms where you can sleep, youth-hostel style, for low rates.

It's a special kind of hotel that earns a reputation for being both disgusting AND dangerous: Within five minutes of entering La Semana, it's evident that it is both. Not only have there been reports of mentally unstable clientele and gunshots, but the check-in clerk stands behind bulletproof glass, and many rooms' windows are covered in bars and barbwire, which creates the feeling of entering a prison. The rest is downhill from there: Holes in the (barely six-foot-high) ceilings, no doors on the dirty bathrooms, exposed wires, disgustingly dirty TV remotes, furniture that looks too cheap for a tailgate party, and beds without blankets make this one of the seediest hotel experiences in New York.