Essex House Hotel

The worst!! Just got back from a miserable weekend at this hotel.
First our plane was delayed (whole other story), even though we called ahead to the hotel 3 times to say that we would be late, they gave our city view room away by the time we checked in. There was also no one out front to help us with our bags (in the rain of course) when we arrived and only one clerk at the front desk (actually in the whole lobby) and it took her about 5 minutes to acknowledge us.
When we finally attempted to check in, the clerk was so confused, she kept mumbling something about trying to find our paperwork and then finally showed us another person's reservation.
When we asked if we could possibly finish this in the morning she became belligerent and after we requested assistance from the asst banquet mgr on call (the only other employee around) we were given a park view room below the tree line. So, more like a street view room for our $600 a night including all of the car and truck noise, yelling, and horns.
There's actually much more including maintenance issues which forced us to relocate to another room the next day (we moved our own bags because we got tired of waiting over an hour for the promise that someone would bring them to our new and much smaller room) with just a breakfast offered for compensation.
The hotel was recently remodelled and we ran into safety problems directly related to those changes. I would give them the benefit of the doubt if it was just one incident and one person we dealt with, but the magnitude of incompetence was too much to ignore.
Buyer beware. There are much better choices in NYC and we will not make this mistake again.