NEW YORK— With perhaps tens of thousands of residents and visitors alike trapped within the city by events— and official precautions— stemming from the twin terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center downtown Sept. 11, a same-day survey by HOTEL BUSINESS® of a number of hotels just a few miles from “ground zero” found properties full and hotel staffs working around the clock to accommodate the public in virtually any way possible. A half-dozen hotels ringing the Madison Square Garden area in midtown Manhattan were scrambling to find rooms for— and fill communications and other requests by— existing as well as potential guests. Among those properties polled that ultimately had to hang out a “no vacancy” sign were the Ramada New Yorker, the Howard Johnson’s on 34th Street, the Pennsylvania Hotel, the Southgate Towers, the Holiday Inn in Herald Square, and the Hotel Stanford just a few doors east of that. While the executives and staffs at each of the hotels were operating on “full alert,” several of the properties in the area seemed to have a better handle on the emergency situation than others. In terms of demonstrating “grace under fire,” hotel employees at The New Yorker and— to a lesser degree— the Holiday Inn seemed to be able to combine understandable safety and security precautions with real dedication to their credo of customer service, whether through on-site refreshments or just a sincere sense of providing whatever help possible. Barry Mann, general manager at The New Yorker, credited the level of readiness and response demonstrated by his associates and co-workers to their years of experience in the lodging and hospitality industry; years that have seen many of them weather previous accidents and upheavals.
Medical and emergency workers stand in front of the Millenium Hilton in lower Manhattan Tuesday