Lindsay Lohan’s Wild Morning at W Union Square

The grand staircase.

It’s publicity. And it’s free. But do hotels really want to be splashed on newspaper front pages? The famous guest grabbing the attention is rarely raving about the service. Consider Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Sofitel New York. And today Lindsay Lohan and the W Union Square.

La Lohans’s early Sunday morning run-in with Christian LaBella, a 25-year-old congressional aide, landed her – and the W – on today’s front page of the New York Daily News (LO BLOW) and the New York Post (NEW LO).

The 26-year-old actress met LaBella, who works for Illinois Republican congressman John Shimkus, while club hopping and later invited him and a group of friends to her suite at the W.

All was well until Lohan, the star in happier times of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, spotted pictures taken of her earlier in the evening on LaBella’s cell phone, the News reported. When she refused to return his phone, Lohan says LaBella threw her on the bed and scratched her

Suite sleep.

then assaulted her in a W stairwell, duly photographed after the fact by the News, after she ran out of her room. The police arrested LaBella, but assault charges were dropped because Lohan did not seek medical help or appear to be seriously hurt, a source told the  News.  Each filed a harassment complaint against the other.

Our take? Following a complete redesign W Union Square’s 270 rooms look good, especially the suites (the hotel upped their number due to guest demand). Suites are spacious by New York standards, stylish by any standard, and sport clever details. The thicket of rectangles and squares on the white wall behind the bed is, in fact, a representation of the streets around the hotel – a life-size Google map. We also liked the pendant chandelier clothed in tufted silver lame.

Lohan could have come back from her night on the town and crawled into a W bed with a pillow-top mattress, a bespoke hotel Simmons creation combining memory foam and pocketed coil springs.  She could have wrapped herself in crisp white sheets and rested her head on goose-down hypoallergenic pillows. She could have slept till one – or later if she finagled an extension on her $500 room. That’s what we would have done. The daytime views of Union Square park from the 15th floor are lovely.