I'm new to NYC and picked this place based on booking.com reviews (it had 8.0 score at the time of my booking and sounded like a very reasonable deal). I though the tiny rooms and shared toilets and showers accounted for the lower price... Well, I was WRONG.
The best one-work description for this place I can come up with is "erratic". See for yourself:
I arrived around 8pm after an overnight flight and a full day at the office, was warmly greeted and shown into a tiny and perhaps a dash smelly, but reasonably cozy room with a bunk bed. I pretty much went straight to bed only to wake up at 6am next morning itching from bed bug bites and shivering from the cold -- apparently during the night some guests complained of it being too warm, so the staff decided to switch the heating off altogether. Given the -2ºC outside + a 2cm-wide crack in the supposedly shut window, this got the air in the room down to 15ºC or less, which is pretty cold, even for my Russian back side.
Obviously, I reported both issues and was moved to another room, this time one without bugs, although the receptionist did coldly ask "what led me to believe there were bed bugs in the room". You'd think two dozen bites are hard to miss, wouldn't you? Neither he nor his colleagues showed much surprise, however, which leads me to believe that this is not the first time they encounter such a situation.
Fortunately, nothing in the remainder of my stay could trump that first morning, although the temperatures remained unpredictable -- the second night I had to barricade the window with pillows and sleep with my clothes on, whereas the third night it was so hot I could barely fall asleep even without a blanket.
Apart from the conditions inside the rooms, I must remark on the clientele, -- most of the folks I encountered in the washrooms and corridor seemed clean and nice and cheerful, but I did meet a couple of guys that looked, smelled and acted precisely like hobos. Other reviews reported highly intoxicated people sleeping or being noisily sick in the shared bathrooms, but I was luckily spared such encounters. I suspect that this minority of clients is also responsible for the presence of the bed bugs. All I can say is that next time I'll gladly pay double not to be in the same building as these guys and their tiny biting friends.