Hotel Reserve now ready for your, uh, reservation

The Hotel Reserve opened earlier this month on Nassau Street at Maiden Lane in the Financial District. It was originally reported that this would be a Wyndham Garden Hotel. But Hotel Reserve has such a more local flavor given that the Federal Reserve is directly across the street.





Pretty spiffy design...The hotel is L-shaped and wraps around three low-rise buildings that sit on the corner of Maiden and Nassau.



So why did they do something seemingly so complicated? According to an article from October 2007 in the Times titled New buildings that embrace the old:

These challenges pale in comparison with the difficulties faced by Gene Kaufman, an architect who designed a 113-room hotel that is being built just a few blocks from Wall Street.

This L-shaped hotel, which will be a Wyndham, will have entrances at 51 Nassau Street — opposite the New York Federal Reserve Building — and 20 Maiden Lane. But its longest street frontage will actually be in a dark, narrow one-block alley called Liberty Place.

The hotel is being built on this odd-shaped lot because it has to encompass three low-rise buildings on the corner of Nassau Street and Maiden Lane that the developer, the McSam Hotel Group, was unable to acquire. These buildings all had commercial tenants with long leases who could not be enticed to leave, Mr. Kaufman said.

“These old buildings were in very bad condition, so we had to be careful not to create any vibrations that could damage them,” Mr. Kaufman said. But, he said, that was just the beginning of his headaches.

For one thing, the New York City subway system passes directly beneath this site, and it has ventilation shafts on all three sides of the building. This meant the developer had to dig deeper for the foundation. But as the excavation began, he discovered that the three older buildings had foundations extending into the property lines for the hotel.

“We’ve wrapped around little buildings before; we’ve built against the subway before; we’ve built on narrow sites before,” Mr. Kaufman said. But never all at once. “It was like fitting a diamond into a setting,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Win Won on Liberty Place survived all the construction.



Here's what it looked like in late spring.

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.

Checking in (so to speak) at the Wyndham Garden Hotel

Workers unveiled the entrance to the 20-story Wyndham Garden Hotel at 20 Maiden Lane yesterday in the Financial District. Still, from the look of things inside, plenty of work remains at this L-shaped hotel that wraps around three low-rise buildings on the corner of Maiden and Nassau.




Regardless, the hotel has its Web site up and running. So I thought I'd check out a room for this week.



Oh. According to the site, they are now accepting reservations for stays after March 15, 2009. Anyway sounds nice, based on the description:

The Wyndham Garden Hotel - Manhattan Financial District is a new, modern, 20 story high rise located in the heart of the New York City Financial District and Wall Street, bordering the historic South Street Seaport and the trendy neighborhoods of Tribeca & The Lower East Side.

Whether you're traveling to New York City for business or pleasure you will find that this magnificent downtown New York City hotel offers easy access to the World Trade Center site, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, South Street Seaport, Battery Park, The Brooklyn Bridge and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Let's add: "Come and see the end of Wall Street firsthand!"

Previously on EV Grieve:
A Win Won Situation