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Hotel Historian Loves the Cosmopolitan Hotel

Where: 95 West Broadway [map], New York, ny, United States, 10007

We now present you with our VIP Hotel Reviewer Series in which we hand-pick experts in the travel and media worlds and beyond to tell us what are their favorite hotels and why. Once a week, we'll feature a hotel review from said VIPs about their favorite leisure or business hotels. Pay attention: These VIPs are experts at what they do and they don't mess around when it comes to their hotels.

The next VIP in the series is A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, author of the book Hotel: An American History. Annie0007 interviewed the author back in December all about this book and of course, we wanted to know which hotel is his fave. Here's his answer below. Enjoy.

As a sightseer, I love hundred-year-old palace hotels like New York's Plaza, Chicago's Blackstone, and San Francisco's Fairmont.

But as a historian, I recognize that luxury establishments made up only a tiny percentage of all hotels, and that most people stayed in more modest hostelries.

One of these, the Cosmopolitan Hotel on West Broadway in Manhattan, has been in business since 1851, operating in the same building and serving the same kind of middle-class clientele for more than a century and a half!

The rooms are small and the décor is modern, but it's in the same historic building that's pictured on a nineteenth-century trade card in my book. And you can't beat the Cosmopolitan for affordable accommodations in the stylish SoHo neighborhood.

[Photo: Straightedge]