The iconic Music Box Theatre is 11 blocks due north of the equally iconic New Yorker Hotel. Both are landmarks but, while the former was the theater in which in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s hit Broadway comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner” opened, the latter is where a non-comedic replay of sorts played out over the past six years.
Known for its distinctive red “New Yorker” sign atop the building, The New Yorker hotel, which opened its doors to guests on January 2, 1930, is a part of the city’s rich history. Indeed, from its opening, the hotel was one of the city’s most fashionable, not to mention the largest with 2,500 rooms, a trend that continued through the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to the elegant ballrooms and five restaurants, the Art Deco hotel housed the world’s largest barbershop, sporting 42 chairs.
As the city’s fortunes declined, so did the hotel’s. By the 1960s, it was outclassed by newer and more modern properties and it closed its doors in 1972.
It gained a new lease on life in the 1990s, with several top-to-bottom renovations, and has been a part of the Wyndham chain since early 2014.
Over the years, the hotel has been host to a number of prominent guests, including Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali, and Joan Crawford. Nikola Tesla even lived there during the latter years of his life. But no guest outstayed his welcome quite like Mickey Barreto.
Barreto, who booked a room for one night in 2018 after learning about New York City’s Rent Stabilization Code, which grants tenants who live in individual rooms in buildings built prior to 1969 the right to a lease of six-months’ duration, from his boyfriend, who also stayed the night. The New Yorker’s own Sheridan Whiteside – the main character in “The Man Who Came to Dinner” – asked for a lease and, instead of being served hand and foot while viciously insulting his hosts, the well-to-do factory owner Ernest W. Stanley and his family while monopolizing their house and staff, running up large phone bills, and receiving many bizarre guests, including paroled convicts, he is promptly evicted for his trouble.
But the story didn’t end there.
Barreto sued the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, which bought the hotel in 1976 and continues to own it. After losing in the initial trial, Barreto appealed the decision and won by default because the building’s owners failed to appear in court. Because the two parties never agreed on lease terms, Barreto was somehow able to live in the hotel at no cost until July 2023.
During his lengthy hotel stay, he – under an entity he formed, Mickey Barreto Missions –falsely portrayed himself as the hotel’s owner, the city’s district attorney’s office said. If that weren’t enough, he also attempted to profit from this “ownership” by billing other tenants for rent, and he further uploaded fake real property documents onto the New York City Department of Finance’s Automated City Register Information System, known as ACRIS, including a fraudulent deed that purported to transfer ownership of the entire New Yorker Hotel from its proper owner to himself.
“As alleged, Mickey Barreto repeatedly and fraudulently claimed ownership of one of the City’s most iconic landmarks, the New Yorker Hotel,” Alvin Bragg, Manhattan district attorney said in a statement.
As a result, in 2019, the Unification Church sued Barreto for representing himself as the hotel’s owner on LinkedIn and for having submitted the forged deed. The case is ongoing, and in the interim, Barreto has been instructed to abstain from asserting ownership of the building.
Today, a walk through the hotel’s revolving doors and makes one feel transported into the 1930s, a time that the hotel and Mickey Barreto had not yet crossed paths. Everything in the lobby continues to evoked the day the hotel opened. Fortunately, as Barreto left the hotel, he didn’t follow in the footsteps of “The Man Who Came to Dinner’s” Mr. Whiteside.
As for Whiteside, due to various things that transpire at the end of the play, he somehow is able to stand and prepares to return to New York by train. Unfortunately, as he is leaving the house, he slips on another patch of ice, injuring himself again. He is carried back inside the house screaming as the curtain falls.
Now, unfortunately for Barreto, he faces as much as a decade in a different type of housing, namely a prison cell, if convicted of 14 counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree, a class E Felony, and ten counts of criminal contempt in the second degree, a class A misdemeanor.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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