Chelsea May Have Legionnaire’s Problem: Health Dept. Probes Lux Hotel

The New York City Health Department has opened a Legionnaires’ probe into the High Line Hotel, after a union representing workers there—the New York Hotel and Gaming Trades Council—said that multiple positive tests had been conducted by hotel management.

The luxury hotel sits only steps away from an entrance to the High Line, the elevated 1.45 mile linear park and greenway that was built on the trestle tracks for the old New York Central Railway and with five million visitors a year remains one of the city’s top tourist attractions.

City Council Member Carl Wilson, who represents the Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen district that contains the hotel, called attention to the tests in a social media post. “According to the Dept of Health, routine testing conducted by the hotel in July detected elevated levels of Legionella bacteria in [their] cooling tower,” he wrote.

The Hotel and Gaming Trades Council told the press that the union had filed a complaint with the Health Dept., after pushing hotel management to deal with the seeming presence of said bacteria; the hotel, located on 10th Avenue and W. 20th Street, is owned by the hotel conglomerate MCR.

The announcement came less than a week after a severe Legionnaires’ outbreak on the Upper East Side—which infected more than 80 people, killing seven—was declared contained by health officials.

A test conducted by MCR at the hotel earlier in the summer had reportedly detected 170 cfu/mL (colony-forming units per milliliter) of Legionella, the union said, far exceeding the 10 cfu/mL that require disinfection.

The union added that management had initially refused to confirm that they had remediated the disease after this result, leading workers to threaten to walk off the job. Eventually, MCR reps. relented when the Council took the matter to arbitration. Management then released a test conducted on July 23, which the union says detected 700 cfu/mL of Legionella.

In an initial social media post written before the Health Department briefed him, Wilson said that his staff had been made aware of “near-critical” levels of Legionella bacteria, an apparent reference to public concerns voiced by the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council.

Yet after speaking with the Department of Health, which is now conducting tests of its own, Council Member Wilson now believes that the tower is currently safe for guests—although he qualified that “confirmatory testing is pending.”

“In response, the hotel carried out the required corrective actions, including multiple rounds of disinfection and a full remediation of the cooling tower system and the hotel is currently safe for guests and employees,” Wilson wrote online, noting that the DOH “does not recommend any additional actions.”

The Council Member concluded his PSA by clarifying that follow-up tests would be conducted on August 11, with results expected later in the month.

Outside of the latest probe in Chelsea and the deadly outbreak on the Upper East Side, the impact of Legionnaires’ disease on Manhattan is still being keenly felt by Harlem as well, where an outbreak of the disease also killed seven people last summer.

Namely, at around the time that the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council announced their new complaint, the Reverend Al Sharpton and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump announced that they’d filed numerous lawsuits against New York City on behalf of dozens of Harlemites–whether patients or family members of those sickened—that remain affected by that outbreak year later.