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Community Leaders Balk at Plans for Hotel on Jerome

November 1, 2007

By NADIA ZONIS
NYCity News Service

There’s lots to do on Jerome Avenue between East 174th Street and the on-ramp to the Cross Bronx Expressway. You can get your car windows tinted. You can purchase a used police cruiser. You can pimp out your rims. You can have a chicken, rabbit or rooster slaughtered, plucked, skinned and trussed. You can time how frequently the No. 4 train roars by on the tracks above. But if you’re worn out after all that activity, there’s no place to rest your head.

Prakashkumar Patel wants to change that. “They need a good hotel in the Bronx,” said Patel, who owns Marriotts, Hampton Inns and other chain hotels in Albany, on Long Island and near LaGuardia Airport. He purchased and demolished a car repair shop – one of many on the strip – at number 1665. And he plans to build a brick and granite Comfort Inn, complete with breakfast and meeting rooms and a parking lot in the rear. “It will bring up the value of the whole area,” he said.

Local leaders disagree. “To suggest that it could possibly be anything other than a hot-sheet motel is just so insulting to our intelligence,” said Jim Fairbanks, chief of staff to Council Member Helen Foster (D-Bronx). “From Maine to Florida, you could put up billboards advertising the opportunity to sleep next to a subway train. Next to a live poultry place? Give me a break.”

The hotel – planned on the site of a former synagogue – has been on hold for months as Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión crusades against short-stay motels that attract unsavory activities. “The borough president’s office is working to ensure that this location is developed in a way that’s beneficial to the community,” said spokesman Mike Murphy.

Negotiations are ongoing for a community group to buy the property, according to Patel and local officials. Patel insists that between the cost of the land, the demolition and various other fees, he’s already out close to $3 million.

Jerome Avenue Hotel

Patel, who plans to charge guests $140 to $170 a night, contends the spot is a viable location for a hotel – one in which only legal activities will take place. He said the building, in the shadow of the el train, will have soundproofed windows and walls. Moreover, he believes the hotel will serve a genuine need. “With all the leisure and a lot of things going on in Manhattan all the time – I am right on [Interstate] 95,” he said. “Show me one good hotel around that area. For the community, for a wedding, there is nothing there.”

Opposition to the project may be particularly strong because of memories of the Jerome Motel, a grim, 37-room concrete block structure at 176th Street. Before police shuttered it in 1995, prostitutes openly solicited out front. Neighbors could hear the bellowing from a bullhorn used to rouse patrons who lingered past a three-hour limit. A social service agency took over the building and converted it into studio apartments for formerly homeless people.

The struggle against transient motels in the Bronx is not a thing of the past, however. A four-story hotel is now being completed in a desolate part of Hunts Point next to a junkyard and a boiler repair shop. This summer, Carrión asked the Department of Buildings to enact a moratorium on permits for hotels outside of central business districts until zoning laws can be changed.

But as the law currently stands, Patel is free to build a hotel on his Jerome Avenue property, and is losing patience with the negotiations. “It looks like there are politics involved,” he said. “If I am going to wait I am going to go bankrupt and I am going to sue all of them.”

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  1. New York City News Service - CUNY Graduate School of Journalism » Locals Fear Jerome Ave. Inn-vasion on August 14th, 2008 8:27 am

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