About a ton of taxpayer-provided food is trashed every day in giant Manhattan hotels used to house immigrants.
Hotel employee Felipe Rodriguez snaps a picture of a garbage bag full of sandwiches and bagels awaiting disposal at the 4-star Row NYC Hotel near Times Square.
“It’s a crime to throw away so much food,” he said.
Other images, Rodriguez said, show hotel rooms strewn with empty beer cans and bottles after a wild World Cup viewing party in November.
The gathering devolved into a fight over a match in a room where she “gave the keys to her cousin” while she was “hanging out in the Bronx,” leaving one man with a “big knot on his head.” said Rodriguez.
Rodriguez also shot a short video clip of two immigrant women pulling their hair outside a hotel during last week’s New Year’s Eve celebrations.
A 23-second cell phone recording shows a man struggling to pull a woman away with what appeared to be a beer can after she fell off the sidewalk and into the street.
A NYPD source who worked in Times Square on New Year’s Eve confirmed the chaos at the hotel, saying the lobby was littered with broken bottles, with some people dancing while others were sprawled on furniture or on the floor. .
“It was a complete show,” said the officer.
City Hall declined to disclose how much it would cost to rent out Rowe and the many other hotels used to house immigrants.
But Rodriguez said, “I’ve heard from management that it’s between $400 and $500 per night, depending on the size of the room.”
Rodriguez, 57, who started working at the 1,300-room hotel in 2017, said he was shocked by what had happened since Mayor Eric Adams’ administration began using the hotel as a “humanitarian response and relief center.”
“The change in October was dramatic,” he said. “There are lovely immigrants in that hotel looking for the American dream, a second chance to succeed in society. Fighting, lots of drugs, lots of sexual harassment abuse.”
A New York Police Department source confirmed that police responded to a series of domestic incidents at the hotel.
NYPD personnel were initially stationed in the lobby, but were replaced by the National Guard in December, Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez also said the hotel has “a list of people who should be quarantined for COVID, chickenpox or other reasons.”
“Nobody supervises those people,” he said. “They run away when they get bored. You never know who’s sick and who’s not.”
“We are in a hostile, violent and no longer safe environment,” Rodriguez added sadly.
The Row NYC is one of four HERRCs that New York City has opened in Manhattan’s larger hotels, in addition to 71 smaller hotels in the city as of Sunday.
The hotel’s expanding roster is being used to accommodate about 26,100 of the 38,700 immigrants who have flooded the Big Apple since the spring, according to the city hall’s latest tally.
Authorities originally planned to have migrants processed at HERRC for only 72 hours, but abandoned that goal after being overwhelmed by the influx that led Adams to declare a state of emergency in October.
Rodriguez — wrongfully convicted of a fatal stabbing incident in Queens in 1987 and released from prison in January 2017 — has thrown away at least 40% of the food supplied to immigrants in Lowe. said.
Rodriguez also estimated how much he wastes “almost a ton” a day.
“How do you know that? Because the cleaners pick up trash floor by floor every day,” he said. “Previously, he had six or seven bags on the landing behind each floor. Now they pick up 15-20 bags of him.
“anything [the migrants] don’t consume. These bags are heavy. Once I weighed a bag full of sandwiches and it weighed 60 pounds. ”
Rodriguez added: “Sometimes the trash can was full and I couldn’t get all the trash out. We’re talking 25-30 bins of trash.”
“My question is why are we throwing away so much food? Someone in the city should have said, ‘Let’s order less and throw away less food.'” But nobody cares,” he said.
At the same time, Rodriguez confiscated hot plates, pressure cookers, and other prohibited kitchen items from hotel residents at least eight times.
“I felt horrible. They want hot food. They don’t want sandwiches. They want food cooked like their country. he said.
In addition to sandwiches and bagels, migrants will be served food such as fruit, peanuts, potato chips, juices, sodas and cooked dinners, said Rodriguez, which they will “heat in the microwave.”
“They don’t like the menu. They don’t. They want rice and beans, plantains and tostones,” he said.
Rodriguez recalled last month that he “knocked on the door on the 18th floor to deliver a duvet and saw smoke and heard the fire alarm go off.”
“I put the key in and pushed the door open and there was a lot of smoke coming out,” he said. “There was a woman there and she asked, ‘What is she doing?’ She said, ‘Nothing.'” I said where is this smoke coming from? She said ‘I don’t know’
Rodriguez said he searched the room and found a pot of rice hidden in the bathroom vanity.
“It was older than my grandmother, who was long gone,” he said. “I was like, ‘Really? This is electricity. These wires will spark, and if something goes wrong, this whole building will burn.
Rodriguez, who continued to work at the hotel after winning a $5 million settlement from the state in April, felt so bad that he gave his family $300 the next day and told them to go to a restaurant.
But Rodriguez said he understands why hotels “cannot” allow immigrants to cook in their rooms.
“They usually put the hotplate on the rug so that no one can see it and away from the fire alarm,” he said. It’s over, it could scare everyone in the line.
“If you’re on the 27th, 28th floor and there’s a fire, there’s no elevator, which means you have to use the stairs,” he said. “My biggest concern is children. There are too many children in that hotel.
Additionally, Rodriguez said Lowe “forgot what the standards were when he had patrons.”
“If they smoked in the hotel, we were charged $500. You could smoke outside, but you couldn’t stand in front of people to avoid second-hand smoke,” he said. I can’t say anything to them. ”
Rodriguez also claimed to have seen a resident apparently selling drugs outside the hotel, and took pictures of a chained scooter nearby.
“One of the guys said, ‘Why are you taking pictures?’ I said, ‘Because they don’t belong here.’ He said, “They are ours.” How do you get the money to buy a scooter? Are these brand new scooters?
Rodriguez first spoke about what he saw and recorded on Row in an interview with ABC7 New York’s Eyewitness News.
Rodriguez, who has always pleaded not guilty to the murder of Maureen McNeill Fernandez, was convicted in 1990. He was convicted primarily on testimony from police informants.
government at the time. Andrew Cuomo commuted Rodriguez’s sentence in December 2016 and was acquitted in 2019 by a judge who called the case a “miscarriage of justice.”
Rodriguez said he kept his job at the hotel. This gave him an after-tax income of $800 a week.
Formerly known as Milford Plaza, Lowe, formerly known as Milford Plaza and advertised as “Broadway’s Lullaby” in a memorable 1980s TV commercial, rented out four floors in the city to house the homeless When he continued to work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The rest of the floor was for airline employees and tourists from Europe. The Secret Service and the FBI stayed during the United Nations General Assembly. It was a great hotel,” he said.
In October, Rodriguez said:
“When the hotel said immigration would be good business, they canceled the deal with the airline and decided they were no longer renting to regular customers. he said.
The homepage of the hotel website has a big notice that says: Check back for announcements and updates. ”
The Row did not respond to a request for comment, and NYC Health + Hospitals, which oversees the hotel and other HERRCs, sent questions to City Hall, which issued a prepared statement. Cooked same day to ensure freshness. ”
“Last month, residents were asked to participate in a guest survey to refine and expand our menu options. We will donate leftovers when possible,” the statement added.
City officials also said Rowe has security guards assigned to every floor to spot problems and ensure the safety of residents and staff.