This hotel was recommended in our travel guide (yep, one with a really good reputation) so we booked a day or two in advance. I will be taking this guide's advice with a grain of salt from now on.
The first room we were given on the ground floor was mildewy and completely rank with a broken window that looked straight out onto a concrete wall. I was so grossed out (and it takes a bit to gross me out) I refused to stay in that room. The second room they gave us on the second floor was marginally better.
We are returning to DF this coming December (2007) and will be giving this place a BIG MISS. If I had to sum it up in one word I would say... SKANK.

This was once a cool but decaying, very inexpensive art-deco hotel. About 12 years ago they remodeled the rooms, modernizing them with cheap carpet, cheap wooden furniture and beds, and raising the prices over tenfold. Well, in 2007, the new, cheap wooden furniture is old and worn, the carpet is in terrible shape, and the bed was like concrete. When I stayed there in 1986, before the remodeling, the 30-year old bed was more comfortable than this one. The TV was sitting on top of the armoire-style closet, so you had to look about 7 or so feet into the air to watch TV. The hot water went out and I had to wait for it to be fixed. Man, I thought inconsistencies in hot water in big-city Mexican hotels was a thing of the past. and the hotel still charges over 30 dollars a night. I have found much better in that price range in Mexico City. I only went back to Capitol to see what it was like now...unfortunately, I found out.

Overall we were disappointed with the standard of this central city hotel as although the location was OK the hotel staff were not. None of them spoke good English so communication was a problem. The mattress of the queen size bed in the room that our friends were in was so lumpy, hard and uncomfortable that they got little sleep. Granted, the staff did remove the bed and replaced it with another. The rooms we occupied were generally of poor standard - towel rails missing, no extra toilet rolls supplied, cracked and dirty tiling and surfaces in the shower. On our first morning orders were taken for breakfast and we wondered why everything was taking so long. It turned out that there was no cereal, orange juice, bread or eggs! We asked one of the kitchen staff to store some bread in the fridge for us and when we went to collect it the unhygenic state of the fridge with uncovered meat etc. meant that we didn't feel inclined to have any meals at all during the course of our stay, and we didn't. To top it all off, when we asked for a small amount of laundry to be done we had to consistently keep asking when it would be returned and were told something different every time. We only just managed to have it returned to us the morning we were leaving. We then were in a state of shock at the charges - the equivalent of about 35USD! Other laundry facilities used along the way were usually in the vicinity of about 12USD. We felt thoroughly ripped off and would definitely NOT recommend this hotel.

We stayed at this Hotel for three nights in March 2005. We booked it because it was cheapest 4 star hotel we found on the net (30 dollars per room for a night during the week-end). We said to ourselves: if it is a 4-star, it cannot be that bad... Well, it was...at least at the first sight. The building is very old, it must have been nice about 30 years ago, but it seems that nothing happened with it since then. There was a wall 2 meters from our window, the room was old and musty, the furniture was shabby, the bathroom was huge but extremely old. The staff was friendly. However, we asked for a wake-up call twice, once it was half hour late and we missed our pre-paid trip to Teotihuacan (we made by metro and bus), the second time it was us who woke up the receptionist...

Now the good things: the room was clean, the location is great - right in the center, 10-minute walk from the Zocalo. It is in a very busy street, but the room was quiet (maybe because it did not really have a window).

Overall, a pretty shabby hotel at a great location for a budget price. You can find a much better one for only a little more money.