Filed under: Underwhelmed (aggressively so)

We drove by this place last summer while staying at the Taconic down the road and thought, huh, that looks like the kind of grand, historic hotel we actually like. So this year, kicking off our vacation, we booked it. Lesson learned: driving past a building is not due diligence.

$600 a night. No bell service. Check-in was fine — forgettable, really, nothing to complain about and nothing to write home about either. We got to our room in the North Wing on the 4th floor and the cracks started showing immediately. Worn-out walls, peeling wallpaper, beat-up molding, and a bathroom that smelled like mildew with water-stained walls that looked like they’d been quietly rotting since the Reagan administration. The AC didn’t work. For $600 a night. It was at least quiet up there, I’ll give it that.

Then came night two. We got back to the room around 9pm to find maintenance had let themselves in, torn the AC unit apart, left the pieces sitting there, and vanished — no note, no call, no working AC. Nobody told us this was happening. We just walked into a hot room full of broken appliance parts. So they moved us down two floors, same room type, and this time the AC worked and the bathroom didn’t smell like a swamp — small victories. But the walls were paper thin. We heard our neighbors walking around, heard the room next door through a gap under the connecting door like it wasn’t even there — their conversations, their dog barking, their snoring. All of it. For $600 a night, I expect not to know a stranger’s sleep apnea situation.

Grounds were moderately busy Friday and Saturday, dead quiet by Sunday, which tracks — I imagine word gets around.

Here’s the truly baffling part: the beds were genuinely excellent. Somehow, in this entire beaten-down, mildew-scented building, someone got the beds right. It’s the single reason this isn’t a zero.

Underwhelmed sentence: Checking into a $600-a-night hotel with no AC and a moldy bathroom is bad enough — getting moved to an even noisier room the next night with zero notice after maintenance trashed the first one is what sealed the 1-star review.

Rating: Underwhelmed (aggressively so)

Funny-not-funny moment: Coming back to find your AC unit disassembled and abandoned in pieces on your hotel room floor, with no explanation, is the kind of thing that’s almost funny once you’re safely somewhere else telling the story. We’re finishing out the week at the Hampton Inn down the street instead. It has AC. That’s the bar now.