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Reply to "Farewell Charming Olde New York, part 4"

The hotel sector of the city's economy is a kind of mafia. They generate their own statistics and so it never shows the sector doing badly, only that demand for rooms keeps going up. This is the only convenient thing the hotels need to cite as they steadily raise their 'rack rate' rooms, which during peak tourist season now easily average considerably more than $300 a night. The only adversary the hotels really face anymore are their labor unions. I worked a large event last February at the midtown Hilton, the largest hotel in the city. An impending strike by the hotel workers' union was narrowly avoided. The hotel had actually spent $100,000 dollars on pine trees it was going to place around the ground floor of the hotel so guests could not look out to the street when the anticipated strike protests started. What the hotel did with those trees I don't know, since the strike was averted maybe the Hilton family donated them to the LA County Jail.
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