NEW YORK’S hotels are hives of urban velocity, where strangers live out epic adventures in a few days, then return home to spend the rest of their lives retelling them. Then there are the guests who never leave.


Twenty-eight years ago, Habiba Ali moved from the Y.W.C.A. into Room 320 in the Hotel Wales on Madison Avenue near 93rd Street, with few illusions of grandeur.


“It was a dilapidated old building,” she said the other day. The rent was $225 a week — more than she could afford, but the neighborhood was tranquil, and she would be close to the American woman who had been like a mother to her since she arrived from Pakistan. The ceilings in some rooms were falling down at the time, she said. Her neighbors were mostly older people living on fixed incomes.


Ms. Ali, who reluctantly gave her age as 60, sat on a creamy leather-upholstered chair in the hotel’s elegant second-floor Pied Piper room as jazz played softly in the background. Gone are the old mattresses, broken furniture, sinks and bathtubs that filled the room when she first moved in; gone are the old neighbors, too. Gone, even, are several generations of renovations.


But Ms. Ali and her roommate, Pamela Downing, who came to “crash” with Ms. Ali for a few weeks in 1985, have remained. In a hotel that has spiffed up, changed clientele, changed ownership several times, changed décor about as often — where various owners have offered them tens of thousands of dollars to leave and once, they said, tried padlocking their door — they have been a rare constant, coexisting in peace or disharmony in the unrenovated 450 square feet for which they now pay a rent-stabilized sum of $1,135 a month, utilities and weekly linen service included.


Let the room next door, which goes for about $500 a night, change occupants every day or two; Ms. Ali and Ms. Downing are not going anywhere.


Did you happen to notice the words “linen service”?


“Every week we get washed, crisp linen,” Ms. Ali said, beaming at the thought. “I said: ‘This I cannot get on my own anywhere. So I better stay here.’ My sisters say, Just for the linen and the tissue paper she sacrificed everything. I say, No.”


The story of Habiba Ali and Pamela Downing in the Hotel Wales is a reminder that time moves at different speeds in New York — not merely at the indomitable pace of real estate and commercial churn, but also at slower, more human paces, immune or resistant to market forces. Even in New York, intransigence sometimes carries the day. In a hallway of doors opened by magnetic cards, theirs still opens with a metal key. A red cowbell by the side of the door, hung by Ms. Ali, announces visitors.


On a recent afternoon in the suite they share — they are roommates, not a couple — the women corrected each other, completed each other’s sentences and described the advantages of the hotel’s rougher days.


“Sometimes we had arguments, which resulted in me being ejected from the apartment,” Ms. Downing said. When downstairs was a store room, she added, “I could stay the night there. There used to be quite a number of characters here.”


In their modest dress, the women say they pass largely unnoticed among the hotel’s wealthier guests, even after they were profiled by a City University journalism student this year.


“There’s a certain elegance to them,” said Bernard Goldberg, who bought the Wales in 1988 and converted it from a single-room-occupancy residence to a well-heeled boutique hotel, before selling it a decade later. “They’re very gentle and cultured. Maybe their clothes are not as expensive, but they were always well groomed. It was really nice to have them. They’re the only guests that I really miss.”


When Mr. Goldberg bought the building, he said, “people were sitting in the lobby on the floor eating out of paper bags, with bottles all around. It looked like a homeless shelter.”


His aim was to clear the building and maximize room rates. He offered residents money to leave and helped them find apartments.