The Wythe Hotel opened in 2012 in a converted 1901 cooperage on the Williamsburg waterfront — the right building at the right moment. The factory structure — brick walls, cast-iron columns, the full height of the original production floor — was converted with intelligence rather than nostalgia: the rooms kept the industrial character without performing it; the Reynard restaurant that occupies the ground floor became one of the better restaurant rooms in New York rather than simply a hotel dining room. The East River is visible from the upper floors; the Manhattan skyline presents from the rooftop. A hotel that preceded the gentrification logic it appeared to anticipate, and has aged into something a decade of Williamsburg development has not diminished.
Williamsburg, New York, United States