The Bowery Hotel – old New York dressed as new brick

The Bowery Hotel opened in February 2007 at 335 Bowery, on the corner where the Lower East Side, the East Village and NoHo run into one another in a jumble of fire escapes and old signage. It was built by Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, the nightlife entrepreneurs already behind the Maritime Hotel, the Jane Hotel and the Waverly Inn, who chose a street still better known for CBGB and flophouses than for turndown service. The building itself is deceptive: the brick tower looks decades older than it is, right down to a stone marker reading 1954, though the structure actually rose between 2002 and 2004 on the site of a parking garage. Behind that invented patina sit 135 rooms, a wood-panelled lobby with a working fireplace, and Gemma, the ground-floor Italian trattoria. The MICHELIN Guide recognises the hotel with One Key.

01The house

The site at 335 Bowery had nothing to recommend it when MacPherson and Goode first looked at it: a plain tower rising over what was still, in the early 2000s, one of the roughest stretches of downtown Manhattan. The building had in fact gone up only recently, between 2002 and 2004, in place of a garage, yet the hoteliers chose to re-clad it in brick and fit it with tall, factory-style windows rather than chase the glass-and-steel minimalism then fashionable nearby. The effect, deliberately, reads as though the hotel has always been there; even a stone plaque on the façade carries the date 1954, a piece of invented history on a building that is anything but old.

Inside, the conceit continues. The lobby was designed to feel like a private house that had simply accumulated things over a century: wood panelling, hunting trophies, worn leather club chairs and a palm-filled entrance that owes more to a Victorian gentleman's club than to a 21st-century hotel reception. The hotel opened its doors in February 2007, co-founded by conservationist and entrepreneur Eric Goode and nightlife impresario Sean MacPherson, the pair who had already redefined the Maritime Hotel, the Jane Hotel and the Waverly Inn.

02Rooms and suites

All 135 rooms share the hotel's central idea: industrial bones dressed in old-world fabric. Floor-to-ceiling, cast-iron-framed windows flood the rooms with light and frame views over the Lower East Side rooftops, while the floors underfoot are dark hardwood scattered with Oushak rugs, set against rich velvet curtains. Bathrooms are marble, with the weathered brass fixtures and rain showers that have become a hotel signature, and rooms are finished with 400-thread-count linens and C.O. Bigelow toiletries.

Insider tip

No pool on site; gym is open 24 hours and spa treatments can be arranged on request.

At the top of the building, the Penthouse Suite is a corner one-bedroom with a king bed and an expansive downtown view, while the Penthouse Terrace Suite, on the 14th floor, adds a 650-square-foot private terrace, one of the more unexpected outdoor spaces in this part of Manhattan. For shorter stays, the Studio Suite offers 400 to 450 square feet with a king bed and a rainfall shower, a scaled-down version of the same formula that runs through every category.

03Where to eat

Gemma occupies the ground floor on the corner of Bowery and East 3rd Street, an Italian trattoria that opened alongside the hotel in 2007 and still handles its room service today. Chef Andrea Taormina pairs rustic, seasonal cooking with an extensive Italian wine list, served from an open kitchen built around a wood-fired pizza oven, in a room lit by candles and glowing in the evenings with the same salvaged, old-world warmth as the lobby upstairs.

The restaurant draws as many locals as hotel guests, a point regulars like to make: this is not the hotel's lobby bar but its own, freestanding dining room, and reservations for dinner can be harder to secure than a room upstairs.

04The bar

The Lobby Bar is arguably the hotel's best-known room. Guests pass a uniformed doorman and a palm-filled reception before reaching a warren of vast leather armchairs and velvet settees, some carved with gargoyles, set beneath antlers and lit low enough for discretion. At its centre is a sandstone fireplace, with a patio open to non-guests by day and reserved largely for hotel residents once the evening sets in.

The cocktail list leans classic: the house drink, the Bowery, mixes Bulldog gin with Dubonnet and a splash of champagne, while the back bar runs to a serious whisky selection for guests happy to sink into a corner and let the room do the work.

05Spa and wellbeing

There is no pool at the Bowery, and the hotel has never pretended otherwise; this is a downtown townhouse hotel rather than a resort. A 24-hour gym covers the basics, and spa treatments can be arranged on demand for guests who want them, but the real wellbeing proposition here is the fireplace in the lobby and the patio behind Gemma rather than any treatment menu.

06The neighbourhood

The Bowery is one of the oldest streets in New York, a thoroughfare that has carried theatres, opera houses, boarding houses and dive bars through four centuries of continuous use, and the hotel sits at the point where the Lower East Side, East Village and NoHo converge. Round the corner, the site of the old punk club CBGB is now a John Varvatos store, a fair summary of how fast this stretch of the city has turned over since the hotel arrived. The New Museum stands roughly 450 metres away, and the live-music rooms of the Bowery Ballroom are a short walk south, keeping the street's old reputation for noise and culture intact even as the storefronts around it have smartened up.

07Making the most of a stay

Ask for a room on a higher floor for the best light through those cast-iron windows, and book the Penthouse Terrace Suite well ahead if an outdoor space matters more to you than square footage indoors. Breakfast at Gemma starts early and the kitchen keeps room service running around the clock, so there is rarely a bad hour to eat. For an evening that stays entirely within the building, a dinner downstairs followed by a late cocktail by the lobby fireplace is still the most convincing version of what the Bowery does best.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.