[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]

Here’s the late Judy Garland with “Give my regards to Broadway …”

Ah yes, Broadway; the Great White Way, the Street of Dreams. Does any thoroughfare in the United States have such a romantic, evocative name?

And on West 50th Street, halfway between Broadway and 8th Avenue, stands the Square Hotel. It is officially named the Square Hotel at Times Square, but that’s a stretch: Times Square is actually five blocks south; but I’ll just put that down to promotional license.

This is the very heart of New York City. Living there must be real expensive, right?

Right: figure six thousand a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

The Square Hotel is appropriately well-appointed. There’s a Japanese restaurant and bar in the lobby and the rooms are Art Nouveau style with sophisticated furniture, plush beds with down comforters and deluxe linens, flat-screen TVs with cable. and toiletries from C.O. Bigelow downtown, “the oldest apothecary in America.”

Great! Let’s book a room!

However, if you go to the hotel website at squarehotelnyc.com, all you get is a plain notice saying “THE SQUARE HOTEL HAS TEMPORARILY CLOSED. Please pardon our appearance as we slip into something new.”

Strange! Can a nice establishment like that, so centrally located, have gone out of business?

No: the Square Hotel is very much in business—just not with American citizens or legal residents. It’s in business with the City of New York. The Mayor of that city, Eric Adams, has filled up its 141 rooms with illegal aliens.

For the hotel and the city, it’s win-win. The hotel is getting easy money from the city and guaranteed full occupancy without having to provide traditional hotel services. And Mayor Adams gets to pretend he has the influx of illegals into his sanctuary city under control.

And upper-middle-class New York theater-goers get to feel good about themselves. Retiree Judie Rudman, 57, who came to see Arthur Miller’s “Enemy of The People” with her husband and three kids, told the New York Post that

I’m more concerned about the migrants than the theater goers. If they have a place to stay it makes the city safer.

[ Chic hotel in heart of Broadway converted to migrant shelter in latest sign of growing NYC migrant crisis , by Carl Campanile and Marie Pohl, May 5, 2024]

There are of course also some losers.

There are potential tourists with one less place to stay in midtown Manhattan.

There are local merchants with correspondingly fewer customers.

There are hotel employees whose services are not required under the minimal new regime.

And there are the occasional victims of a mugging or a knifing by Venezuelan hoodlums resident at the hotel.

What do you get when you mix Close Rikers, Decriminalize everything, defund police, the Raise The Age act, ban the gang database and facial recognition technology, throw in unlimited migrants ? A teen getting stabbed by a gang of 18 migrants last night.https://t.co/mGNkSFNhRZ

— RealNewYorker212 (@RealNewYorker2) February 23, 2024

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