Brooklyn Parents: Turn Sex Hotel Into Schoolhouse

Parents desperate to carve out more desk space for their kids in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, are begging NYC officials to turn the old Sunny 39 Hotel — an alleged brothel busted by the feds earlier this month — into an elementary school.

“Right now, it’s a time where we can’t find perfect sites,” Jovita Sosa, a 35-year-old mom of three who lives in southern Sunset Park and serves on Brooklyn’s Community Board 7, said in an interview with Patch.

”We have to make good with what we have,” she said.

Indeed, the closed-down Sunny 39 Hotel is far from perfect. For the past five years or so, the hotel has earned a local reputation as a haven for drug dealers, hookers, strung-out party people and other undesirables.

The place was finally raided by the NYPD and FBI on Oct. 15.

The middle-aged Chinese couple that ran the 39th Street hotel, along with their front-desk lady, are accused of renting rooms to pimps and prostitutes, then directing Johns to those rooms — turning their hotel and the street below into the red-light district of Sunset Park.

According to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office:

“Sunny 39 Hotel has been the subject of numerous community complaints and 911 calls regarding prostitution. Several ads on Backpage.com for individual sex workers directed clients to the hotel and a hotel room appeared in the background of one such advertisement.”

Now, parents in the surrounding community want to see those same hotel rooms converted into classrooms for their children.

“Everybody has to think outside the box,” Sosa said. “It’s time to take action.”

Sunset Park’s schools are some of the most overcrowded in Brooklyn: In all, seven neighborhood elementary schools are approximately 1,900 students over capacity, according to the Brooklyn Daily.

To remedy the problem, NYC Department of Education (DOE) officials have reportedly offered to open 113 new seats at one of the schools.

“One hundred seats is not a plan,” Sosa said. “There need to be more schools.”

On Oct. 22, Sosa gathered with a group of parents and community activists, led by Friends of Sunset Park, on the sidewalk in front of the now-vacant Sunny 39 Hotel.

The DOE has argued that it can’t find the land for more schools in Sunset Park. So, rally organizers said, why not “seize this opportunity and build a school at 517 39th Street”?

Backing the parents’ call are local politicians Felix Ortiz, a state assemblyman, and Carlos Menchaca, a city councilmember.

“This hotel is now in our past and we need to move on,” Ortiz wrote in a letter to NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio last Friday.

“I ask that you look into preventing this building from operating as a hotel,“ the assemblyman wrote, “and to convert this site into a much needed school for Sunset Park’s ever growing population, already overcrowded into too few facilities.”

The logistics of converting the site, which is now in legal limbo, could be tricky, according to Dennis Lynch at Brooklyn Paper. He writes:

“Prosecutors could potentially seize the building, but they would have to do so in a civil case apart from the criminal case levied against the owners, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the case. If seized, the lot would be sold to the highest bidder and the money split between the agencies involved in the raid.”

Patch has reached out to the DOE for comment on the prospect of flipping Sunset Park’s most notorious sex hotel into a refuge for displaced elementary schoolers.

“All around us, there’s construction,” Sosa said. “Industry City is booming.”

“But what about the kids that live here?” she asked. “We’re failing this generation.”