In the span of six months, Norwood has seen an uptick in construction along Webster Avenue, a corridor that for years was primed for steady economic growth unseen in the neighborhood.

New affordable housing residences complemented by a storefront pepper tiny pockets of the stretch, heavily rezoned to welcome such properties and the working to middle class families developers hope to attract. And while cafés, restaurants, and a bookstore, priority businesses, are still in waiting, other considerations have been met.

Among them is a hotel, the second along the corridor. Just what kind of hotel remains to be seen.

News of the hotel, first reported by YIMBY, continues the rise of hotels across a borough, which up until recently, remained largely scarce of them. That climb, with some 200 hotels in the works across the city, coincides with the existence of more Airbnb rental apartments in the Bronx.

But even as the hotel trade in the Bronx, driven by a reduced crime rate and increased population, advances thanks to a New Jersey-based developer’s purchase of four properties for hotels this year, the movement was initially sparked three years back when the Bronx Opera House Hotel opened at a commercial district in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.

“The Bronx Opera House really paved the way for boutique hotels to be successful and to show that that type of product could be successful in the Bronx,” Scot Hirschfield, vice president of Ariel Properties, a New York City-based commercial real estate sales firm, told the Norwood News. “People have events in the Bronx, weddings, other events, and there’s never really been decent places for these people to stay.”

The hotel frontier is taking hold of the East Bronx, where the immense popularity of the Bronx’s first major hotel, a Marriott Residence Inn at the mammoth Hutchinson Metro Center campus, inspired developers to construct a second Marriott Residence Inn, meeting a demand that’s still in short supply.

“We do need hotels in the Bronx,” Kathy Zamechansky, a real estate broker and Bronx insider, said. “We’re trying to build a hotel trade.”

Data from the New York City Department of Buildings shows the Bronx lagging in the number of hotels. Within the last decade, 15 hotels have opened in the Bronx. Brooklyn leads with 38 hotels, followed by Manhattan with 25, Queens with 18, and Staten Island with six.

Building the hotel trade is a goal bolstered by the New York City Planning Department. In a report the agency released in 2014, it concluded that a hotel in Fordham, roughly a mile from Norwood, could benefit the area. That position supports a separate, long-term goal of the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), settled in Bedford Park on the outskirts of Fordham, to build its own hotel just a block from its floral institution. The NYBG plan, notwithstanding the new hotel in Norwood, is still in the works and would not “have any adverse impact on our plans,” Aaron Bouska, NYBG’s vice president for government and community relations, told the Norwood News.

Howard Johnson Hotel?
The new hotel will be built at 3466 Webster Ave., a weed-filled 15,929-square-foot lot just near East Gun Hill Road. Six floors will be built—five floors that’ll hold seven to 10 rooms each, and a community facility on the sixth floor.

Its location is advantageous given powerhouse institutions such as Montefiore Health System, The Bronx Zoo, NYBG, and Fordham University just minutes away. Out-of-towners usually do business or pay a visit to the institutions, often forced to drive outside the Bronx for hotel accommodations. 

Records list Nehalkumar Gandhi as owner of the impending hotel, purchasing the property for $950,000 in April, working out to be $59 per square foot. If his current businesses are any indicator of future projects, Gandhi may very well set up a Howard Johnson, a national chain of affordably priced hotel rooms. A review of records show his new property’s limited liability corporation, dubbed 3466 Webster LLC, has the same address as a Howard Johnson in North Bergen, NJ just off Route 1. His Webster Avenue hotel will be the second along the corridor, not too far from the Rodeway Inn, part of the Choice Hotel chain that’s seen a steady stream of guests.

Mr. Gandhi’s name is linked to three other hotel projects in the Longwood, Soundview and Belmont sections of the Bronx. The Belmont location at 150 E. 185th St. is expected to be the largest of his hotels, with 88 units planned. Mr. Gandhi did not respond to requests for comment.

But the hotel business has also proven to work as emergency housing for the homeless, with the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) commonly utilizing hotels for alternative shelters, complying with a federal ruling that mandates housing for all New Yorkers. With DHS paying hotel owners top dollar for rooms, with monthly payments going as high as $3,000 per room, realtors ingrained in the Bronx, and residents living there, are wary that hotels are fronts.

“The trepidation on the part of the community is based on the fact that people don’t do the right thing,” Zamechansky said, referring to hoteliers.

Zamechansky cited the Capri Whitestone Motel in the Throggs Neck section, a “hot sheet” inn that was converted into a shelter in 2014, surprising residents. She compared the shelter conversion to a kind of “warehousing” for the homeless given the paltry services available in that neighborhood.

In Riverdale, a pop-up shelter at the independently owned Van Cortlandt Motel over the summer was met with scorn by the local community. Independent hotel chains have a greater chance of being converted into a shelter since it’s the national hotel chains that usually adhere to a standard where its “flag” or brand would avoid any link to a shelter, according to Zamechansky.

The likelihood of the Webster Avenue hotel being converted into a shelter seems remote, said Hirschfield. The news of hotels in the Bronx could also become less important given its constant trend. “It was a big news, but now, they’re starting to be more prevalent,” Hirschfield said. “With each one that pops up, it’s less of a news story.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.