(Sarah L. Voisin/ THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Developer William Conway examines a suite at his 125-room Holiday Inn Express at New York Avenue and Bladensburg Road.
Nicki Neumeister awoke on a recent Tuesday morning and emerged on the sidewalk in front of his hotel, the Comfort Inn & Suites Near Union Station on New York Avenue NE, for a morning run.
First, though, the 21-year-old had to hop across six lanes of traffic and pass a vacant warehouse, a lot surrounded by barbed wire and a man sleeping under an overhang.
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Neumeister, vacationing from Germany, is one of thousands of visitors to Washington this year to rent a room in one of a string of newly built or renovated hotels on New York Avenue NE.
One of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, at 87,000 vehicles per day, New York Avenue has long had hotels. Until recently, however, they weren’t the sort one would find featured in most travel guides.
Now the corridor is capturing more of the tourist trade — with promises of proximity to some of Washington’s main attractions and with rates that can be cheaper than what’s available downtown, even if nearby amenities are few.
It’s a stretch of the District better known for its traffic jams and seedy history than its hospitality.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, some of the hotels rented by the hour or were the scenes of large-scale drug deals. The Capitol City Motor Inn, which housed hundreds of homeless families near where the Comfort Inn now sits, was once referred to as “a hellhole” by a D.C. Superior Court judge after several children died there.
In recent years, however, real estate developers looking to capitalize on the city’s resurgence have invested millions to renovate or build hotels along the stretch, creating new options for penny-conscious travelers who want to be close to downtown.
Today’s hotels aren’t the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons, but they are upgrades from their predecessors.
The Comfort Inn, pinched between New York Avenue and the train tracks at the intersection with Montana Avenue, opened in 2008. Before that, the same building was an EconoLodge, a Ramada and also a President Inn.
Neumeister, sporting a sleek black top and running shorts, said he chose to stay in the area to be close to Washington’s museums and memorials. (The U.S. Capitol is about three miles away.)
He and several friends stayed five nights as part of a three-month tour of North America.
“We looked on the Internet and see it’s not so far out, and so it’s been quite good,” he said.
Limited amenities, low cost
Walking far along New York Avenue is still something no hotel desk attendant would advise. One part is expected to be under construction until the end of next year. Some stretches have no sidewalks. Others remain popular with prostitutes and the homeless.
The amenities nearby are limited to gas stations, fast-food restaurants and an animal shelter. And according to the District Department of Transportation, an average of two pedestrians per year are hit by cars along the street.
The hotel owners are still eager to advertise their physical proximity to Washington’s top attractions, though, which may contribute to the occasional sight of a hotel guest struggling to hail a cab or pulling a roller-bag along a sliver of median with cars, dump trucks and buses zipping by.
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