Wythe Hotel

Theobald Engelhardt built it as a cooperage in 1901, and between the barrels and the hotel it spent years as a textile factory turning out specialty fabrics for NASA. Southern yellow pine timbers and cast-iron columns came through all of it. Morris Adjmi stacked four glass floors on top and swapped a twenty-foot bay of the west facade for a window wall modeled on the factory glazing, leaving the metal tracks where they were in the lobby ceiling. Le Crocodile has the ground floor, Bar Blondeau the roof.

Thirteen-foot timber ceilings sit over concrete floors with radiant heat running beneath them, and the arched windows face Manhattan or Brooklyn depending on which side of the building a room falls on. The lofts upstairs take floor-to-ceiling windows, a few of them opening onto private terraces. The beds are made from the building's own pine.

A curator on staff, Alessandra Gomez, buys the work that goes up in the rooms and the public spaces, and her recent additions have run to drawings and works on paper. Outside, Tom Fruin's fifty-foot marquee has climbed the scooped corner since 2012, spelling HOTEL in red neon over signage he pulled off demolition sites and out of dumpsters across two decades. Hand-painted fruit, pizza, an air-conditioner repair number.