The Nolita Express Hostel: What $100 a Night Gets You in Manhattan

Accommodation in New York is ridiculously expensive. When I got off Nomad Cruise, I considered leaving town straight away. Then I found the Nolita Express on the Bowery: a historic hostel fashioned on a train carriage, with private rooms for $100 a night. The average reviews were good enough, so I booked it. Only once I’d arrived did I read the worst of them. One called it worse than a hostel, and another called it a tuna sauna.

Where is the Nolita Express?

The Nolita Express is at 220 Bowery in Manhattan. It’s named after Nolita (North of Little Italy), but the street itself is the Bowery, which runs through the area where Little Italy, Nolita, Chinatown, SoHo and the Lower East Side meet.

The history of the Bowery and the building

The Bowery is the oldest road on Manhattan Island, older than Broadway. It started as a Native American footpath, and the Dutch named it after their word for farm, bouwerij, because it linked the farms to the city at the southern tip of the island. By the end of the 1700s it was New York’s most elegant street, lined with grand theatres, banks and mansions.

Then it fell. By the Civil War it was beer halls, brothels and pawn shops, and the turf of the Bowery Boys, one of America’s first street gangs. The Third Avenue elevated railway ran above the street from 1878 to 1955 and blocked out the light. From the 1940s, for decades, the Bowery was New York’s Skid Row, lined with flophouses where you paid for a bed in a cubicle by the night.

The hostel’s building opened in 1927 as the Prince Hotel. In the 1940s, every floor was rebuilt into single cabins for soldiers returning from the Second World War, each one just big enough for a bed and a few essentials. Some of the Bowery’s most eccentric characters went on to live in them for decades. The owners say they’ve preserved and restored the 1940s cabins, and that’s what you sleep in today.

How much does it cost?

I paid $100 a night for a private pod. I don’t usually like paying that much for accommodation, but it was by far the cheapest option I could find in downtown Manhattan.

Checking in

Check-in is done online. There’s wifi inside the hostel and a QR code on the wall. You fill in a quick form, and it gives you a code that opens your own bedroom door. It worked perfectly. You can also check-in at the desk if you prefer.

Common areas and kitchen

The common areas are done in a roaring twenties style, with antique and retro furniture, old typewriters, lamps, shelves of books and magazines, a fireplace, comfy sofas and tables. There’s also a kitchen, wood-panelled with good lighting, that has everything you need.

The pods: size, bed and ceiling

The pod is the bed, a walkway about 50cm wide down one side, and that’s it. The bed is exactly my height. Lying down, my head touched the wall at one end and my feet touched the wall at the other. I’m about 6’1″.

The pillow and the mattress are both thin. In my pod, the springs under the mattress were broken, with a metal bar running across the middle. The staff came and patched it with a sheet of cardboard over the springs until it could be fixed properly.

The pods don’t have a solid ceiling. The top is a wooden crosshatch lattice, mostly open to the rest of the floor.

Noise and sleep

The hostel seems to take noise very seriously. The inside of each pod has signs about what is and isn’t allowed, mostly about noise, including fines for making it. Free earplugs and eye masks are handed out.

On my night there were phones going off, the odd door banging and the occasional noisy person, but none of it lasted long. I stayed in cold, rainy weather, so I can’t say how the pods feel in a New York summer, which is when the tuna sauna review seems to have been written.

Bathrooms and showers

The bathrooms are shared. In the morning, you have to tiptoe around and keep quiet, because people are still sleeping. The shower was really good.

Final thoughts

For the price, I slept pretty well, even with the broken bed.

Watch the video: https://tinyurl.com/24vpavg6