The Union Square Plaza is a cheap hotel with a central location. It's definitely a place for the budget traveler-------divas, asthmatic grandmothers and neat freaks won't be happy there. (But those people shouldn't even be looking in the budget hotel category anyway.) The hallways at the USP were the worst thing about the hotel--------hot, stuffy and musty. And the carpeting was the dictionary definition of "threadbare". My room, however, smelled nice and fresh when I opened the door for the first time. (It wasn't so fresh after I had left the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob for a couple of days, but that's not the hotel's fault.)The building is old and the rooms are heated by steam radiators.There was a patch black mold or something on the baseboard down by the radiator. Even a hardy budget traveler is grossed out by stuff like that. Otherwise, however, the room was fine. I asked for a room at the back of the hotel, to be away from the Geary St. din, and was very pleased with what I got. There's a small alley behind the hotel, but it's gated, so the only people back there are kitchen workers. (There are four hole-in-the-wall restaurants located right in the USP building. When you walk out the front door of the hotel you're literally three feet from the entrance to the first of them, Katana-Ya.) Union Square is a crowded,densely built neighborhood that reminds me a lot of Manhattan. Which means that you can walk out of the hotel at four a.m. and find four restaurants open for business within a block. Of course, each of them will have at least one homeless panhandler out in front, but that's San Francisco.
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