Hotel Carter
The Hotel Carter is a defunct hotel at 250 West 43rd Street, near Times Square, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, U.S. Opened in June 1930 as the Dixie Hotel, the 25-story structure originally extended from 43rd Street to 42nd Street, although the wing abutting 42nd Street has since been demolished. The hotel originally contained a bus terminal at its ground level, which was closed in 1957, as well as a bar and restaurant immediately above it. The upper stories originally contained 1,000 rooms but were later downsized to 700 rooms.
The hotel was developed by the Uris Buildings Corporation, which announced plans for the site in September 1928. The Bowery Savings Bank foreclosed on the hotel in 1931 and acquired it in March 1932, operating it for the next decade. In 1942, the Dixie became part of the Carter Hotels chain, which rehabilitated the hotel several times. The hotel was renamed the Carter in October 1976 in an attempt to rehabilitate its image. Businessman Tran Dinh Truong operated the Carter from 1977 until his death in 2012, after which GF Management took over. The Carter was sold to Joseph Chetrit in 2015. He closed the hotel, with plans to renovate it. As of 2025, it remains vacant.
While in operation, the Hotel Carter gained a negative reputation due to the crimes that occurred there, as well as its general uncleanliness. At least four murders occurred in the hotel. In addition, the Hotel Carter was cited as being among America's dirtiest hotels for several years in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Description
When it opened in 1930, the Dixie Hotel contained a thousand rooms. The hotel had been planned as a 22-story building with either 650 or 700 guestrooms. The plans had also included an underground bus terminal. The hotel was largely located on 43rd Street, although it also had an alternate entrance through a two-story building on 42nd Street.Bus terminal
The hotel originally contained a bus depot, which opened in 1930 and operated until 1957. The terminal occupied the entire ground floor of the hotel, although its loading platform and waiting room were below street level. The facility was accessed by two arrival and two departure ramps, which could accommodate up to 40 buses per hour; these ramps led to both 42nd and 43rd Streets. The center of the terminal contained a bus turntable with a diameter of 35 feet. Twelve loading slips were arranged around the turntable. The terminal handled 350 buses daily during peak summer seasons.Buses arriving at the terminal would drive onto the turntable, which would then rotate to the proper slip. The center of the turntable was below the rim, preventing buses from rolling off the turntable by accident. Bus drivers pulled forward into the slip, allowing passengers to alight and board at the widest part of the loading platform. To prevent buses from rolling backward onto the turntable, each loading slip sloped downward from the turntable. The loading platform itself was about above the slip, allowing level boarding. Buses leaving the terminal would reverse onto the turntable, which would rotate toward the exit ramp. A dispatcher used an electronic signaling device to control all of the buses' movements, and the dispatcher also announced the departure of each bus.
The loading platform wrapped around each of the bus slips. Two sets of doors, one on either side of the terminal, led from the loading area to the terminal's waiting room. The terminal was arranged so all slips were within of the waiting area. The waiting room had a cafe, newsstands, ticket booths, and elevators leading to the hotel's lobby. Both the waiting room and the loading area were heated using a forced draft system. Ventilation openings were placed at the rear of each slip, near the buses' exhaust pipes.
Nightclub and theater
The hotel's first story contained the Dixie Lounge Bar, a nightclub that opened in 1942 and was decorated in the Southern Colonial style. The space was designed by Jac Lessman and could be accessed from the lobby, the dining room, and directly from the street. The room was surrounded by a four-foot-high brick wainscoting, and the front wall contained white window shutters and ivy-filled planting boxes. In addition, the columns were decorated to resemble trees. The nightclub, along with the adjacent Plantation Room restaurant, could fit a combined 500 people.The Bert Wheeler Theater opened at the hotel in 1966, ten steps above its entrance. The theater was variously cited as having 220 or 225 seats; it occupied the former Plantation Room and measured. A circular bar, in circumference, adjoined the theater and was behind glass doors; it was closed during performances, except for during a twenty-minute intermission. Food was served in the Terrace Room, the hotel's restaurant.
History
Development and foreclosure
Harris H. Uris, who cofounded the Uris Buildings Corporation with his son Percy, acquired the land lots at 241 West 42nd Street and 250–262 West 43rd Street in September 1928. The acquisition gave the Uris family a site of, on which the family planned to build a 25-story hotel with 700 guestrooms. In May 1929, the New York State Title and Mortgage Company gave Percy and his brother Harold a $2.2 million construction loan for the Hotel Dixie. Excavation for the new structure began the same month with the removal of six old tenements from the site. Tenements at 250–262 West 43rd Street were razed, along with a two-story taxpayer at 241 West 42nd Street. The Uris brothers acquired a four-story building at 266 West 43rd Street in August 1929. This land lot was separated from the hotel's site by another building at 264 West 43rd Street, which belonged to the Schulte family. At the time, work on the hotel's foundations was underway. Several floors of steelwork had been added to the hotel by mid-October 1929.The Uris brothers leased the storefronts to various businesses, including a laundry, as well as a beauty parlor and barber shop. A concession was also awarded for the hat rack in the Dixie Hotel's lobby. Scarr Transportation Service was hired to managed the bus terminal, and the restaurant space in the terminal was leased to Loft, Inc. Two bus operators began using a temporary bus terminal on the site on December 9, 1929, and group of transportation executives formally dedicated the Dixie Hotel's Central Union Bus Terminal on February 14, 1930.
The Dixie Hotel was originally supposed to open on May 1, 1930, and the bus terminal was planned to formally open at the same time. That month, M.C. Levine was recorded as having incorporated the Hotel Dixie with 10,000 shares. The Bowery Savings Bank gave a $350,000 mortgage loan the same month to the Jerrold Holding Corporation, a holding company led by Harris Uris, which owned the hotel. This mortgage loan, along with four others on the site, were consolidated into a single lien totaling $1.85 million. The bus terminal formally opened in May 1930. The Hotel Dixie opened the next month, with S. Gregory Taylor as the operator and James M. Tait as the general manager. The Central Union Bus Terminal was known as the Short Line Bus Terminal by July 1931.
In October 1931, the Bowery Savings Bank moved to foreclose on the hotel's mortgage, for which the Jerrold Holding Corporation owed $1.98 million. A federal judge appointed the Irving Trust as a receiver, and James B. Regan, former proprietor of the Knickerbocker Hotel, was another appointed receiver. The Bowery Savings Bank scheduled a foreclosure auction for the Dixie but withdrew the planned auction in February 1932. The auction for the hotel was rescheduled to March 1932, at which point the Uris family owed the bank $2.06 million. At the time, the hotel was valued at $2.3 million. The bank ultimately bought the hotel for $1.8 million at the end of the month. In April 1932, the Southworth Management Corporation took over the hotel's operation. Hubbell only managed the hotel for a short period; he died in October 1932 in his bedroom at the hotel. The hotel started hosting big bands in November 1933, when Art Kahn's band began performing there.
Carter Hotels operation
The Bowery Savings Bank sold the hotel in March 1942 to Kings Hotel Inc., subject to a mortgage of $1.125 million. The new owner was a subsidiary of the Carter Hotels chain, which planned to spend $200,000 on renovations. The project was to include refurbishing the lobby, installing a marquee, adding dance floors, and renovating half of the rooms. Carter Hotels took over management of the business that April. To accommodate executives and business couples who lived at the Dixie, its managers converted some rooms to studio apartments. Jac Lessman converted the bar into a nightclub named the Dixie Lounge Bar, which opened in September 1942 and featured live music. The hotel's restaurant became the Plantation Room, serving Southern food throughout the day. The hotel was planning to add another room for live performances by 1945. The Plantation Room began hosting live music shows in 1946, replacing what Billboard magazine called the "silly hat-nursery rhyme phase at this room". In the room's heyday, its performers included Al Trace's band and Teddy Powell's band. The Plantation Room stopped hosting shows in early 1947 because it was losing money.Meanwhile, most of the bus lines that had served the Dixie Hotel's ground-level bus terminal relocated to the nearby Port Authority Bus Terminal after the latter opened in 1950. The Dixie terminal's operators had signed a ten-year lease for the space in 1947; the bus terminal ultimately closed in 1957, after most of the remaining bus lines relocated to the Port Authority. The Walter Ballard Company converted the Dixie Hotel's former bus terminal into a parking lot for the hotel's guests in 1961. The space included a secondary lobby with features such as a registration desk, baggage check-in area, and a communications system; according to The New York Times, drivers could contact the front desk via closed-circuit television and could summon a bellhop without going to the main lobby. In 1964, local civic group Broadway Association proposed demolishing the Dixie Hotel, as well as ten nearby theaters on 42nd Street, to make way for a large convention center between Seventh Avenue, 41st Street, Eighth Avenue, and 43rd Street. Carter Hotels finished renovating the Dixie Hotel in 1965; the project included restoring all 700 rooms, as well as adding a CCTV system and automated elevators.
By the mid-1960s, the hotel was managed by William Benson of Carter Hotels, who ran the hotel until his death in 1967. An off-Broadway venue, the Bert Wheeler Theater, opened at the hotel in October 1966 with the musical comedy Autumn's Here. The hotel's theater was renamed the Burstein Theater in 1973 after it began presenting Yiddish shows. During the 1970s, the Dixie began to decline along with the rest of Times Square. Carter Hotels allocated $250,000 for renovations and sign alteration in an effort to "clean up" Times Square. H.B. Cantor, president of the company, wanted to change the hotel's name to give one of the establishments in the chain a corporate identity; at the time, the company operated several additional hotels in the Northeast United States. At this time, the Dixie was renamed the Carter.