For decades, the Bossert has served as a hostel for Jehovah's Witnesses stopping off at the global headquarters here, but as they are moving upstate and getting rid of all their property, developer David Bistricer stepped forward in May to turn the Bossert back into a boutique that still bears the same name it has for nearly a century.

He recently said that the hotel would not be under the banner of any national chains, and he is partnering with the mysterious Joseph Chetrit and the guys behind King & Grove, all of whom are working on the controversial conversion of the Hotel Chelsea.

The designer behind all this is none other than Gene Kaudman, also hard at work on the Chelsea, who has designed dozens of hotels around the city in recent years, mostly for those name-brand outlets Mr. Bistricer now eschews. Mr. Kaufman will be lucky on this project, considering the Witnesses, famous for the meticulous upkeep of all of their properties, have left the architect with an immaculate lobby, which renderings show will be little changed.

Upstairs, the story is different, with the number of rooms rising from 224 now to 300 suites when the renovations are completed. No idea what those will look like, but there has been talk of a rooftop bar overlooking the Heights, the harbor and the Manhattan skyline, which ought to be something.

“The Hotel Bossert is an exceptional building and one that should be open to welcome guests from across the country and around the world," Mr. Kaufman said in a release about the renovations. "Brooklyn has not only seen a residential explosion but thanks to a cultural coming of age the borough has also become a tourist destination yet it remains underserved by hotels."

With the boom in Brooklyn hotels, especially in one of the borough's poshest redoubts, this ought to be a perfect fit.

Joseph Chetrit is the mysterious buyer taking over the famous flophouse, The Journal reports today, beating out more talked about suitors like Andre Balazs, Ian Schrager and David Edelstein. It appears he has no intention of creating condos, unlike some of his rivals.

It has almost become a cliche to rundown the artists who have called the redbrick edifice home--Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Courtney Love, Arthur C. Clark while writing 2001--but it bears mentioning because it looks like the Chelsea will continue this tradition, at least until the residents in the building's 100 apartments are gone.

Mr. Chetrit has experience in dealing with concerns of tenants in buildings he's acquired and upgraded. In a similar deal, his Chetrit Group in 2004 acquired the Empire Hotel, next to Lincoln Center, which housed a number of long-term residents.

Despite media reports that he planned to convert the building into condos-a popular trend at the time-he renovated the property and has maintained it as a hotel. He also moved a small number of existing tenants into renovated rooms at the Empire where they could live rent-free.

Rent-free! There are only two words that could make a New York artist happier: "Whitney retrospective."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Now, the Port Authority has an ambitious plan to revive the Saarinen building as a boutique hotel, according to The Journal.

Now, the agency hopes to find a developer who will build a small hotel in the space between the old TWA terminal and the new JetBlue building. The interior of the TWA space would serve as an entry way and lobby for the hotel with restaurants and shops.

"You can have perhaps the hippest, coolest-looking front office to a boutique hotel that serves a very special and unique air traveling market," said Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward. "It's not a big airport hotel. It's going to be a niche-market boutique-style hotel with about 150 rooms."

It seems like the perfect plan, an inn in the heart of the city's busiest airport. Especially with all the delays suffered these days, passengers will probably be wanting for easy, reliable accommodations. And the high-architecture boutique model has been a huge success at places like The Standard and the Cooper Square Hotel.

Yet partly what makes the boutique model, pioneered by Ian Schrager in the 1980s, so successful is that it allows people to enjoy the hotel without actually staying their. It is hard to imagine anyone riding the A-Train and then the AirTrain for the privilege of bottle service or a dip in the jetfuel-misted pool. Indeed, the Port Authority has tried to transform the old terminal before, creating some sort of mini-mall, with limited success. And as The Journal points out, there will be landmarks and aviation approvals necessary, which could hamstring a design.

If this thing ever gets built, it will be a miracle--not only to have happened but to visit, as well, this being one of the most magnificent architectural forms in the world. That said, any plan seems like it will be stuck at the gate for some time.

SLIDESHOW: Inside the Coolest Hotel Lobby in the World. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

As you can see in these new renderings provided by the building's architect, Gene Kaufman, it has light up balconies that will shimmer at night, bringing a bit of that dance-club flare back to the cleaned up thoroughfare. This is not the first time Kaufman has designed a hotel that twinkles in the night, either.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Today, the deal with the French Louzon Group to buy the site was finalized, and with it new renderings for the project were released. The only remarkable thing about the 14-story, 65-room hotel designed by Gene Kaufman Architects is that at least it blocks out views of the unsightly 22-story condo at 52 East 4th Street, designed by notorious architect Robert Scarano and home to the likes of John Legend.

With each new project, it becomes clearer and clearer why locals want to see this side of the Bowery rezoned.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The idea was to preserve at least a slice of the neighborhood's historic industrial sector, but now that Jed Walentas and Two Trees Management hope to transform the 11,105-square-foot site on Wythe into a boutique hotel, it could spell doom for its manufacturing neighbors.

If this story sounds familiar, it should. It played out most notably with the Trump Soho, the 48-story condo-hotel in Hudson Square that was built on land zoned for manufacturing use through a loophole that allows transient hotels in manufacturing districts--a loophole the Bloomberg administration has repeatedly declined to close. It has also created problems for neighborhoods like Gowanus in Brooklyn and Dutch Kills in Queens, both of which saw a spate of hotel development in recent years.

Manufacturing advocates argue that by continuing to allow such shadow residential development into industrial areas, prices will continue to rise to levels factories and warehouses can no longer afford. Walentas makes exactly this point to the Journal today, in an article about the project:

Jed Walentas, principal at Two Trees Management, said that there were no other industrial businesses competing to buy the building when his company purchased the property. "I disagree that a hotel is not a productive thing to have there," he said. "I think a hotel is an amazingly complimentary use."

Yet part of the reason no other industrial businesses could compete was because the price for the property was likely out of their price range--thanks in no small part to people like Walentas who are willing to pay more because they know they can turn the property into something like a hotel. Sure, the globalization argument, that all the companies are now in China, could be made, but the New York Industrial Retention Network and other groups insist this is not the case, that there is plenty of demand for manufacturing space. The problem is it has grown so unaffordable.

It is true Williamsburg has changed, and a hotel may be more befitting the area than a defunct warehouse. But the Bloomberg administration set this land aside for industrial purposes five years ago. To reverse course--and give the project tax breaks no less, as it is considering doing--seems to make no sense. Either strengthen industrial protections or do away with them entirely. To leave all these gaping loopholes makes it harder for everyone to do business.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Of course, there was the recent fallout with the ownership, which had been trying to update the place and was torn between a commitment to artists and profits. The latter seems to have won out as the 15 shareholders who own the property have decided to sell. "Regardless of who owns the hotel, the Chelsea will always be the Chelsea," Paul Brounstein, one of the owners, said in a release. "The hotel will always continue to be a destination for creativity and art, that's what makes it so special. Nothing can ever change that."

Yet Brounstein was more candid with The Wall Street Journal, telling the paper, "The way we want to run the hotel is not necessarily the way the business world works." In the past, ownership was famously forgiving, even accepting art in certain circumstances as compensation. Now? "I think the neighborhood has changed faster than the hotel has, and it has become anachronistic for the hotel not to change as well."

This was bound to happen at some point, as the last of Manhattan's old artistic well runs dry. But with all the competition from its neighbors (see: Standard, Gansevoort, Jane, et al) one wonders if the Chelsea could even keep up. Maybe the secret will be keeping the artists, instead of kicking them out. And people will pay extra for that "authentic" experience.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

That was Jason Pomeranc, who, as co-founder of Thompson Hotels, has fashioned himself New York’s innkeeper to the image-conscious. Last Friday afternoon, he arrived promptly to his newish hotel in New York, the 100-room Smyth Tribeca at 85 West Broadway, dressed for the part: rumpled and rough shaven, dark hair gelled back, revealing a face whose close-set brown eyes recalled Patrick Swayze, and whose full cheeks recalled Tim Russert. He wore a black jacket over a gray sweater, distressed jeans and canvas sneakers without shoelaces.

“As you can see, the hotel has a kind of eclectic, masculine point of view,” Mr. Pomeranc continued. As he spoke, his right hand on his hip, his left a half-open gesticulating claw, two striking women in black V-necks sauntered by and assumed their positions behind the check-in desk, which, with its backdrop of glass shelves occupied by vaguely menacing cohorts of antique toys, looked more like a bar in a hip financier’s Tribeca loft. 

“It has a touch of the bachelor pad,” Mr. Pomeranc said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not extremely welcoming to the female psyche as well.”

He rolled through the hotel lobby, followed by a coterie of female press attachés and his general manager, pointing out the mid-century Brazilian furniture, the pencil drawings by Santiago Rubino. The décor, he said, was evocative of both The Thomas Crown Affair and male suit material. A bar filled out the end of the room. Its surface was made of glass manipulated to look like a thick block of ice, and its wall was covered with pink crocodile leather.

“Downtown,” proclaimed Mr. Pomeranc of his target market, “is effectively melding into one neighborhood.”

How sad.

“Yes and no. It’s not so much that the neighborhoods are diluting, it’s that the psychology of the guests is opening up.

“I think the real separation now is between uptown and downtown.”

Lest there be any doubt, Mr. Pomeranc, 38, and a Soho resident, is of the downtown ilk. Though it took him a while to get there. He grew up in Queens and then on 67th Street and Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side. He ultimately transitioned downtown via an N.Y.U. education and well-publicized relationships with the actress Shannen Doherty and Ali Wise, the former Dolce publicist now in the tabloids for allegedly hacking into the phones of her ex-boyfriends’ girlfriends.

Does he worry that he opened his hotel in one of the worst economic downturns to hit New York since the 1930s?

“Look, I think you always do,” he said, leaning, ankles crossed, against the brown leather walls of the elevator, which was carrying him to a ninth-floor “signature suite.” “I hope, at least, or I believe, the worst of that cycle is behind us.”

The elevator opened onto a hallway painted chocolate brown. “Hotels,” he continued, “in a down cycle are the first to suffer, and in an up cycle, they are the first to return.”

The signature suite felt more like an apartment. A perfect apartment. Tom Dixon–designed cone lights. A full kitchen. A full kitchen table. Extraordinary views. On the wall was a piece by John Sparagana, who deconstructs fashion photographs.

We descended to the ground floor, where famed French restaurateur Frederick Lesort will reopen the Jour et Nuit brasserie this spring, the bar and lounge in the basement below.

Back in the lobby, Mr. Pomeranc posed for a photograph. Which, thanks to concerns about his appearance, turned into a 29-minute photo shoot. The wispy, Chapin-educated Lake Bell dropped by. She was shooting a new HBO show upstairs called How to Make It in America. She wore chunky high heels, skinny pants and her long brown hair half tied back. Mr. Pomeranc kissed her broad-cheekboned face hello.

“You’re doing a photo shoot?!” she giggled.

IN MORRIS MOINIAN'S NEW Hotel Indigo at 127 West 28th Street, one image is painted on the walls opposite the elevator banks on every floor. It’s a photo by fashion photographer Marco Glaviano of a dark-haired woman in a flowing violet dress holding a dark umbrella jauntily over her head as she saunters through the rain.

At the hotel, she’s known as “the rain lady.”

Last Wednesday, Joe Moinian’s little brother Morris, 47, sat on the blue velvety couch at the Hotel Indigo’s entrance between Sixth and Seventh avenues.

From the outside, the Indigo looks like something the hotelier-to-the-masses Sam Chang–Gene Kaufman machine might build. Aside from the glass overhang on the ground level, and an angled glass window, the facade was basically dull bare brick.

Mr. Moinian, like his older brother, a big developer, started out in the garment business. And, like his older brother, Mr. Moinian is an unabashed dandy. That Wednesday afternoon, he wore a double-breasted suit over a white mesh shirt, a polka-dot tie stopping an intentional inch above his waistline, and pointy-toed loafers with little heels.

The hotel had opened the day before. It is Mr. Moinian’s only hotel in New York City. He used to own the Dylan on 41st Street, where he earned notoriety for his and business partner Britney Spears’ failed restaurant NYLA.

He sold the Dylan in 2007, he says for “economical reasons, a cashing-in of profits.”

His new venture is the 122-room Indigo, part of the Intercontinental Hotel Group. Another developer is building a Hotel Indigo on Duffield Street in downtown Brooklyn.

If Mr. Pomeranc’s Smyth harks back to the pre-cataclysm days when pink crocodile skin was considered an appropriate wall-covering, Mr. Moinian’s new boutique feels decidedly more cost-conscious. The lighting fixtures don’t seem quite so extravagant (or attractive). The dominant artwork is not original, but rather photographs licensed from Mr. Glaviano.

“The entire property is very vibrant, colorful, which I believe is the way to go in the future,” Mr. Moinian said. “You walk in the room, and the room smiles at you.”

He was standing in a  room on the building’s 18th floor. There was a large flat-screen TV, white and red couches atop a red area rug. Wood floors. A mural of spools of thread recalling the hotel’s proximity to the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Mr. Moinian peered out the window, admiring the skyline of water tanks, and guffawed at a neighboring rooftop covered with a motley array of potted plants. “Take a look—the guy is like in the Hamptons,” laughed Mr. Moinian. We were in the flower district. The hotel itself is couched in between Associated Cut Flower and 28th Street Orchids. 

“Now, we’ll show you our rooftop!” Mr. Moinian said.

The rooftop will be called the Glass Bar. It takes its name from the 7-foot-high perimeter glass separating drinkers from the abyss below, and it will be lit indigo blue.

“Blue lights all around, blue light everywhere,” said George Buchelli, the hotel’s general manager.

“I’m saving the best for last,” Mr. Moinian said. “Next stop is the restaurant, called the Blu, B-L-U.”

“You will love it. It’s full of art. Full of charm,” he said. “It’s designed in a very clubby atmosphere.”

Indeed, the restaurant looked charming. There were Italian-style chandeliers, forty colorful, happy photographs by Jonas Mekas. “Also, the mirrors are angled so you can see everybody from every point in the restaurant,” Mr. Moinian said.

Two men walked by carrying a plastic bin full of raw, beheaded chickens.

Mr. Moinian led the way to the kitchen, from whence, presumably, the chickens came. There, Roberto Bellissimo, formerly of Le Cirque, will reign.

Perhaps it’s a prerequisite of the hotel developer gig, but Mr. Moinian, like Mr. Pomeranc, professed himself utterly lacking in fear amid the economic wreckage.

“It’s going to be great,” Mr. Moinian said softly, back in the lobby, nary a smile to be seen on his weary-looking face. “It’s going to be great.”

drubinstein@observer.com