Nearing the end: Food Workers at Roosevelt Hotel Told June 20 Will Be Last Day

The Roosevelt Hotel has already announced plans to lay off nearly 100 employees in mid-June as the city no longer needs what was called “the new Ellis Island” during the height on the migrant crisis.

The Pakistan government, which has owned the 101-year-old hotel for over a decade, has begun to solicit bids for what is expected to be a teardown to be replaced by a new supertall tower on the site at some point in the not-too-distant future.

But there are still 1,800 migrants living at the Roosevelt, according to a recent report in the New York Post, citing the city as its source, and those migrant residents have not been told when they will have to leave. Single individuals are given shelter for only 30 days in most cases, but families with kids could stay for up to 60 days.

Amid all the chaos, a popular sushi restaurant, a deli, and a men’s clothing store on the ground floor of the Madison Avenue side of the hotel all seem to be surviving if not thriving.

According to a WARN (Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification) filed with the NYS Labor Department, 96 of the 103 employees working in “accommodation and food services” are being laid off by the Interstate Hotel Corp. Ed Netzhammer, who is listed as a senior VP at Interstate in the filing, had not returned a call by press time. The WARN notice said the reason for the layoffs was “contract termination.”

The branch of the Pakistan government that owns the Roosevelt has been trying to sell the hotel for at least a year. The news in February that Mayor Eric Adams was closing the facility as a migrant check-in / emergency housing shelter suddenly saw interest in buying the hotel perk up. Some published reports say it could fetch up to $1 billion by a developer, and the international brokerage firm JLL has already been hired to handle the sale.

Tishman Speyer, Related Companies, SL Green, and Vornado have all been linked as potential buyers.

Peter Riguardi of the brokerage JLL declined to comment when reached by Straus News, to inquire about the bidding process.

But back in February, Riguardi told the Post: “Pakistan hired us to evaluate the property’s potential as a mixed-use project combining retail, offices, a new hotel, condo apartments, and event space, all in a single building.

“We expect all the major developers and global capital sources to be interested. It will attract the greatest architects. The Roosevelt location is in the hottest part of New York City, close by Grand Central Terminal,” he said.

More recently, a developer has appeared that is willing to let the Pakistan government retain a 50 percent stake in a new multi-use tower that could be erected on the 42,000-square-foot site.

Shahal Khan’s Burkhan World Investments reportedly pitched a plan to let the Pakistan government’s PIA Holdings (Pakistan International Airlines) keep a 50 percent stake in a joint venture to develop the property, Bloomberg reported last week.

A Burkhan representative told Bloomberg the proposal is the “best deal” for PIA.

The Roosevelt’s midtown location and proximity to Grand Central enhances its value at a time when the NYC commercial real estate market, which suffered tremendously during COVID, has been slowly rebounding from its four-year slump. Office demand finally returned to pre-pandemic levels in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to consulting firm VTS.

And the city’s Office of Management and Budget forecast about 38,000 new office-using jobs in 2025, derived mainly from companies in finance, business services, and technology.

That has to be good news for the new JP Morgan Chase HQ, a supertall 60-story tower designed by Foster & Partners that was built on the site of the old Union Carbide Building. The tower will be opening shortly with a grand plaza entrance on Madison Avenue between 47th and 48th streets.

That’s a stone’s throw away from the Roosevelt, which is listed as 45 E. 45th St. but takes up the full block between Madison and Vanderbilt avenues and East 44th and East 45th streets.

One Vanderbilt, an even taller, 73-story supertall structure owned by SL Green, opened in 2020. It is mostly office space, with an observatory atop the tower, and it boasts its own connection to the Grand Central subway lines.

Of course, before any development can begin, the migrants will have to leave. Right now, the hotel remains one of 171 sites used to house migrants, but the city has been able to shut down the tent cities on Rikers Island and Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.

At its peak, there were up to 4,000 migrants a week landing in the city, and over 220,000 landed in just over two years, costing the city over $7 billion. The Roosevelt Hotel, which was shut down during COVID, received a $220-million contract from the city to become the principal check-in and emergency shelter site for families.

But in the past week, only about 100 asylum-seeking migrants arrived in the city. Mayor Adams said recently that the city is still housing about 39,000 migrants citywide.

Meanwhile, the ground-floor businesses in the Roosevelt facing Madison Avenue seem to be doing well. They include New York Deli, Cafe & Pizza; Sayki, a high-end men’s clothing store, and a popular sushi place, Omakase Osukaa. The sushi restaurant is said to be operating under a five-year lease–suggesting it may be a few years before the hotel is actually demolished to make way for a new multi-use tower.