The Standard, the Ace, the Jane, the Cooper Square; now, or very shortly, these stylish hotels will be adding hundreds more rooms to New York’s existing 85,000. Any expansion at this moment in time seems odd, but a hotel boom—with the resurgent dollar scaring off Europeans and business travel slowing to a crawl—feels particularly ill-conceived. Of course, these properties, and the 35 others set to open in 2009, have been in the works for years, planned when occupancy rates were reliably in the 80-plus percent range. (There were a record 47 million visitors in 2008, up a million from the year before.) No wonder hoteliers expanded.

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