Today’s gleaming, touristy Meatpacking District has no room for low-rent motels. But the Liberty Inn, at 51 Tenth Avenue, which famously charges by the hour, is still hanging in there.
This flatiron-shaped building is a remnant of the days when 14th Street west of Eighth Avenue was a commercial and ship-docking district, home to a produce market, meatpacking plants, sailors’ dives, and sex clubs.
The hotel had a dicey reputation from the start.
It first opened in 1908 as a sailor’s boardinghouse called the Strand on a patch of land known as Dalamater Square (right, 1938).
“It is a three-story structure, on the ground floor of which is a saloon and the upper part of which contains 28 rooms,” stated a court document from 1914.
“[The Strand] accepts only men as roomers,” the document added, and caters “to the class of trade that has business at the river front.”
In other words, it was a rough place–which might be why it had its “all-night license” revoked in 1910.
Its waterfront location came in handy after the Titanic sank in 1912. To cover the story, the New York Times rented a floor of rooms at the Strand (below, at Pier 54).
“The editors sent reporters to the pier with orders to buttonhole survivors and then run into the Strand and dictate their notes on one of the telephone lines, which were connected to the newsroom in Times Square,” the Times recalled in a 2012 article.
There’s no reason to think the Strand—or whatever it was called as the decades went on—ever changed its seamy vibe.
And why would it, since the Meatpacking District became the haunt of sex workers and the site of sex clubs from the 1970s through the 1990s.
The Anvil operated out of the ground floor of the building from 1974 to 1986, where “drag queens and naked go-go boys danced upstairs and those looking for a more hands on experience wandered the dark passageways below ground,” recalled the Daily News.
[Above: Photo by Brian Rose]
Today’s Liberty Inn, which limits rooms to 2 guests each and charges $80 for two hours, is a far cry from the debauchery of the Anvil.
But it’s the most unsavory place you’ll find in a neighborhood that’s scrubbed its down and dirty past clean.
[Third and fourth photos: NYPL Digital Collection. Fifth Photo: Brian Rose.]
Ephemeral New York 