Why the trees were cut down on Fifth Street next to the Cooper Square Hotel

To make room for the hotel's trash.

Previously on EV Grieve:
What's new around the Cooper Square Hotel: Sidewalk, lack of trees

What's new around the Cooper Square Hotel: Sidewalk, lack of trees

After looking at E2E4 the other day, I swung by to check in on the progress of the Cooper Square Hotel. (I usually only go by for free ice.) Well! For starters, the sidewalk alongside the hotel's coming-soon garden (outdoor bar?) space on East Fifth Street is done....




...but not at the cost of a few trees.



And what is going on with this one?



Meanwhile, it's looking really glassy....





...and close to the neighbors.





Curbed had an update yesterday on the hotel and the ominous Wolverine claw....




P.S.
The hotel's VIP entrance still needs a little work...

Ice capades at Cooper Square Hotel

The last, oh, three or four times that I've walked by this service entrance to the Cooper Square Hotel...there are bags of ice just sitting there...melting.

Actually, we're still infuriated

Daily Candy checks in today with their take on the new Cooper Square Hotel (aka, "Dildo of Darkness"):

Cooped Up
The Cooper Square Hotel Opens

You can hate your neighbors only until you realize you love them.

So it was with The Cooper Square Hotel, which infuriated the testy East Village. Then came the post-construction reveal: Damn, this is one fine-looking, well-mannered new kid on the block.

An intriguing, modern glass tower, The Cooper has enough outdoor garden space to make you think the 6 train added a stop in L.A. The beautiful library off the lobby has a fireplace, bookshelves filled with eclectic volumes from Housing Works, and an honor bar for everyone. (Yes, even off-the-street riffraff like us.) Govind Armstrong’s long-awaited Table 8 outpost will open in February.

Overnight guests (yippee, no more fleabag St. Mark’s hotels!) won’t want to leave, what with the indie movies in the minibar, Red Flower amenities, three bathrobes, and insane city views.

It’s enough to inspire a block party.

Breaking: Model booty at the Cooper Square Hotel

Curbed has the first peeping-tom photo from a scantily clad photo shoot at the just-open Cooper Square Hotel. I'd post the photo here, except that this is a decent family-owned and operated site that wouldn't stoop to gratuitous butt shots to drive up our page views.

No heedless intruder?

James S. Russell, Bloomberg’s U.S. architecture critic, uh, critiques the Cooper Square Hotel today. The hotel, which opens Thursday, includes a 1,600 square-foot, three-bedroom, full-floor penthouse ($7,500 a night) that features a private outdoor shower that squirts upward.

Anyway! Some passages from his very positive review. (Meanwhile, see you in the penthouse! I'll be in the outdoor shower wearing a diaper!)

Like a spinnaker frozen in glass, the 21-story Cooper Square Hotel billows above beat-up tenement buildings in Manhattan’s gentrifying East Village.

And!

The slim, all-glass tower, enclosing just 145 rooms, makes plenty of attention-seeking gestures. It swells outward as it rises, then tips back. Facets along the side wiggle in and out, changing from glass to hole-punched metal panels. These surfaces look stretched taut, as if under enormous internal pressure.

If it sounds like too many ingredients and too many ideas, [architect Carlos] Zapata molds them into a seemingly effortless whole rather than a nervous assemblage of tics.

He has fused the hotel with a battered tenement building next door, which has been saved along with the tenancy of two women who have lived through the neighborhood’s extended tough times to see it flower.

And!

Zapata animated the entrance by erecting a little four-story tower that bookends the tenement and looks ripped from the main tower at the base. Above, he has peeled away the shiny skin to reveal squared-off tubular shapes in tan and green. This lets the tower echo the ragged silhouette of the long-neglected tenement neighborhood. Its contrasting lightness doesn’t weigh down the layers of red brick, terra-cotta rickrack and dangling fire escapes that give the streets such evocative character.

In spite of its size and contemporary styling, the hotel is no heedless intruder.

Candidates for the John Varvatos Preservationist of the Month Club

From the Times today:

The 21-story Cooper Square Hotel may be an imposing presence on the Lower East Side, but its interiors have an intimate scale more evocative of neighborhood buildings. In fact, the hotel was built around one of them, a 19th-century tenement that was not torn down because two tenants refused to move. “It would have been much cheaper to demolish,” said Carlos Zapata, center in picture, the designer, but in the end “the tenement had a positive effect” on the design, inspiring smaller, more livable interior spaces. The first two floors of the tenement became the hotel’s library and offices; the third and fourth house the two tenants, who have their own entrance.

For guests, who will pay $375 to $1,000 a night ($7,500 for the penthouse), “the hotel means to be a home away from home,” said Klaus Ortlieb, left in picture, who developed the $115 million project with Matt Moss, right in picture, his partner at MK Hotels. Among other things, that means there is no formal check-in desk in the lobby, above right: The registration process will take place out of sight, while guests are greeted by a hostess bearing drinks.

Previously on EV Grieve:
“This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it.”


[Photo: Rebecca McAlpin for The New York Times]