The MacBurney YMCA, New York
Created | Updated Mar 31, 2002
A note to the editors:
I am not sure if the direct criticism of an actual hotel is being allowed in h2g2 as it stands. However, as I write this at 6am, listening to the heavy plant machinery outside, and thinking about the MacBurney's web-page with its pictures of apparently the same hotel from a parallel, and much cleaner, universe. I think it's something that must be said somewhere.
Entry:
Some things are so appallingly awful they almost seem unreal; the superhuman effort that appears to have gone into their construction defies you to accept that they can exist. The MacBurney is one of these things.
The whole experience is like something out of a film: The main entrance is permanently locked shut. Access (god help you) can only be gained from an alley around the other side of the building which is filled with bin-bags and more skips than can possibly be useful to the building site that is directly opposite.
Inside, the inhabitants who consist of a bizarre combination of malcontents, psychos, men on the phone to their estranged spouses and lost tourists, probably, like me, thinking hard about the alluring pictures of clean rooms and cosmopolitan cafeterias displayed on the hotels webpage.
It's a strangely fascinating place as well. I can already see how entertaining the stories will be once some distance is put between myself and this hovel:
The small old man who rides up and down in the elevator so he can explain to his captive audience how after reading a book called "Civilization: A personal view" he now "knows too much"; the urine stained communal showers, where you feel marginally dirtier than when you entered, and, of course, the heavy plant machinery that started up a 6am.
These are all the stuff of the traveler’s tales and will be the source of much entertainment later on, but right now, lying in this rickety bunk-bed listening to Joe "crank her up to the next one" outside and worrying vaguely that the smell from the toilets has now permeated everything I own, I really want to hurt someone.
I am not sure if the direct criticism of an actual hotel is being allowed in h2g2 as it stands. However, as I write this at 6am, listening to the heavy plant machinery outside, and thinking about the MacBurney's web-page with its pictures of apparently the same hotel from a parallel, and much cleaner, universe. I think it's something that must be said somewhere.
Entry:
Some things are so appallingly awful they almost seem unreal; the superhuman effort that appears to have gone into their construction defies you to accept that they can exist. The MacBurney is one of these things.
The whole experience is like something out of a film: The main entrance is permanently locked shut. Access (god help you) can only be gained from an alley around the other side of the building which is filled with bin-bags and more skips than can possibly be useful to the building site that is directly opposite.
Inside, the inhabitants who consist of a bizarre combination of malcontents, psychos, men on the phone to their estranged spouses and lost tourists, probably, like me, thinking hard about the alluring pictures of clean rooms and cosmopolitan cafeterias displayed on the hotels webpage.
It's a strangely fascinating place as well. I can already see how entertaining the stories will be once some distance is put between myself and this hovel:
The small old man who rides up and down in the elevator so he can explain to his captive audience how after reading a book called "Civilization: A personal view" he now "knows too much"; the urine stained communal showers, where you feel marginally dirtier than when you entered, and, of course, the heavy plant machinery that started up a 6am.
These are all the stuff of the traveler’s tales and will be the source of much entertainment later on, but right now, lying in this rickety bunk-bed listening to Joe "crank her up to the next one" outside and worrying vaguely that the smell from the toilets has now permeated everything I own, I really want to hurt someone.
