Miracle on 42nd Street

. . . and Madison Avenue, Broadway and many other Manhattan locales. It's not easy finding cheap sleeps in NYC, but we found a few ways to save.

Think gasoline prices have gone through the roof? Try booking a hotel room in New York City.

If you're planning a trip to Manhattan but haven't priced lodgings lately, be very afraid. The average hotel room rate in 2005 was $243 a night, according to NYC & Company, the city's tourism marketing organization, and it's edging ever upward -- and that's not including the onerous 13.6 percent extra in state and city taxes, plus assorted other fees. And that's just the average cost; if you're looking for some style, charm or character, be prepared for some serious financial hemorrhaging. It's enough to make you stay home.

But we're the Travel section, so we can't have that. Instead, for this special issue on New York lodging, we set out to see if there is such a thing as a decent hotel room in Manhattan for under $200 a night. We ran Internet searches, checked online ratings sites and visited dozens of hotels, chatting with guests, testing mattresses, looking for dust bunnies and walking through pretty much every neighborhood in Manhattan. We came up with a list of 15 finds that we can recommend without (sorry) reservation.

Another way to beat the high cost of hotels in Manhattan is to head outside the borough, so we've also got recommendations for lodgings in nearby Brooklyn and New Jersey. If you want to conduct your own search, we provide a primer on how to find a hotel room for the best price. And if, after all this, you still want to luxe out, we have suggestions for eight hotel splurges in Manhattan.

Sure, sometimes you just have to have that snazzy view of Broadway at night from one of the $659-a-night rooms at the W Times Square. But it's nice to know there are options. Now if we could just do something about those gasoline prices.

::Continue on to our New York hotel bargains package.::