Capstone Equities has acquired Life Hotel, a shuttered building that is the third distressed property the company has acquired in Manhattan since the beginning of last year.

When state lawmakers formed an Asian American caucus in 2017, the only Asian American members were Assembly Members Ron Kim and Yuh-Line Niou. Since then, their ranks have swelled to 12, four in the state Senate and eight in the Assembly. Similarly, the New York City Council has gone from just two Asian Americans – Margaret Chin and Peter Koo, both term-limited in 2021 – to six today. 

As the city’s vital hotel industry struggles to fully recover from the pandemic, it can do with all the public support it can muster. So Mayor Eric Adams’ opening remarks Monday at the Hotel Association of New York City Foundation “red carpet hospitality gala” at the Pierre will be closely followed.

Tourists gradually returning to New York have boosted demand for hotel rooms, an industry hit hard by the fallout of the pandemic. But a big part of that recovery isn’t coming from travelers.

New York City’s hotel industry, devastated during the COVID-19 pandemic, is on its way to recovery, but not quite there yet.

The health of the city’s hotel industry is a crazy-quilt pattern of mostly optimistic but confusing and conflicting cross-currents. Large new hotels continue to open even as famous old ones close for good. Occupancy’s way up over 2021 but still below pre-Covid times.

Just steps from Times Square and surrounded by Broadway theaters, the Row NYC hotel advertises itself as “more New York than New York,” bringing together “urban grit with grandeur.”

After escaping political persecution in Zulia, Venezuela, José Rivera arrived in a hotel-turned-shelter in Long Island City, Queens, last August. Once there, it took him three months to learn he and his family, as asylum seekers in NYC, were eligible for health insurance and another three months to file his asylum claim.