Weekend Event: 1970s ad for Hotel Seville, NYC

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

The YouTube™ comments state: "Cute little musical commercial from the late 1970s for a local hotel. Must have been popular with suburbanites, since real out of towners would never see the local airing of this."

Then in the comments, an NYU alumnus writes: "@ Musicom, or any interested party.. Right. NYU students occupied several floors in the mid-80s. I was one of them from 86-87. Permanent residents, including street-gals, on the first three floors. NYU students spread among other floors. An irate woman, a former cleaning staff, would stand in front of the entrance and hex and berate students as they'd enter the building. They had so many fires in that place, you'd swear it was insurance fraud. The hotel had a colorful history. NYU never took it over.....good enough to house students at a premium, but not good enough to possess. Anyway, mid-1980s was an interesting time to be living in Manhattan."

I remember the Hotel Seville as being promoted with its sister hotel, the Collingwood, and both were rumored to be hot-bed hotels, where you could rent by the hour. Businessmen were thought to take their secretaries there at lunch hour.

This was an ad for the Seville in Puck magazine the 2 June, 1904 issue, shortly after its opening.

Comments

[heather mccrillis (from livejournal.com)]

So bring your own bed sheets?

[ponitacupcake.livejournal.com]

The Seville ad is so cute!

One I was fascinated by was the Hotel Carter which also has an interesting seedy history. I was sure it'd been torn down for the new Times Square but it'd been showing up in exterior shots for Smash (that flop show) as they might have had some deal with NBC so I looked it up and found it was voted the dirtiest hotel in America for like 3 years in a row. Lots of bedbugs too! Since renovated though. It still has a 1930s bus depot with bus turntable in the garage.