The Roosevelt Hotel, once the symbol of New York City’s migrant crisis, is laying off nearly all of its employees as the city moves to end its use as a shelter and intake center.
The former luxury hotel disclosed the move in a notice filed this week with the state’s Department of Labor, citing “contract termination” as the reason.
Mayor Eric Adams said last month that the hotel would close and stop operating as a shelter for newly arrived migrants in June, after the number of people arriving in the city fell dramatically. But he didn’t say at the time that 96 of the hotel’s 103 employees would lose their jobs.
The Roosevelt was dubbed “the new Ellis Island” because it served as a centralized intake center for many of the more than 230,000 migrants who arrived in the city between summer 2022 and this past January. The Roosevelt stopped operating as a luxury hotel in late 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As more migrants arrived in New York by bus from Texas and other border states, deepening the crisis, the city began paying the Roosevelt roughly $200 a night for each of its 1,022 rooms, or roughly $75 million a year.
By early this year, however, the number of migrants arriving each week had fallen to 350 from a peak of roughly 4,000. At one point in late 2023, the city was sheltering 69,000 migrants, in addition to tens of thousands of other homeless people. The migrant census has since fallen to 43,578 as of the end of February, a decline that prompted Adams to announce plans to close 53 other migrant shelters in the coming months.
The Stewart Hotel, another midtown facility that the city operated as a migrant shelter, is following suit. It plans to lay off all 99 of its employees by mid-June, according to a notice it filed with the state Labor Department. The city had at one point been paying the hotel $200 a night for each of its 611 rooms, according to a contract obtained by Bloomberg news through a records request.
And the health-care company DocGo, which drew scrutiny in 2023 for its $432 million contract to provide migrant care, announced plans this month to lay off all 360 of its workers at five sites across the city. New York officials said last year they wouldn’t renew DocGo’s city contract when it ended.
Both the Stewart Hotel and DocGo cited “contract termination” as the reason for the layoffs.
Representatives for City Hall and the Hotel Trades Council, the union that represents hotel workers, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Requests for comment from the Stewart Hotel, Roosevelt Hotel and DocGo weren’t immediately returned.
