Heartbreak Hotel

On a fall afternoon in 2019, I waited for P, a married man, at the east corner of Fourteenth Street and Tenth Avenue. We decided to hold our first meeting across from Liberty Inn to verify each other’s identity and decide, before going into the hotel, if we still wanted to have sex together. Earlier that week, we connected on a dating app over our shared interest in BDSM and needed a place where we could be loud and shielded from prying eyes or ears. P’s painting studio in Long Island City was not private enough, and I was living with a roommate in a thin-walled Crown Heights apartment. As we were both low on disposable income, even a cheapish Manhattan hotel room (about $150 on average, not including all the extra fees) was more than we were willing to spend for a tryst. Liberty Inn, which I’d found by googling “hourly hotel nyc,” met our needs: It was less than ten minutes on foot from the Fourteenth Street station; it was inexpensive (the flat rate for two hours was $80); and with its mirrored ceilings and colored lights, the place was explicitly geared for sex.

Though only two blocks down from Chelsea Market, this patch of the Meatpacking District was lightly peopled. There were few nearby attractions at the time: Street-level retail units in the surrounding buildings stood empty, and many more people used the Gansevoort Street High Line entrance several streets away near the Whitney Museum than the gloomy stair around the corner. The wind blowing over the Hudson River chilled me through my coat as I waited there with increasing anxiety, wondering if I’d taken too great a risk meeting a stranger for sex, which I’d never done before, not without a drink or other date-like activity beforehand that allowed me to get a read on a man, to easily back out if something seemed off. Would P hurt me? Or worse: Would I be kidnapped from my corner or left for dead in a shady hotel room? Would I return to my apartment covered in bed bug bites? I pinned my location on Google Maps and texted it to a friend, just in case.

P approached my corner from the south. He was tall, slim, with a sculpted face, at once skeletal and boyish. He was dressed shabbily in some battered-looking work wear, boots with paint flecks on them. I’d never seen his face before that afternoon; his dating-app photos only showed his body.

“Do we know each other?” P asked, shouting over the noise emanating from the West Side Highway, the wind whipping around us.

“No,” I said, squinting into the glare of the late-afternoon sun hovering over the Hudson, studying his face, “you don’t look familiar.” He was, to my relief, attractive.

“Good,” P said, grinning, “do you want to go inside?”

We crossed over the empty avenue. The three-story, wedge-shaped brick building still sits on a triangular island dividing the West Side Highway from Tenth Avenue, but because the hotel entrance was located on the less exposed side, patrons could not be seen coming and going. There was next to no signage, and the only indication that you were in the right place was the discreet vinyl lettering printed on the awning above the front door. It read, “Liberty”; the address, 51 Tenth Avenue, wrapped around the side.

Box shrubs shielded the entryway. The frosted glass double doors opened into a small lobby area furnished with a plush bench, an oversized photograph of the Statue of Liberty, and a vending machine stocked with snacks, lube, and condoms.

A gruff older man sat behind a ticketing booth–like window. I found out later from Chichi^*, the desk agent who worked the graveyard shift, that this man, an emigrant from Egypt, had been employed at Liberty Inn for thirty-five years. He peered at us from the top of his glasses, waiting for me to speak first.

“Two hours please,” I said.

“I need IDs from both of you,” he said, eyeing P, who stood away from the window shiftily, “and one of you needs to fill this out.”

He passed an index card through the narrow slot below the pane of bulletproof glass. On it were empty fields where guests were expected to list their names, addresses, phone numbers.

“You fill it out,” said P. “I can’t leave a paper trail.”

“Fine,” I said, filling out the card and passing it back through the slot.

“It’s $80 for two hours.”

P handed me $40 in cash as I passed my card to the desk agent.

“I’ll also need a $20 deposit for the key. And you will get your IDs back when you check out.”

“Sure,” I said, handing over a twenty. P looked vaguely panicked about not having his ID returned right away.

“There’s a two-person limit for the rooms,” the desk agent said. “No parties.”

He passed me a key fob attached to an old-timey hotel keychain printed with the room number and a notice guaranteeing postage if returned by mail.

“Up the stairs,” he said, pushing the key through the slot. “Someone will call twenty minutes before your time is up.”

The stairs and the hallway were narrow, so I went up ahead. P, suddenly throwing his overzealous caution to the wind, spanked me as we reached the top of the steps. In the hallway, I heard vague thumps and errant moans through the walls, but I couldn’t tell how full the hotel was.

Our small room was already lit with blue lights when we entered. Plate glass mirrors were mounted on the ceiling and on the wall opposite the bed. Blackout shades were pulled down over the narrow window that looked out onto the highway. The headboard was tall and heart-shaped. Everything was clean: no dust bunnies in sight. Under the side table was a vinyl ottoman that could fold open into a “sex ramp.” The institutional-looking bathroom came furnished with two sets of clean towels, a cheap toiletry kit, and two pairs of Liberty Inn–branded disposable slippers, which I would subsequently hoard each time I visited.

We took shots of tequila blanco from the mini bottles P had picked up from the liquor store and got busy. Two hours is, to be sure, ample time to get everything done. Afterward, we watched TV and discussed what a pain in the ass it must be to clean this room after every use.

P and I went a few more times before the hotel shut down, temporarily, during the pandemic. I continued to go there for as long as I lived with roommates, whenever my partner du jour could not host, and sometimes just for fun. I’d been in almost every room except the large suites downstairs, which were furnished with hot tubs and reserved for overnight guests only at $200 per night. Each lodging had a different theme: There was the blue-lit room with the lip-shaped headboard; there was the red-lit room with an erotic fresco on the ceiling; the green-lit room with kinky, Alice in Wonderland–themed art; the purple-lit room with an octagonal mirror above the bed. Over the years, I developed a fondness for the place’s kitsch, its frank sexuality. Chichi’s discretion and friendliness made me feel welcome—I never felt judged, even when I’d return with different partners in back-to-back visits. But most important of all, I felt safe there: Their ID policy effectively discouraged theft and sexual violence.

When the hotel closed in 2023—for good, this time, after longtime owner Edward Raboy announced he’d retire—I was bereft. It was like losing a beloved neighborhood bar. Where would I go now for casual, spontaneous sex? I wondered. Liberty Inn minimized the risk of casual encounters. Without it, I was limited to meeting men in their homes or apartments—or worse, in motor inns located on the outskirts of town—unfamiliar places where I felt vulnerable. Having sex in a public spot, even if somewhat secluded, was out of the question—I take no pleasure in being watched, nor in the risk of being caught or arrested. Liberty Inn helped me experience the city as a place of sexual opportunity, through which I could move freely—led by desire, without judgment—and now it was gone forever.

THE BUILDING at 51 Tenth Avenue was constructed in 1908. Known then as the Strand, the hotel provided boarding rooms for sailors and other laborers who worked on the waterfront (men only, as specified by a court document) and operated a saloon on the ground floor, with a separate address and entrance on the north side of the building at 500 West Fourteenth Street. The port was among the busiest in the world, and the Strand was in the thick of the action. In 1912, it briefly entered the world spotlight as Titanic survivors arriving on the Carpathia disembarked from Pier 54 right across the street. For the occasion, the New York Times booked the top floor for its reporters and installed telephone lines linking the inn to the newsroom in Times Square.

Not long after the Strand opened, its all-night license was revoked by then mayor William Jay Gaynor. In a letter to the police commissioner published in the Times, Gaynor characterized nocturnal patrons of establishments like the Strand as “vulgar, roystering [sic], and often openly immodest. They get inebriated, behave boisterously, and indulge in lascivious dancing in rooms devoted to that use.” Whatever it was that constituted “lascivious dancing” clearly didn’t conform to the moral codes of the Progressive Era. This wasn’t the last time the authorities tried to shut down operations at the Strand for after-hours activity that brought together populations deemed outside of the norm.

In the early 1970s, the Strand became the Hide-a-way Motel. The building was owned by Raboy’s father until Raboy took over operations in 1977, after which the hotel was renamed Liberty Inn. Though the rise of commercial airlines meant the demise of the ocean liner business, and the commercial cargo industry moved over to the more spacious Port of Newark, Liberty Inn continued to serve the truckers, meatpackers, and salesmen who passed through the quarter. The demolition of the West Side Elevated Highway in 1977 was often blamed for an influx of prostitution in the area, but as one anonymous West Village resident remarked contemporaneously to The Villager, “those hookers have been there for years. … [T]hey have serviced the truckers and meatmen for years. Before that it was the longshoremen when this was a shipping district.” Though other hotels in the neighborhood fell on hard times and converted large sections of their properties into social rehabilitative housing and single-room occupancy units, Liberty Inn managed to avoid this economizing measure, housing only nine permanent tenants in 1978. Across the street, on the north side, was a gas station; to the east of Tenth Avenue stood Sterling Provisions, a meatpacking company. The neighborhood reeked of meat: animal carcasses were hung on hooks out front, and blood emptied out into the streets. It smelled, according to Steve Cuozzo in the Post, “like one big pancreas.”

Though the Raboy family owned the building and the lot it sits on, they leased out the bar downstairs to entrepreneurs who managed the space independently. Until the owners introduced “leather night” to the weekly repertoire, the bar catered to a straight clientele with female go-go dancers performing during the lunch hour and after work. By 1972, the spot had transitioned into a full-fledged gay bar known variously as Danny’s, the Meatrack, and finally the Anvil. Operating from 1974 to 1985, the Anvil was one of New York’s most notorious gay BDSM clubs. Will Kohler, an oral historian and scribe of the now-archived Back2Stonewall blog, described it as “one of the hottest, sleaziest, and most glorious places to be for gay men of that period.” Boasting a dance floor, drag performances, naked male go-go dancers, live sex shows, and downstairs, a makeshift porn theater and a dark backroom for sex, the Anvil attracted a celebrity clientele: Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, Truman Capote, and Andy Warhol reportedly frequented the spot. Felipe Rose, “the Indian” from the Village People, was discovered dancing on the bar. It was, as one former reveler recalled on Back2Stonewall, “every bit as famous as Studio 54 in the gay world.”

The Anvil’s fame peaked when it was featured in William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising, in which an ostensibly straight cop played by Al Pacino goes undercover to catch a serial killer targeting gay men. Around this time, refrigerated trucking had taken over the commercial freight industry, resulting in the shutdown of the West Side Line viaduct (the site of today’s High Line). The increased vehicular traffic and availability of empty cargo trailers at night made the area along Fourteenth Street—of which Liberty Inn was the terminus—a popular “stroll” for trans sex workers, despite the near-constant threat of violence from not only clients but also the police. The brainchild of Governor Hugh Carey, what later became reviled as the “Walking While Trans” law made it legal for the NYPD to harass and arrest anyone for “loitering.” Trans women of color bore the brunt of this abuse.

The Anvil itself was subject to several raids and shutdowns under various pretexts by the NYPD’s Public Morals Division and by the New York State Liquor Authority: for fire code violations, operating without a liquor license, and tax evasion. The Padlock Law, passed by the city council in 1985, gave police license to close any business suspected of illegal activity without judicial review, and with the rise of the AIDS crisis, gay clubs and other sites of “high-risk sexual activities” came under assault. The Anvil voluntarily shuttered in November of that year. The bar space was incorporated into the ground floor of Liberty Inn and eventually converted into deluxe overnight suites. The north-facing bar entrance was sealed up.

By the time Mayor Rudy Giuliani instituted the Adult Zoning Resolution of 1995, which prohibited sex-oriented businesses from operating within 500 feet not just of schools, residences, and places of worship, but also of other adult businesses—effectively discouraging the formation of a red-light district—Liberty Inn had long been out of the city’s crosshairs. Lacking an after-hours watering hole to draw theire of nightlife scolds, the hotel passed into anonymity. Giuliani’s reforms, meanwhile, stifled a liberated culture of nightlife, of sex in the city that had encompassed both public and private spaces.

In a 2015 interview conducted by artist Lize Mogel for the Whitney Museum, which had just migrated from the Upper East Side to the Meatpacking District, Raboy explained that he “gradually improved conditions” at Liberty Inn, “to the point where today it’s pretty top-notch and every room has a private bathroom and they’re all, uh, very well-decorated.” His instincts served him well: Before the pandemic, the hotel was very busy, hosting sixty to eighty couples within a twelve-hour shift. As Chichi tells me, front desk agents were expected to process visitors quickly to ensure that no one risked being seen by other guests in the lobby—privacy was part of the service. I encountered another couple just once, during a late afternoon visit with P. (“Suits and ties hour,” as Chichi calls it, was a busy time at the hotel.) They were checking out as we were checking in. Everyone theatrically avoided eye contact, heads turned to the floor or toward the opposite wall. Liberty Inn modeled the way sexuality would be expressed “acceptably” in a gentrifying neighborhood: peripheral and, above all, discreet.

Compliance was also solicited through quiet but revealing decisions regarding amenities. The erotic hotel art, for instance, always depicted straight couples or provocatively dressed women. And though porn—from the 2000s, by the look of the actors’ flat-ironed hair and frosted tips—played constantly on no fewer than four channels, it was geared toward the clientele management wanted to attract: straight, mostly white people.

The “free in-house adult entertainment” was so bad as to seem like an afterthought—a superfluous convenience, like an ice bucket that one does not plan to use but is nice to have just in case. As one of my frequent partners at Liberty Inn noted, half-jokingly, the picture on the “POC channel” was always frozen or plagued by other technical issues. There was a conspicuous absence of gay porn. The devil, as always, is in the details.

AT THE END OF Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), Samuel Delany’s gimlet-eyed eulogy of the adult theaters and public sexual culture of gay men in the old Times Square, he opines that sex positivity, especially in heterosexual society, could make women feel freer, safer, in cities. To enact what Delany calls “pro-sex infrastructural change”—to inscribe sex positivity in urban space—he proposes the creation of “sexual assignation hostels” for women:

A “sex hostel” of Delany’s description the Liberty Inn was not. But in providing a safe, clean, relatively inexpensive place to have sex in a city where having one’s own space, comes at a high price, it was the closest thing we had. And even if Liberty Inn, as I knew it, came at the end of an era of sweeping demographic change in the neighborhood, it managed to retain some of its original, sexually liberated essence.

Yes, Liberty Inn was known for being a “cheater’s paradise,” and in this way it upheld heteronormative institutions, obliquely, by helping married men keep their affairs secret and their marriages intact. But it was also an outlet for people exploring nontraditional forms of intimacy like nonmonogamy, sex work, and casual encounters. Chichi, who worked at Liberty Inn from 2017 to 2023, tells me that though guests ranged in age, with some visitors well into retirement, a lot of them were young people: university students, young adults who lived with families or roommates. There were the college-aged girls “working for themselves,” who used the rooms to entertain sugar daddies. But couples were more common—interracial couples especially. As a Turkish Muslim woman, she could guess why: “Most people stay within their community. I’m Sunni, so if I brought home a Shia or a Black guy or an Asian guy, it would have been a problem in my family. And since people tend to live among people in their own community, even as roommates, the gossip still goes around.”

Chichi’s observations track with testimony from other former guests. Jimmy^*, a Queens native, visited when he was not yet separated from his ex-wife and needed a place outside of their shared home to be intimate with other people. Eric^*, a Brooklynite, visited with a girlfriend out of sheer curiosity, having heard of the charmingly tacky interiors from a mutual friend. Raquel^*, who lived on the Lower East Side with her South American emigrant parents, went to Liberty Inn with her boyfriend because it was conveniently located, relatively cheap, and—importantly—private. Oyster^*, visited on occasion with a client who liked a high-low mix to their evenings (think: dinner at Nobu followed by a tryst at a cheap love hotel). She recalled, with amusement, the sound of a man getting spanked, hard, as she walked through the narrow hallways on one of her stays. Liberty Inn, which served people with different backgrounds, motivations, and various orientations to heteronormativity, was valuable precisely because it offered a nonjudgmental space for sexual expression.

Sexual desire is an essential part of human experience, and as such, it’s also a vital element of city life. Being able to pursue sexual pleasure freely is one of the reasons I love living in this city. But without institutions or intentional city planning oriented around desire, people—in particular, women and trans women—are forced to seek out arrangements that are not just more expensive monetarily but costly also in terms of privacy, safety, and social risk.

What would a city built around desire require? In New York City, we could begin by dismantling the Giuliani-era zoning regulations that preclude the planning of red-light districts. This would also require the decriminalization of sex work and the creation of policies that protect the rights and safety of sex workers—especially trans women—active in the field. Having a red light district would help normalize sex, remove it from the procreative domain into one of recreation and leisure, and in the process, destigmatize the open pursuit of sexual pleasure. The hoped-for result would be a culture of sex that is more public and less heteronormative in that sexual desire would be discussed and centered at a policy level. One thing is clear: The personal would need to be made political once again.

ON A FRIDAY EVENING in late February 2023, I paid a visit to Liberty Inn with N, a man who shared my fondness for the hotel. We went together on a semiroutine basis and made a night of it, stopping at a bar or restaurant before or afterward. Or we’d book three hours and drink in the room, watch cable reruns of Seinfeld, critique the porn on TV, and have sex intermittently. My favorite room, 206, was lit by red bulbs and boasted the most mirrors—on the ceiling and walls to the front and side of the bed. I liked the mirrors because men seemed to like them; they performed better, more energetically, in front of mirrors. The mirrors also made the small, crimson room seem larger, dazzle the eyes a bit; it was like fucking inside of a tacky glass gemstone. Delightful. Chichi caught on that I liked that room and would book it for me whenever it was available.

“It’s a good thing you came by because we’re closing. This is the last weekend,” she said, pointing to a sign posted in the reception window announcing Liberty Inn’s closure.

My partner and I expressed our dismay.

“I’ve enjoyed taking money and IDs from you guys all this time,” she said with a laugh, passing the key to 206 through the window slot.

When we checked out, I said my farewell to Chichi and left her the $20 key deposit. As a parting gift, she gave me an old, decommissioned key chain to room 206—now one of my most prized possessions.

“Come by during the daytime next week,” she said. “We’re having a sale of all the furnishings and memorabilia.”

I took off early from work to check out the last day of the sale. I hadn’t been to Liberty Inn during the daytime in years, as I’d long stopped seeing the married man with whom I paid my first visit. Inside, several people were rummaging through items displayed on a long table. It was busy by Liberty Inn lobby standards. The hotel manager, a middle-aged Asian woman, walked me through the items for sale in different rooms.

One of the large suites on the first floor, at the north end of the building, had already been cleared out, save for a pile of Liberators-disguised-as-ottomans stacked nearly to the ceiling. Because Liberators (the La-Z-Boys of sex paraphernalia) come standard in velveteen, the hotel manager explained, the owners had to have the “flip ramps” reupholstered in easy-to clean vinyl. They were sold that day, as-is, at a steep discount. “You won’t be able to find these anywhere else,” the manager said.

With mirrors mounted on the walls, the north-side room looked for all the world like a dance studio; the only giveaway was the mirror above where the bed used to be. I tried to imagine the interior of the Anvil, which had occupied this part of the building over forty years ago: dim lights, go-go dancers on the bar, men in leather grooving to a disco beat, sex acts on stage, erotically charged gazes exchanged between patrons.

I asked about the Alice in Wonderland décor, but the manager shook her head. (“Those were the first pieces to go.”) I opted instead for a particularly ugly piece of erotic hotel art—an unintentionally pixelated print of a woman partially clothed in lingerie—that I’d remembered from my first stay at the hotel.

At the front desk, Mr. and Mrs. Raboy tossed in a few Liberty Inn–branded extras as they rang me up: a few toiletry kits, a bottle opener, and a set of scratchy, reportedly unused polyester sheets. Their appearances were unassuming: Ed, a sixtyish white man with graying hair and glasses, wore a dark collared shirt; his wife, a serious-looking Asian woman around the same age, wore a knit sweater in a neutral color and had no makeup on her face. I would not have clocked them as the owners if the manager hadn’t mentioned it to me earlier, in passing.

As I bagged my haul, an older couple walked in. The bespectacled man wore an old NYCDOT windbreaker, while his partner was more anonymously dressed in a navy parka. They looked like a pair of empty nesters on move-in day at the college dorm, and both wore a disoriented expression on their faces, stunned, as I had been, by all the activity in what was usually an empty lobby.

“Hi! Can I help you?” asked Ed.

“Well, we wanted to book a room…” the man started to say.

“Unfortunately, we’re closed. But we’re having a sale, so you should have a look around.”

“Oh, really? When did it close? I had no idea…”

“Last weekend,” said Ed. “It was time to retire.”

“Oh shoot! Well, congratulations on your retirement,” the man said. “How sad,” he added, looking around. “What’s going to happen to this building?”

I walked out of Liberty Inn for the last time, kitschy erotic hotel art in hand, in the direction of the subway. Across the West Side Highway lay Little Island, a “green space”/billionaire’s vanity project suspended on concrete pillars over the Hudson River where Pier 54 used to be. Its existence seemed to serve no purpose other than to signify wealth (Fox Broadcasting Company founder Barry Diller provided most of the funding) and act as a selfie backdrop. Depressingly, it drew a steady stream of people through the streets around Liberty Inn.

On the east side of Tenth Avenue was Hyundai’s Genesis House: a car showroom that, notably, does not sell cars but rather an “immersive experience,” which includes a library of Assouline coffee-table books and the American outpost of Onjium, a Michelin-starred restaurant. That summer, Hyundai purchased the Liberty Inn for $22.5 million, the highest price paid per square foot in the Meatpacking District’s history. It is not yet known what the automaker will do with the property, but one of the “perks” of the sale was the fact that the lot lies outside the historic district and is zoned to permit the construction of a building twice as large as the shuttered hotel. What was once celebrated for its unseen, erotic pleasures—the dark backrooms of the Anvil and its raucous dance floor, of which there are no surviving photographs; the sounds of people having sex (or getting spanked) behind closed doors in the hallways of Liberty Inn—will likely become a monument to conspicuous consumption in the age of social media, a controlled luxury “experience” in which views are currency. I looked back at Liberty Inn and, bracing myself against the wind, snapped a photo.