People often associate New York City with constant expansion and, to a large part, it’s true. In the past decade, the city’s skyline has become more and more crowded with high-rise hotels, quickly expanding upward in order to accommodate the urban metropolis’s continuous stream of visitors. Yet while New York’s hotel capacity is projected to grow to 100,000 rooms by the end of this year (up from 73,000 tallied in 2006), it is still significantly below the stats from 50 years ago. Back in 1964, The New York Times reported that the city boasted about 125,000 hotel rooms. Although specific research into the cause of the decline since then is pending, the newspaper suggests that the demolition of single-room-occupancy hotels, as well as conversion of luxury hotels rooms — at grande dames such as The Plaza — into condominiums, may be behind it. Still, it appears that, fifty years later, New York City hotel rooms are once again solidly on the rise. [The New York Times]
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