It is gone now 9demolished ca. 2002), but its memories live on.
It was buildt around 1960-and incorporated the latest styles 9shag carpets, revolting shades of orange and gree, modern furniture). the place was never redecorated. By the time it closed, the floors and walls were saturated with cigarette smoke, and the bathroom fistures were all brass 9the chrome had worn off).
Well, for a year or so I lived at (what I think was called) The Hickory Hills Motel - it was on 95th street (I think) - that place was awful. There were several gas leaks, the fire dept. was there a few times - that was a rough year. I also spent a weekend at a motel up on Route 12 just as you get into the Chain Of Lakes - mirrors on the ceiling and everything. That place was something else. Can’t remember what it was called, but it was just as you come into the chain on 12 after the 59 ramp across the street from the Burger King on the water and next to the greek restaurant.
I have no idea. We were on our way to Bandjiagara in Dogon country and it was a necessary layover. It had non-functional air conditioners blowing hot air. I was able to get it marginally cooler by climbing out the window, dismantling the back of it and shaking out about 100 years of dust, sand and spider nests. But I’m afraid the freon had long fled to the ozone layer. Later in the trip, we had a pit stop in what had to be the most appalling toilet on the planet.
Oh, man, where do I begin!
Casino West in Yerington, NV. The rooms reek of cigarette smoke, every surface is dirty and/or grimy and/or moldy, the mattresses are concave, and in the cold winter the air is so dry it gives you cigarette smoke nosebleeds. Miserable, miserable.
Well, this is pretty tame compared to the doozies here, but…
One night I was driving home and couldn’t have been but about four hours from home. But I was so dead tired that I literally jerked myself awake a couple of times (not good on the interstate!). I decided then and there to find a room at the first motel I found.
$23 per night, with the name “American Inn,” or something, along I-44 in Missouri. Probably 75 miles west of St. Louis. They took Amex.
The place reeked of cigarette smoke, had threadbare carpet, an ancient TV, and a lamp with a bare bulb exposed. No matter - I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
Empire, Louisiana.
Can’t remember the name of the hotel. I remember the toilet rocked and there were small sandcrabs under the bed and occasionally crawling across the floor. Not quite as creepy as roaches but less expected.
The Hotel Pennsylvania. Yeah, just off Times Square, across from Madison Square Garden.
Broken glass on the framed picture, fraying carpets, stained curtains and wallpaper, cigarette burns in the coverlet, no hot water, and the shower curtain was black with mildew. It was really, really bad. Give me any Holiday Inn, any day.
It’s a tossup between an Econo Lodge in Newark, NJ and a Knights Inn in Cartersville, GA, both in 2005, I think.
The Knights Inn was run-of-the-mill dirty hotel – cheap sheets, bad climate control, ugly property. But it was only $25 and it wasn’t in a dangerous place. Just old and moldy.
The Econo Lodge was probably the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel and actually been concerned for my safety. The hotel itself was disgusting and it was in a terrible neighborhood. The room smelled, the beds were lumpy, the water had this bizarre odor and texture, and the door had about 6 locks on it. The toilet was stained gray and the bathroom floor had a little too much play in it for my tastes.
I half-jokingly told my travel companions to call their mothers and say “I love you”. While they did that, I was looking under the mattresses for dead hookers and around the room for evidence of foul play.
I should have known that $45 was too cheap for a room near Newark-Liberty.
I’d say it was a small hotel back in the 1980s near the Gare de Lyon in Paris. It was dirty and smelly, but it was all I could find.
Mine comes with a bit of backstory.
A few years ago I was driving across the country for a summer job. I think I was about 25 years old at the time and my driving companion was my little dog Alli. My Mother was shocked that a 25 year old woman would be brave enough to take the trip by herself, but I shrugged that off. I am in the car or in a locked hotel room, what is there to be brave about?
Since I was on a budget and had a dog with me I generally went to the Mom and Pop motels and snuck the dog into the room, people charge more when there is a dog involved.
So about two days into the trip I am in a diner having breakfast chatting with the waitress and she is also shocked that I am brave enough to do this trip, but I again shrug it off.
That night I see a little motel on the edge of this city and I turn in. There is an office on one side of the strip of rooms and a decrepit house on the other. I head into the office and this ancient man comes around the corner and he is the most talkative guy I have ever met. He was going on about how only traveling salesmen come to this hotel anymore, about how things were in it’s heyday, and really about anything that popped into his head. I pull out my VISA and he shakes his head. Apparently this is a cash only business… OK, I didn’t have any cash on me but there was a gas station a block away with an ATM, so he asked my what room I wanted and I picked one right in the middle of the strip so that It would be away from the house and the office so it would be easier to sneak my dog in. (I didn’t tell him the dog part 
) He starts talking about his brother that lives in the house with him, and all I want to do is go to get some cash. I finally break away from his rambling and soon return with the cash.
When I got back with the cash he had changed the room from the one I requested to one closer to the office… Visions of the scene from Psycho when Norman hesitates when reaching for the room keys before giving her the one with the spy hole flash before my eyes.
OK I think, I will just put the chain on the doors and all will be well. It’s only one night, and I have my dog, she will bark if something is up.
I get into the room and go to put the chain on the door.
There is no chain for the door.
I go to make a phone call.
There is no phone.
Oh Crap.
I am in a hotel where the only record of my being here is a tiny slip of paper that could easily be burnt with no means of talking to the outside world.
I am exhausted and the next town big enough for a hotel is hours away so I psych myself up and figure I will just nap for an hour or two and drive on. So at this point I have visions from every horror movie racing through my head and the words of my Mother and the waitress commenting on my bravery on loop as well.
I prop a chair against the door in some vain hope that it will serve as a warning just in case the 90 year old man decides to break in and watch me sleep or something and then I supplement that by balancing some bells that I had packed on the doorknob so that if it turned they would fall. I didn’t bother changing clothes, still being paranoid that he is watching me through a hole in the wall and lay down on the bed. I could have lived with all that and probably slept fine, except that my dog spent the entire night growling…
She never growls…
I left at sun up.
Our family was on a Euro trip (my sister and I as teenagers), and we were in Paris for some sightseeing. Dad decided for us to stay in a small hotel near downtown. His first clue should have been during dinner in the nearby cafe when a prostitute hit him up with my mom sitting right there with him at the table. The room had a tiny little B & W TV, the drawers in the clothes cabinet all fell out when I pulled one out, and the bed was very lumpy (yes, one bed for all 4 of us), with one of those middle-of-the-room bathtubs. In retrospect it obviously was a hotbed for illicit activities of all sorts, but what did us naive Americans know about such things?
The worst tho was during a trip through Daytona Beach at twilight during a storm. Unable to make it home at a reasonable hour, we pulled in at the first Holiday Inn that we saw, but it was a total dive (peeling wallpaper, dirty bathroom), and made the Paris establishment look like four stars. The next morning on our way home we passed a very nice looking and posh Holiday Inn along the beachfront, only about 6 miles away from the first one. :smack:
I was sent to San Diego by the Navy, I packed up my wife and son and off we went. The first night in San Diego we stayed at a nice place near the recruit depot on Rosecrans, I was familiar with the area during my short stay during training after I left boot camp. The next afternoon I looked in a phone book and saw an ad for a place downtown, only $19 a night. The place looked okay from the outside so I rented a room, the manager gave us a “nice” room on the 4th floor. The first tip this place this place wasn’t so nice was the out of order sign on the elevator. When I asked I was told the elevator hadn’t worked in over 10 years. As we climbed the stairs to the 4th floor the place got darker and dingier. The walls were covered with graffiti and the paint was peeling on the walls and ceilings.
When we got to our room the door was hanging wide open. I went inside and found no one. There were no sheets or blankets on the beds, no towels, or any other items you expect to find in a hotel room. I was ready to head back down stairs when a woman appeared with an arm load of stuff for the room. She did a half ass job of making the beds and used the only washcloth she brought to clean out the bathtub.
We were woke a couple of times during the night by yelling and hollering in the hall. About 4 in the morning someone knocked on the door and called for someone in Spanish. We were up and out of the place by 6am. A few months later the city of San Diego shut down the hotel.
Go Jayhawks! 
(Yeah, it’s a dump. Luckily, I can drive right past it without stopping.)
Mine would have to be this place we stayed in Harrisburg PA during a family vacation back in the late 70’s. Dad was driving and mom was looking in the guidebook for a place to stay and saw a “Holiday Inn”. Well, it wasn’t a real Holiday Inn, it was some dump called “The Holiday Inn”. No bugs that I can recall, but very dirty and smelly. We were so glad to get the hell out of there the next morning.
The winner in my case would be a joint in some tiny town in the Amazon basin in eastern Ecuador. The base manager (I work for an oilfield service company), who had driven down from Quito to pick me up when I got off the rig, announced that we had to wait for some supplies that were supposedly on their way by boat from another location downriver. This actually made no sense, and no one at the dock knew what the hell he was talking about, but we waited around all day until it got dark and it was clear that no such shipment was coming in.
At this point it was way too late to start driving back, so the base manager announces that we’ll sleep in the car. Great. So I try to get some shuteye on a seat that won’t recline, with a streetlight glaring in, a bunch of guys singing along with an untuned guitar in a cantina down the way, and another guy knocking on a door on a second-floor balcony across the street. This last bit goes on for, swear to God, two.frickin’.hours.
Tap Tap Tap…
(10 second delay)
Tap Tap Tap…
(10 second delay)
Tap Tap Tap…
(ad infinitum)
Seriously, what kind of idiot would stand there knocking on a door for two goddam hours?
Anyway, at this point I’m about to go insane, so I beg the base manager to find someplace, anyplace, we can flop for the night. So we drive around until we find some little dive on the outskirts of town, with just about one 60-watt bulb illuminating it. We manage to rouse the clerk, and end up booking one room, which costs the equivalent (at the time) of one US dollar. We stumble to our chamber, and in it there is:
A. One bed
B. Made of cement
C. With a straw mattress
D. infested with bedbugs, which savaged me throughout the night
E. with a bare lightbulb hanging overhead.
Didn’t matter. I slept like a baby. Man, I was tired.
Downtown Vancouver - smelled badly, slept on top of the blankets in my sleeping bag - and the view from the window was the courtyard where the prostitutes & junkies threw their needles and condoms.
Very scary, but better than the night in the stairwell entry to a building the day earlier.
The worst I’ve stayed in is the Manhattan Broadway Budget Hotel, in the Garment District in NYC. I only spent one night there (I was going to a concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom and I needed somewhere to go after and sleep over before taking the train home the next day) and it cost $150 (in 2003 or so.)
For that, I got this room the size of a shoebox, with a queen bed in it that basically took up the whole room. The carpet…crinkled, like it had tissue paper under it. They only gave me two rolls of TP, and no one there spoke any English, so I had to go down to the Duane Reade and buy some myself. The water pressure in the shower was total shit and the water was lukewarm. The toilet overflowed in the middle of the night for no damn reason. The giant bed was like a concrete slab, with rock-hard buttons in it like the back of a fancy leather chair.
I was totally pissed off the next day and couldn’t wait to go home.
When I first moved to Atlanta in ‘89, I got off the bus with $20 in my pocket and didn’t know a soul. So I worked day labour and slept in an ally,unless it rained. Yes this place was so bad that an ally was better.
The Falcon Hotel,$7.50 a night for half a double they would rent the other half to someone else. The floors in the halls all sag. Public bathrooms down the hall that make you want to go outside. Open crack use in the halls. One TV in the lobby in a cage. And the atendant was also in a cage and would not come out for any reason.
On the bright side,I would make money stayin’ there by bootlegin’ gin.
You needed more than two rolls of TP for a one-night stay? Sounds like fun…
Joe
Olongapo Philippines back in 1982. I was stationed at Subic Bay naval base for a month and as a young buck I wanted to sample the local life when we got leave.
Olongapo as far I could tell, was there for the sole purpose of servicing the servicemen. I hook up with some dancer/bargirl and she knew a nice place around the corner.
I guess it could have been considered a hotel, there was someone at the front desk. As soon as we walk in, I reach for the light switch and the biggest freaking cockroach I have ever seen was clearly pissed and ready to pounce on me. I swear it had to be 10" long and was mad as hell. It must have sensed some danger when I grabbed my shoe so it scurried off under the wall.
This room was horrible, horrible green paint, no AC of course, a shitty ceiling fan that spun about as fast as the ones in Apocalypse Now. The shower was basically a garden hose which trickled water. There was a feeble looking bar of soap, which had obviously been used many times before.
Have I mentioned that the water was some sickly yellowish, murky, green color? Oh yes, and this was the bad part because I was already dehydrated from bar hopping and swilling beer at 6 pesos… which at the time translated to about a quarter a beer.
Even though I got laid that night, while keeping an eye out for the cockroach of doom, I somehow don’t remember it being worth it.