For the first time in over three decades, the Academy Awards won’t have a host when ABC broadcasts the show this Sunday, February 24 at 8 p.m. Sounds like anything can happen. What better time to drink in the annual display of theatrics, tears and dresses with cocktails and a crowd?
These New York hotel bars are serving up drinks, big screens, a party atmosphere, even prizes. Popcorn, too, if you’re lucky.
Did Herman Melville dream up the first themed boutique hotel?
Never mind that this was never his intent. But I’m rereading Moby-Dick, and it’s hard to ignore what we know about modern-day hotel design when Ishmael, roaming around New Bedford, Massachusetts looking for a bed for the night in Chapter 2, spots The Spouter Inn, “the dilapidated little wooden house” that “was the very spot for cheap lodgings.” (Our narrator had already dismissed The Crossed Harpoons and Sword-Fish Inn as “too expensive and jolly.”) Read more
For two hours late Monday afternoon the ballroom at the Pierre Hotel was transformed into Versailles, or Versailles as dreamed up by designer Stacey Benedet for her alice + olivia Spring 2015 collection.
Models flaunting Benedet’s flirty dresses — Halston-esque halter necklines, chiffon accordion pleats — stood grouped in themed tableaux. Carpets of faux grass — miniature golf, anyone? — blanketed the real carpeting to create a garden room where the Pierre’s fanciful frescoes of Versailles backdropped the models. Read more
Roof bars are no longer an oddity at hotels, but that doesn’t make them any less appealing. Drinks with an eye-popping view a pairing the never gets old. I found a full hand with money vistas of the ultimate New York City icon – the Empire State Building. Four are open year round so you can gaze whenever the mood strikes upon “the closest thing to heaven” to quote a line from not one, but two legendary movies.
A bright room number against a dark wall
Hotel hallways are a scene setter, a visual amuse-bouche before you dig into your room. You rarely notice them unless they’re battered or dingy or film noir scary. Usually they’re white or beige, some variant of pale.
But we’re seeing a darkening trend, walls bathed in gray, charcoal or to cut to the chase, black. The Refinery Hotel and NYLO New York are two less-than-a-year-old New York boutique hotels with dark halls. (The 11-year-old Maritime was an early adopter, sporting midnight navy halls as was the Royalton with deep gray.) Read more
It’s January, and once again Tripadvisor rolls out its annual Best Lists compiled from the bazillion reviews filed by hotel-goers each year. How did New York City’s nearly 100,000 hotel rooms fare?
Lots better than in 2012, when not a single Big Apple hotel landed on the Tripadvisor top 25 best US hotels list (New York has yet to crack the ranks of the 25 best hotels in the world). This year there are three: Read more
It’s time for my annual over-the-shoulder look at the year that was in New York City hotels.
If New York felt unusually crowded in 2013 there was good reason. The city hosted 54.3 million visitors, up from 52.7 in 2012 and nearly 20 million more than in 2002.
And while some of them no doubt stayed with friends, relatives and Airbnb, others helped fill the 30 million hotel room nights sold, up 1 million from 2012. The results? Visitors on average paid a pricey $296 a night, and hotels enjoyed an 87.8 percent occupancy rate. Read more
When a tower is as tall as the Empire State Building, you can see it from a lot of vantage points. Still, the view from roof bar at the new Refinery Hotel is special.
The hotel stands just four blocks north of the once-tallest-building-in-the-world. From the roof it appears so close you feel you could almost leap over in a King Kong moment. Read more
$200 a night: Central Park view at The Roger.
You’ll have to come to town in January.
But 12 hotels are offering rooms for $100 during the third annual New York Hotel Week, January 3 through 12, 2014.
Another $100 gets you 14 hotels in a spiffier range. And for $300 you can sample a pair of boutique hotels normally in the $400-plus range. Can Brooklyn Hotel Week be far behind? Read more