Moving into the Coop

A few weeks back in The Villager, Scoopy reported that school officials planned to move into Cooper Union's new academic building at 41 Cooper Square by the summer. (The ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new building is Sept. 15.) Well, this seemed awfully ambitious to me. However, sure enough, over the weekend... the moving trucks lined up....




Meanwhile! The scaffolding is gone from in front of the new building! The graffiti! No!




By the way, what's there now looks a little different from the original rendering...

Saturday at the Cooper Square Hotel

Someone standing around told me this was a shoot for a music video.





DNA the band?

Not this DNA, of course.

Peek-a-boo I see 2 (Cooper Square)

I swear I walked by the behind-schedule 15-story rental-retail combo at 2 Cooper Union just two days ago and saw nothing (the hole in the ground)... and now? Someone's working OT....

Things that got laid this past weekend: The sidewalk outside the new Cooper Union building

Meanwhile, the plywood along Seventh Street is gone. And you can get a much better look at what's what.





And I don't recall having seen this sign there...



And on the plywood that remains...

Busy Saturday for Cooper Square construction

Busy Saturday on Cooper Square. Construction all around...

At the Cooper Square Hotel:






At 2 Cooper Square:



At the Cooper Union:




P.S.
A little CBGB nostalgia on Fifth Street:

Noted

At the new Cooper Union building on Seventh Street at Cooper Square.

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.

Danger: Swamp Ass Area

On Cooper Square.

Meanwhile a little farther north...At the under-construction Cooper Union building at Cooper Square between Seventh Street and Sixth Street. Charming!

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.

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.

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

The Times has a great story today about two women who saved their home from destruction at 27 Cooper Square to make way for Cooper Square Hotel. We hear from 74-year-old Hettie Jones and her garden:

“I grew the most fantastic tomatoes and peppers up there, veggies that need lots of light,” lamented Ms. Jones. “We used to have views from every angle, but now they only exist from the hotel’s penthouse.”

She has lived here since 1962.

Pointing to the cluster of new luxury towers rising in the square, Ms. Jones added with a sigh: “This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it.”

Jeremiah had a post on the history of 35 Cooper Square this past summer.

[Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times]