in the middle of everything, and noisy
My daughter and I stayed at the Affinia Manhattan for one night this past week. We had planned on two nights, but had to check out after the first night because our room was so noisy. The hotel is on 7th Ave and 31st St, directly across from Madison Square Garden and Penn Station. This is a great location if you want to be in the middle of tourist New York -- Times Square, the Empire State Building, all of midtown close by. But the street is noisy 24/7 -- it is NYC, after all! I visit NYC often, and expected all of this. What I didn't expect was how little the noise would be filtered out in the rooms. The hotel says that it has just been renovated. The rooms all have new bedspreads and paint, but the windows are still single pane and still have window a/c units, which makes filtering the noise impossible. It is a bad sign when a hotel has complimentary ear plugs next to the bed! We requested a quieter room, but that was not possible -- apparently all the other guests had the same issue, so the rooms on the quieter side of the hotel were not available. 
The bathrooms were also tiny -- really, really tiny. I would not have minded this if everything else had been well-done, but that was not the case.
The front desk staff was nice but overwhelmed.
I love the Affinia group of hotels -- we moved to th Shelbourne from the Manhattan -- but will not stay at the Manhattan again.