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Workers — with no one left to attend — dozed off inside the empty lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, its chandeliers still pocked with deflated balloons that had welcomed migrants to New York City.
The luggage room, once just for tourists, held a few suitcases left behind by migrant families that had cycled through the hotel. The gift shop shelves were bare, except for the diapers that city workers had handed out to new mothers.
Upstairs, the grand ballroom was desolate. Gone were the migrants who had slept on cots as they waited for rooms, on the same carpet where New York politicians once campaigned. A map of the United States was all that remained, with small arrows pointing to New York, and a handwritten note in Spanish: “You are here.”
Those were the last traces of New York’s migrant crisis inside the Roosevelt before the hotel stopped operating last week as the city’s best-known migrant shelter — 767 days after it opened as a city-run shelter in May 2023.
Chaos, criticism and conviction had greeted the shelter’s arrival. It closed quietly, fading away with little fanfare, much like the migrant crisis, as the city relocated the remaining families to other shelters and housekeepers turned over its thousands of rooms.
