The old dame on Eighth.

It was July 1, 1982. Approximately 4,000 followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon were entering and exiting the second-floor Grand Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue. There they entered into marriage contracts with strangers whom the reverend, the Korean-born founder and head of the Unification Church, had picked for them. Then, the same day, they walked barely a block and entered Madison Square Garden—most in formal wear—where they were declared husband and wife en masse by Reverend Moon.

Photos of the Moonie marriage ceremony were distributed worldwide. It would be hard to forget—though the New Yorker Hotel would prefer that you did.

The venerable old hotel, once the largest inn on earth, with 2,500 rooms and 1 million square feet over 43 floors and the likes of Joe DiMaggio and Benny Goodman swinging by, has tried mightily to shake off the Moonies’ shadow ever since the church, which reveres the reverend as the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ, bought it in the bad, old Beame days of 1976, and started using it exclusively for church housing (the Moonies still own it, through their Holy Spirit Association).

The latest gambit: marketing the largest contiguous block of Class B space in New York City, 287,000 square feet over five floors now occupied by egg-salad tenants like insurance firms and the Barbizon Modeling School.

When it opened in January 1930, the New Yorker had that essential element for prime real estate: a fabulous location. Before the era of cheap plane tickets, the regal old Penn Station just down the avenue deposited steady streams of guests, who came as much for the Art Deco elegance as for the rubber-necking. Actors, celebrities, athletes, politicians, mobsters, the shady and the luminous—the entire Brooklyn Dodgers roster during the glory seasons—would stalk the bars and ballrooms, or romp upstairs.

The New Yorker couldn’t help being a hub, right into the Me Decade: In March 1971, Muhammed Ali, after getting pounded by Smokin’ Joe Frazier in front of a Garden crowd that included Woody Allen, Frank Sinatra and Norman Mailer, recovered at the New Yorker. “Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death,” Hunter S. Thompson would write that same year in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand—at least not out loud.”

An era was passing, the New Yorker with it. Hounded by financial difficulties, ownership changes (including, briefly, to Conrad Hilton) and a decaying city, the hotel closed in 1972. The French Polytechnic Institute bought it and tried to turn it into a hospital; then sold it, empty, to the Moonies in 1976 for $5 million, or about $19 million in today’s money.

The church used it as housing and for administration—it was renamed the World Mission Center—including the matchmaking by Reverend Moon and his third wife, Hak Ja Han, and his crusade to save New York from itself. “The world has lost faith in America, and New York has become a jungle of immorality and depravity,” he said to a half-full Yankee Stadium in June 1976 during his Bicentennial God Bless America Rally. (Mr. Moon would later do time for tax fraud.) “God has sent me to America in the role of a doctor,” he continued, “in the role of a fire fighter...”

Throughout the rally, “youths hurled programs and decorations, let loose balloons from an upper tier and ran through the corridors shouting and laughing.” An apparent smoke bomb “added to the confusion.”

As did the several hundred picketers—including parents of Moonies—who started their demonstration outside the New Yorker and another 43rd Street property that now serves as Moonie headquarters before moving to the stadium. Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the liberal firecracker, took Reverend Moon’s rally as an opportunity to publicly denounce the use of non-union workers for a planned renovation of the New Yorker. And all this reported in the next morning’s Times.

Reverend Moon, of course, had no remedy for New York City. It got worse before it got better, and around the time it got better—the early 1990s—the Moonies moved out of the New Yorker. But the church still controls it, through a lease to the New Yorker Hotel Management Company.

It reopened as a lodge on June 1, 1994, with 178 rooms and no sign of the Moonies. Membership losses amid bad press and 11 months in the slammer for its aging Messiah had eliminated the need for thousands of convenient crash pads. (Calls to the church’s headquarters were not returned. No one from the New Yorker or Cassidy Turley, the brokerage firm it hired to market the office space, would comment for this story.)

The slow slog toward respectability, which could very well climax in leasing that big block of office space before the end of 2011, included extensive changes. In 1997, the New Yorker quit Con Ed steam and switched to boilers; in 2000, Ramada began handling reservations; in 2008, the New Yorker scrapped 2,000 window AC units; the number of hotel rooms grew to 912 on the top 21 floors; the first 18 were turned into offices and dorms.

Then the bed bugs bit. “I had a rash all over my body,” a Fordham senior told reporters in September 2007, after she sued the Moonies and Ramada over alleged bed bugs in her dorm room. “I can’t sleep anymore. I haven’t slept in, like, forever.”

These allegations not only lighted the blue touch paper for the city’s ongoing buggy freak-out, they also reinforced the perception of the New Yorker as a forever faded belle, a part of a New York City that in most cases had literally died out or, at the very least, like the old Penn Station, been destroyed and resurrected as coldly functional.

When The Observer pushed through the revolving doors on Eighth one morning, we found the typical bustle of a midrange hotel near check-out time and nothing of the Unification Church. Middle-age men in business suits barked into cell phones; tourists pored over city maps; staff stood frowningly by; the 24-hour Tick Tock Diner, to the side through a door, did brisk trade. There was nothing bespeaking the New Yorker’s pre-Moonie swagger, save for maybe the piano against the wall, behind a superfluous red cordon.

The Observer was able to get upstairs for a look at the offices—low ceilings, warrens of hallways, happenstance views, nothing too extraordinary, as to be expected. A few days earlier, after coffee and an English muffin at the Tick Tock, we found our way into a wedge of a room on the 39th floor. It had been used as a wake-up café for guests, and the detritus of another morning was being cleaned up as we approached a wide, south-facing window.

One World Trade Center, more than halfway to its 104 stories, reigned clearly visible amid other ground zero construction that will bring more than 10 million square feet within the next 10 years. To the upper left of that, we could see the run of a rejuvenated (rebooted?) Silicon Alley; there somewhere, too, were the footprints for NYU’s 6 million-square-foot Village expansion; we could even make out Brooklyn’s sapling commercial skyline, including the Nets arena under construction; and then, to the right, ever so slightly, we saw the Hudson, near which the old rail yards along 10th Avenue are slated by Stephen Ross’ Related to be turned into an office and apartment spread to rival London’s Canary Wharf in size and ambition.

The Observer descended in the elevator thinking the New Yorker's office space might be better off as more hotel rooms or more dorms (the bed-bug allegations have not seemed to hurt business in that regard, and booking rates for the hotel are at or above the Manhattan average of about $210 a night).

In the lobby, a “1929” was molded into the floor in bronze twists—the Jazz Age year the hotel was built, before everything went to shit with the Depression and the war. Outside, across Eighth, we saw an elderly storefront that read “S & Gross Co. Inc. Est. 1901 Loans.” The lettering had faded.

The city's tourism office reported an average occupancy rate of 92.4 percent in August. The average daily rate edged upward about a buck from July to $285.84.

That's $20 higher than in August 2007, but still about $40 less than this past June, when a typical night cost $325.94.

Hotel rates should only increase over the next several months, as the city's various lodges hit peak travel season.

Last September, the average overnight stay cost $340.33. Rates last November and December hovered around $370.

The teary, trembling, 21-year-old Fordham University senior couldn’t help but scratch as she discussed the “itchy, disgusting bites” that spread all across her body after just a few nights inside Manhattan’s ragged New Yorker Hotel.

Talk about a learning experience: “I never knew what a bedbug even looked like,” said Ms. Hopkins, who first checked into the old concrete fleabag at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 34th Street on Sept. 2.

Nor did she ever imagine the severe allergic reaction that would result from her painful introduction to the tiny blood-sucking insects.

Eighteen days and two hospital stays later, Ms. Hopkins, still sporting her in-patient wristband, appeared alongside her attorney in his downtown office, where an array of enlarged photos of her many oily, inflamed welts went on display for a whole room full of camera crews.

“This is a disgusting story,” grumbled WCBS-TV correspondent Brendan Keefe.

Bad timing, too, for the New Yorker Hotel, which is desperate to shed its run-down reputation.

The 40-story Art Deco-style building, erected in 1929 and owned for the past three decades by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, is undergoing a reported $65 million makeover.

“[R]enewing a once-tired product,” is how the hotel’s own publicists trumpeted the planned resurrection, which is scheduled for completion by August 2008.

More than 100 rooms on the upper floors have already been refurbished, boasting new high-tech heating and cooling controls, flat-screen TVs, wireless Internet and, perhaps most important to insomniac entomophobes like Ms. Hopkins, brand-new beds and bed linens.

“It has that new car smell,” declared Thomas McCaffrey, the New Yorker Hotel’s director of sales and marketing, as he took The Observer on a tour of the newly revamped 37th floor.

Golden-framed artworks adorned the hallway. The carpet, once a shabby, stain-spotted green, was now dark chocolate, lined with a shiny marble baseboard.

The marble actually isn’t new, Mr. McCaffrey noted; it’s been there for years, trapped under the drab old flooring scheme. Even the hotel’s head salesman agreed it was an odd cover-up: “Why would you do that?”

The lobby has long suffered from a similarly baffling marble-blanketing program.

Stripping that floor of its own downtrodden carpet is just part of the sweeping changes at ground level, which further entail the tearing out of an existing café and a newsstand to make way for more common-area seating. The chandeliers will be restrung with existing crystal and given a more modern design. The former lobby-level Italian restaurant, La Vigna Ristorante & Bar, will be relaunched as Cooper’s Tavern, complete with a new chef and a new menu.

The whole massive overhaul comes at a time of booming hotel construction in Manhattan, with more than 13,000 new and renovated rooms expected by 2010, and also at a time when the 860-room New Yorker’s closest competitor, the 1,700-room Hotel Pennsylvania, is slated for demolition as part of the planned redevelopment of the whole Penn Station region. With new office towers looming and the nearby Javits Center expanding, the New Yorker is repositioning itself to better cater to business travelers and conventioneers. “Certainly, our prices will go up,” Mr. McCaffrey said.

Yet even as the renovation crews continue their top-down improvements at the New Yorker, it’s clear the place hasn’t yet scrapped all of its raffish charms.

A large garish plush animal greets guests in the lobby, “Bear Wittus says: Join us as we turn the New Yorker into one of the premier hotels in NY City.”

You won’t find that at the St. Regis or Ritz-Carlton.

“We don’t want to be a four-star hotel,” noted Mr. McCaffrey, describing the place as more of a two-star hellbent on earning its third.

One thing clearly lacking from the many slated improvements, though, is any sort of bedbug prevention plan.

“Hotels have to have some type of inspection,” said attorney Alan Schnurman, who is representing Ms. Hopkins in her negligence suit against the New Yorker.

Mr. Schnurman predicted that the hard-to-rid critters’ recent resurgence among the city’s homes and hotels was “just starting” and that the epidemic may become so widespread that it could spin off into its own separate genre of litigation. He mentioned another recent case at a high-end hotel in midtown, where a television producer from Los Angeles, in town covering Fashion Week festivities, discovered “thousands of bugs” behind a shrouded headboard. That lawsuit is forthcoming, he said.

The New Yorker’s response to Mr. Schnurman perhaps best sums up the frustrations of bug-wary hotel operators citywide.

“You can’t really do anything in a preventative way,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “Mice, cockroaches—you can prevent those things from coming in.” Not so much the bedbugs. Guests unwittingly bring the itsy-bitsy insects with them, scores of future lawsuits crawling around inside their own suitcases.

Mr. McCaffrey asserted that housekeepers already check beds for signs of the bloodsuckers when changing linens in between guests. “You have to lift the mattresses, anyway,” he said, seeming rather well versed on the “insipid little beasts,” repeatedly adding to his remarks, “And another thing about bedbugs …”

Finding the flesh-feeding insects just isn’t that easy. “They can hide in the tiniest cracks and crevices.”

Mr. McCaffrey was quick to point out that Ms. Hopkins wasn’t technically a hotel guest during her “horrific” exposure to the bugs. She was staying on the 16th floor, which the hotel currently leases to a private student-housing operator for use as a makeshift dormitory.

That’s not to say the hotel proper is immune to the problem. When bedbugs have surfaced in the past, Mr. McCaffrey said, the extermination process is a multilevel operation, affecting rooms on either side of the infested suites, as well as the rooms directly below. “It happens,” he said. “It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.”

Redecorating now sounds a whole lot less daunting.

Located at 481 Eighth Avenue, The New Yorker was the largest hotel in the city when it opened in 1931. The expected renovations include a complete overhaul of furniture, carpets, wallpaper and fixtures as well as a serious clean-up job on the front of the building, according to a press release. Oh, and the historic hotel will step into the 21^st century by improving Wi-Fi service and television programming.

There is one other big reason for the renovations: The expansion of the Javits Center. The massive convention center/event space, which sits just three blocks west of the hotel, is expected to double in size by 2010. The New Yorker will already be all cleaned up by then as the revamping is expected to be finished by 2008.

The full release about the renovations is below.

NEW YORKER HOTEL EMBARKS ON $65 MILLION RENOVATION,

REFURBISHMENT TO BE COMPLETED AUGUST 2008

Hotel to Re-Emerge on the Scene Revitalized with Art Deco and Modern Edge Style;

Complete Overhaul of Furnishings, Remodeled Lobby, New Restaurants Among Highlights

NEW YORK, NY (Aug. 13, 2007) - Once the largest hotel in New York, with more than 2,500 rooms when it first opened in 1930, the New Yorker Hotel has launched an aggressive program to revitalize what is still one of the biggest art deco buildings in the heart of midtown New York City. The owners, recognizing the value of the hotel's glorious past history, have embarked on an ambitious $65 million renovation and remodeling project to both restore its art deco reputation and add the modern edge and style that today's guests demand.

The scope of the project, to be completed by August 2008, includes the following:

* Installation of a new heating and air conditioning system for the entire hotel (a four-pipe HVAC system, which will allow guests to control heat and cool air all year long - not an oft-found amenity in many hotels)

* Total overhaul of furniture, carpets, wallpaper and fixtures in both the guest rooms and the hallways on the guest floors

* Complete redesign of the lobby to recapture the grandeur and feel of when the New Yorker opened in 1930

* Facelift of the entire front of the hotel on Eighth Avenue - replacing signage, re-facing the stonework, and changing the marquee

* Guest services enhancements including improved free Wi-Fi service and better television programming

* Upgrade and refurbishment of the hotel's restaurants (La Vigna Ristorante & Bar and the 24-hour Tick Tock Diner)

"The time is right for us to embark on this major renovation project to revitalize our fantastic property," said Thomas McCaffrey, director of sales and marketing for the New Yorker.

"Our goal is to keep pace with the tremendous development taking place on the West Side with new hotel construction and the expansion of the Jacob Javits Convention Center. We're anchored in a superb location, so we're renewing a once-tired product, infusing it with style and new amenities to unleash its character and make it a hotel in demand," he added.

The design concept is the exotic and glamorous New York/Hollywood art deco style of the 1930's, as a nod to the hotel's past, but with a distinctive modern edge. This project marks the property's first renovation since 2000.

NYC-based Stonehill & Taylor (www.stonehilltaylor.com) has been tapped to conduct the architectural and interior design. Established in 1963, Stonehill & Taylor has broad hospitality experience encompassing five-star, transient and extended-stay properties with an impressive client roster including Millennium Hotels & Resorts, Affinia Hotels, Hilton Hotels, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Sheraton Hotels and many other properties, restaurants, industrial and commercial buildings, showrooms, education and healthcare complexes.

"The New Yorker Hotel will open a new chapter in its life once the renovation and refurbishment is complete in August 2008," McCaffrey said.