Your Shepard Fairey/Cooper Square Hotel daily update!

Your Shepard Fairey/Cooper Square Hotel daily update

Previously.

Updated: Shepard Fairey creating new mural for the Cooper Square Hotel

Following up on yesterday's post about the whitewashing of the mural on the Cooper Square Hotel... Just like that, a new mural is in progress...




We asked a Cooper employee for confirmation of the artist, but he said he didn't know... Uh-huh. Anyway, Shepard Fairey is creating this mural too.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Goodbye Homer Simpson: The Cooper Square Hotel has a white wall again

Goodbye Homer Simpson: The Cooper Square Hotel has a white wall again

As Curbed first pointed out yesterday... the ode to Homer on the side of the Cooper Square Hotel was being painted over by, uh, painters... And so I went by yesterday to see what was what and all at our favorite local eyesore (uh, the hotel, not the art)...



And Blake Lively?! (No.)




And those poor bushes were smashed/displaced again on Fifth Street...



And today...



At least the Coop put on the bush condoms for safe gardening...



Anyway, I'll always remember the first site of Homer...

Does this mean the Cooper Square Hotel no longer wants to fit in with the neighborhood?

Curbed has the news that the mural on the side of the Cooper Square Hotel is being painted over right now... And they produced the above evidence...

As you may recall, the Hotel hired four graffiti artists — Joyce Pensato, Nick 1, Vizie and Shinique Smith — to create the mural.

As you also may recall:

Klus Ortleib, the hotel's managing partner, wants the place to fit in with the edgy local art scene. "When I came up with the idea, people said I was crazy," he said.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The Cooper Square Hotel's attempt to fit in with the neighborhood ready to be unveiled

Something IMPORTANT looking happening this evening in the Cooper Square Hotel's penthouse

Feel free to guess...because I have no idea.

A night at the Cooper Square Hotel makes writer long for a Motel 6

There's a funny piece in The Washington Post in which staff writer Joel Achenbach recalls his experience at "a striking place, very modern, a steel-and-glass tower rising above the Lower East Side." He never mentions the place by name. But I'm assuming it's the ol' Cooper Square Hotel... (He mentions grabbing a slice at Ray's... and a room at the Coop does go for $270 ...) Anyway, I think I'd feel exactly the same way as Joel here ...

Walking in, there's no sign of a lobby per se. No Registration Desk. A snappy dresser tells me to follow him. Suddenly I'm introduced to a sharp-looking woman who is, apparently -- maybe -- a concierge of sorts, and is somehow associated with the task of giving me a room. It's like we're going to have a conversation first.

I'm a little thrown off by the whole thing. I need a room, a phone, electricity. I want a KEY. But perhaps that's me being really old-fashioned.

In the absence of a Registration Desk, the concierge-type person operates out of what appears to be a small conference room, as if I'm going to sign refinancing papers. Alas, there is no room yet available, it being merely 1 in the afternoon. You know that even at $270 a night you can't expect a hotel to have a room ready this early in the day.

And it only gets better!

So I wait for 90 minutes -- stylishly, hanging out amid the groovy furniture, ducking out briefly for a slice of pizza at Ray's.

They're all very nice. They offer me a drink! But no: At this point I am starting to crave a Motel 6.

Finally get the room. It's about the size of a large bed. Everything is so gleaming that I worry I'm going to leave fingerprints everywhere.

Heh.

It's hard on a middle-age man's ego to realize that he's being totally outcooled by everyone on the hotel staff. The guy fetching the taxi probably pities me. Because he knows he still has a future. He says to himself: Thank God I'm not him. How does he face the morning???

The Cooper Square Hotel's new dining option opens Saturday

Workers have removed the paper on the windows on the former lobby bar at the Cooper Square Hotel...




As Eater reported, the space will be for a "casual cafe"...and we were told this past weekend that it opens Saturday...

Christmas Eve blockbusters -- Cooper Square Hotel in default on $52 million in loans: report

The Real Deal has the blockbuster:

A German bank claims the developers of the year-old sleek 21-story Cooper Square Hotel in the East Village are in default on $52 million in loans, at the same time the building owes millions to contractors.

Not only is the project in financial distress, but developers and investors in the 145-room hotel at 25 Cooper Square at East 5th Street could owe as much as $6 million in personal guarantees, the recent lawsuit says.

Commercial lender WestLB filed to foreclose on $52 million in loans given to Cooper Square Hotel, Cooper Square Mezz Lender and seven individuals including the hotel's co-developer Matthew Moss and real estate investor Kyle Ransford, a lawsuit filed Dec. 14 in New York State Supreme Court says.

The toilets at the Cooper Square Hotel are really powerful

I recently stopped by the Cooper Square Hotel to use the restroom. And check the place out: Had never been inside. Not much to see in this video inside one of the co-ed bathrooms...But the audio... (with a little Interpol on the hotel soundsystem...)

The Coop preps for winter

At the Cooper Square Hotel. Keeping the bold-faced names warm.

Impressions of the new Bowery

[Image via Metropolis by Adam Friedberg]

SVA faculty member Karrie Jacobs checks in with a Bowery reborn piece in the November issue of Metropolis magazine....

Let's get to it:

What’s happened on the Bowery is surely gentrification, although the distance from five-buck flops to $500-a-night luxury suites cries out for a stronger term. I see something else: a lesson in urban ecology. The places where it’s possible for new architecture to thrive in Manhattan are generally those districts where the political clout of civic groups is the weakest. In Greenwich Village or on the Upper East Side, the community boards and neighborhood activists rush in like SWAT teams to counter development threats. But on the former skid row, the power to say no to development isn’t as strong. A preservation-oriented downzoning of the East Village, approved late last year, left out the Bowery. Development on the west side of the street is moderated by the low-density zoning of the Noho Historic District and the Little Italy Special District. The east side of the Bowery, where most new development has taken place, was left undefended. While an organization called the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors has tried to have rules put in place to limit buildings on the east side of the Bowery to eight stories, that strip is still approved for what the city’s Zoning Handbook calls “high bulk.”

And!

One time, shortly after the completion of the massive apartment complexes that now face the Bowery on the north and south sides of Houston Street, I emerged from a nearby subway station — something I’d done literally hundreds of times — and had no idea where I was. The new buildings, the hopelessly bland Avalon Bowery Place and Avalon Chrystie Place, developed by a large real estate investment trust, had wiped out my sense of place.

By contrast, the architect Carlos Zapata’s Cooper Square Hotel has emerged as a landmark. But not all landmarks are created equal. The glassy 21-story tower, which borrows its milk-colored glass and swoopy style from Frank Gehry’s much nicer IAC headquarters on the West Side, is wedged so tightly between the neighboring tenements that it appears to be a cartoon illustrating the evils of overdevelopment. I attended a party in the hotel’s penthouse that was a total mob scene, but on the afternoon of a recent walking tour, I found the public spaces ghostly and depopulated. I’ve heard that its East Village neighbors have coined a nickname for the Cooper Square: “Dubai.” And as I sat by myself in the back patio, the building prompted the exact question I found myself asking all the time in Dubai: Who is this place for?

Who is this place for? I've been thinking the same thing for far too long...

The Cooper Square Hotel officially unveils its new graffiti mural

Well, last night was the big party at the Cooper Square Hotel to unveil its new graffiti project....which is now all illuminated for us to enjoy...



Meanwhile! Inside the hotel, yours truly was hobnobbing with a bevy of beauties...







OK, OK. None of this is true. Except the first part about the mural party. I was NOT invited, for some reason. Oversight, most likely. Yeah, I just typed in "Party at Cooper Square Hotel" in Google and...

MEANWHILE:
Bob Arihood has a great shot of the mural here.

The Cooper Square Hotel's attempt to fit in with the neighborhood ready to be unveiled

As Curbed noted, the Cooper Square Hotel is throwing a bash tonight to unveil its new graffiti mural...

Here's what the mural looked like as of Saturday...



And we did a little research to learn more about the origins of the Homer Simpson tribute.

Also, for the record, I want to be clear that I really like the work of the four graffiti artists -- Joyce Pensato, Nick 1, Vizie and Shinique Smith -- who were hired to create this mural. And I'm happy that they have such a high-profile canvas to show their work. My problem is with the Cooper Square Hotel's lame attempt to suddenly try to fit into the neighborhood. As the Post reported:

Klus Ortleib, the hotel's managing partner, wants the place to fit in with the edgy local art scene. "When I came up with the idea, people said I was crazy," he said.

Anyway! We assume that the mural is finished. The bushes that were removed to make way for the crane...



...have been replanted.



Sort of. I'm not much of a gardener, but I always thought plant life did better in the ground if you first took off the burlap around its roots...



Previously.

Photo(shop) exclusive: An excerpt from Levi Johnston's "Playgirl" shoot at the Cooper Square Hotel

Apologizing in advance.



Photoshopping a Photoshopped photo.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Part of Levi Johnston's "Playgirl" photo shoot probably took place at the Cooper Square Hotel

[Photo of the father of Sarah Palin's grandson via; Levi photo with Coop not included and done via Photoshop, aka Little Photoshop of Horrors]

Part of Levi Johnston's "Playgirl" photo shoot probably took place at the Cooper Square Hotel

The tweet showed up few hours ago...



In case you've been following this story.... Anyway, maybe this isn't even the real Twitter account for the 19-year-old father of Sarah Palin's grandson.

Homer getting whitewashed at the Cooper Square Hotel?

Previously.

Day 4 (nighttime edition)

At the Cooper Square Hotel. Previously.

Cooper Square Hotel wants graffiti on building "to fit in with the edgy local art scene"

On Friday afternoon, we noted that some sort of graffiti mural was going up on the wall at the Cooper Square Hotel. (Curbed posted photos too.)

Yesterday, we walked by for an update...




Today, the Post follows up on the story.

Graffiti vandalism is apparently so cool that an East Village hotel has decided to fake it.

In a wacky attempt at earning street cred, the swanky Cooper Square Hotel has commissioned four graffiti "artists" to tag the Fifth Street wall of an adjacent building it recently bought.

One of the taggers, Joyce Pensato, was going to town yesterday on her section of the mural, which the hotel owners hope will be finished by Nov. 10, and then updated annually.

Pensato and three others -- who go by Nick 1, Vizie and Shinique -- were each paid to fill one quarter the wall.

His section spells out the words "Tropical Fantasy," a tribute to a friend who died over the summer and a reference to a local soda company.

Klus Ortleib, the hotel's managing partner, wants the place to fit in with the edgy local art scene.

"When I came up with the idea, people said I was crazy," he said.

At least one tenant of the tagged building agreed.

"They came in without regard for others," says Katy Able, 63.

"They say they can't fix a leak because they don't have money, but now they've paid to have a crane to put up graffiti."

Cooper Square Hotel honors Homer Simpson

Yesterday, most of the the shrubbery (which was new!) was ripped up on the Fifth Street side of the hotel...



...to make way for, uh, this.