When a promising student-athlete was found dead under mysterious circumstances in her room at a New York hotel in 2015, it dredged up memories of a dark past in the history of a near century-old Times Square property.

The night before, the pretty, 21-year-old co-ed had been out partying with friends during spring break.

Investigators months later declared the Syracuse University track athlete died of an irregular heartbeat and that no foul play was suspected.

But for the hotel, it had already raised the spectre of a decade-old gruesome murder on the property, for which authorities had not yet closed the book, and would not do so until the following year.

Stretching back through the decades of the last century, Hotel Edison in midtown Manhattan has held a long fascination for Bermudians, and for many other travellers.

Edison’s success comes from a widely recognised and intriguing central-city location, and engagingly hospitable staff.

It was years after the famed hotel opened amid the depression of 1931 that regular civilian air traffic became available for Bermudians, the US military having loosened the strings of the wartime airbase it built at Kindley Field.

By the 1950s, organised tours through the Donald Smith Travel Agency ferried Bermudians farther and more widely.

The Edison was then as cheap and cheerful as a reasonably priced New York hotel could be.

Its rich past includes a reputation as a celebrity destination and a location for movie shoots. The Edison coffee shop was also once a popular hangout for the Broadway crowd.

It was Thomas Edison, himself, who opened the property by turning on the lights — hence its name.

Just four years after opening, the hotel’s house detective was shot dead by a guest, TheNew York Times reported in 1935.

But the hotel was a product of its location, and therefore has an even darker history.

In August 2007, the mangled body of a 33-year-old prostitute was pulled from a garbage bag found under a bed in a Hotel Edison room that had been vacated by a registered sex offender.

It wasn’t until 2016 that a case was brought before a jury.

Television station NBC4 reported at the time that a former design student turned crack-using streetwalker was the victim at the “Times Square budget hotel”.

After nine years of procedural arguments, a jury took just a couple of hours to convict.

If there was any healing to be had for those who loved the hotel — and there have been many — it might have come with another round of property upgrades and renovations.

With 831 operational hotel rooms today, and food and drink facilities outsourced, the Triumph Hotels property is a far cry from its past of years neighbouring a troubled Times Square and 42nd Street — true crime in Gotham City.

Today, Trip Advisor’s AI-generated summary of the most recent reviews includes praise for professional staff, historic charm, clean rooms and its prime Times Square location, but also complaints of noise and unexpected fees.

A business traveller remarked how what was quite a “rundown property” in the past looked remarkably better in 2018 after “the latest renovations”.

Trevor Bell was last at the Edison in 2017, having never known the history of the Bermuda Dance.

“It was the New York hotel Bermudians knew, but the last time I was there it was like a high-class hotel, three times as expensive as my first visit.

“You can’t beat the location if you want to see a lot of the attractions in New York. If you can’t walk to it, you have cabs and the subway is close by.

“I was first at the Edison in the Seventies or Eighties when it was a low-class, cheap hotel. It was a place you could go and get whatever you wanted.

“Talk to the guy in the hotel and you would get a room with two lines of coke waiting for you and a girl for the night. It wasn’t really my scene. I never really went back, although I knew people who did.”

Wayne Perinchief travelled with Bermuda church and police groups and last stayed at the hotel in the 1990s.

He said: “Even then, it needed a facelift — 42nd Street was a different place to what we know now.

“But if you were Bermudian in New York, there was a good chance you were at the Edison.”

New Yorkers say the hotel was not that far from blatant, open prostitution on 42nd Street in the worst of times; porno theatres with live sex acts on stage, and the subsequent solicitation of audience members for further “extracurricular” activity.

Junkies were openly shooting up and there were hotels where you could get a room for an hour or a night at a reasonable price (hint, hint).

But things improved.

Geraldine Harris is among a large number of Hotel Edison guests who missed the Bermuda Dance and the depraved days on 42nd Street.

“It was in the Nineties,” she recalled. “We enjoyed sightseeing because so much was within walking distance. We went to Radio City, an amusement park and various restaurants and shopping, of course.

“And Greenwich Village was real nice. There was so much to see that was really close.”