The Bowery Hotel is a luxury hotel located on the cusp of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Once an avenue full of pickpockets, artists and homeless folk, today the Bowery is as chic as it gets, populated by wealthy residents who love the  street for its loft living and slight grunge, authentic feel.  The latest venture from Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson, who created the Maritime Hotel and numerous boîtes, the Bowery Hotel evokes the Gilded Age of red waistcoats, hand-set bricks and wood-paneled elevators, with views from the upper floors positively grand.

Features and Amenities

The Bowery Hotel towers seventeen stories over the East Village and Noho, offering 135 sun-drenched guest rooms and suites. The floor to ceiling windows throughout offer incredible city views, especially at night. Meanwhile, the loft-like layout of the hotel and the suites evoke a New York experience that The Bowery has come to symbolize. The handsome lobby, a dark and moody space, feels like an Old World drawing room, with faded tapestries, Moroccan tiles and iron lamps. The hotel reeks of luxury – the kind of luxury that can come into a newly revitalized neighborhood and turn it upside down. Rooms at the hotel are relatively compact but loft-like, thanks to a factory-style windows, hardwood floors and beaded-board ceilings.

The rooms are graceful without being overly dainty – like Restoration Hardware came in and provided the furnishings and then went boho-chic on it. There are the details: accordion brass lamps, old Oriental rugs, 400 thread count European cotton sheets, sturdy wood tables and hunter-green velvet chairs, and iron stars on the walls. The rooms might not be oversized, but they’re comfortable and evoke a sense of serious luxury. Bathrooms are done in marble with antiqued brass fixtures, white subway tiles, rain showers and plush towels – and they offer complimentary products from New York fixture C.O. Bigelow. Guests enjoy all the high tech toys of today – iPod steroes, flat screen HDTVs, DVD players and free wifi.

The hotel has a small fitness center, but it’s more known for it’s drinking and dining spaces. Gemma, a beautiful Italian brasserie that sits right next to the hotel, was opened by the hoteliers about six months after the hotel itself opened. It’s since received rave review after rave review. There is a copper-covered bar up front, which fills up in the evenings with mobs of jolly, overtanned revelers, grinning their toothy end-of-summer grins. The eating rooms are carefully contrived to convey equal parts rustic, old-shoe comfort (thatched wine bottles hanging from rafters, half-burned candelabra, farm-style tables made from distressed wood) and chic bonhomie. The menu is a grab bag, not of regional Italian cuisines but of market-tested, consumer-approved styles. There are fashionable crudi, crunchy crostini, and wood-fired pizzas, and even a selection of Italian cheeses replete with tasting notes printed on the menu in a flowery French manner. There’s an awful lot about Gemma, in fact, that echoes Keith McNally’s own Italian brasserie, Morandi. At Gemma, however, the rooms are slightly more commodious, the service is slightly less chaotic, and the menu is less busy and more manageable, albeit in a predictable way.

Other amenities available at the Bowery Hotel include round the clock room service from Gemma, as well as round the clock concierge service, complimentary bicycles and film library, as well as newspapers, a lobby bar and lounge, a multi-lingual staff, a full business center, same day dry cleaning and laundry service, in-house pressing service, shoe shining, meeting and event space available, spa services, valet parking, babysitting service, private trainers and massage therapists upon request…the hotel offers everything under the sun.

Location

Back in the day, the Bowery was all flophouses, whiskey joints, and legendary bums. The flophouses survive, but now they’re surrounded by celebrity lounges and multi-million-dollar lofts. The Bowery Hotel’s location is an interesting one – the Bowery itself isn’t exactly a neighborhood, though it’s got plenty of history of which to speak. The hotel, however, sits on the cusp of the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Noho (which stands for North of Houston). Those who stay at the hotel have their pick of the litter when it comes to authentic New York neighborhoods chock full of amazing restaurants, little known boutiques, bars and more.

To the north of the hotel, you’ll find the East Village. The East Village is technically part of the Lower East Side, but began developing its own identity in the 1970s when the traditionally immigrant neighborhood became a mecca for artists, musicians, students and writers. Since then, many of the neighborhood’s residents are being priced out as the area gentrifies and rents rise. St. Mark’s Place (East 8th Street), one of the neighborhood’s most famous streets, is lined with bars, restaurants and shops and a popular strip for tourists to visit. The village boasts the most bars per capita of all neighborhoods in the city, and, much like the Bowery, has been undergoing a gentrification and revitalization process for years.

A lively mix of Old World Ukrainians, students, artists, and young professionals populate The East Village, which extends from 14th Street south to Houston Street and east of Fifth Avenue. There is a large and varied assortment of antique shops, bookstores, record stores, specialty shops, and ethnic restaurants as varied as Jewish delis, Polish coffee shops, and Indian Row on East 6th Street. At the heart of the East Village is Cooper Union, one of the country’s most prestigious art and architectural schools, and Saint Mark’s Place–a famous nightlife destination for its many clubs, bars, cafes, and restaurants.

The influx of young affluents has fueled development and conversion, with million-dollar loft apartments sprouting up in the Astor Place area and suburban chain K-Mart sponsoring poetry readings in its K-Cafe. Further east, the Tompkin’s Square Park area, known as a center for political demonstrations, has become a new focus for the blossoming Lower East Side/ East Village community. Located between East 7th and East 10th Streets and bordered by Avenues A and B, the well-patrolled park has been renovated and its pathways and playground restored. What is now known as Alphabet City consists of Avenues A through D on the eastern edge of the Village between Houston and 14th Streets.