The quiet Standard (don't let the architecture fool you).

Andre Balazs is not known for his quietude, having developed hotels the world over famous for their parties and celebrities—the Standard Hollywood has naked people in the lobby, the Standard Manhattan has them the windows. So it is surprising to hear the hot hotelier tell Grub Street that the new Standard East Village, inside the old, alien-looking Cooper Square Hotel, will be more "residential, more quiet—more introspective, if you will."

Mr. Balazs also shared plans for his recent $90 million acquisition with The Wall Street Journal. Property manager Ironstate Development Co. and Mr. Balazs closed the deal for the Cooper Square Hotel last October.

This marks Mr. Balazs' third New York Standard, after the Meatpacking mainstay and the East End outpost he opened last summer.

Balazs plans to open by mid-fall with "an emphasis on public spaces" claiming that "good hotels are a center of their community." The lobby, restaurant, and ground floor are further being "re-imagined as public spaces." Balazs will also slash prices at the East Village location, according to The Journal, by having rooms that "start at about $190." That is about half the price of the Meatpacking District's Standard Queen for $385.

realestate@observer.com

The Real Deal, who first reported the move, called it "amicable." Westport had been a mezz lender on the hotel, where rooms now average $300 a night and occupancy's at 85 percent.

The 21-story, 145-room hotel made its debut in 2008. By December 2009, lender WestLB made moves to forclose on the $52 million in loans doled out to the developers.

mcoyne@observer.com

He was speaking metaphorically, of course, about the final push to open the glassy, 23-story, $110 million Carlos Zapata-designed building, which towers over the Bowery at the corner of East Fifth Street.

The analogy might seem apropos except for the fact that, in this case, water-breaking would be a bad thing.

“We have two major inspections tomorrow,” Mr. Ortlieb noted—one of which was plumbing. “Then we have to go through the full building inspection,” he added.

If everything checked out, he was expecting to finally deliver the brand-spankin’-new 145-room boutique hotel by Dec. 1.

Albeit lacking full motor function and a few limbs.

The first- and second-floor bar and restaurant areas, along with the top seven floors of guest rooms, remained under construction last week.

The 3,200-square-foot, two-bedroom penthouse suite was in such a crude state—its walls scrawled with construction workers’ lewd idioms—that a hotel publicist forbid The Observer from taking photographs, despite some truly stunning views of Manhattan from its largely unobstructed, 21-story perch. (The hotel’s top two floors are mechanical.)

“You can literally watch the Freedom Tower go up,” noted Mr. Ortlieb, standing on the ledge of the penthouse balcony, pointing toward the Financial District in the distance.

It may take until February, he said, for the hotel and planned Table 8 restaurant to be fully operational

Yet, ever the optimist, Mr. Ortlieb described the long-delayed debut as a sign of constant improvement. “You know, the more delayed you get, the more the building gets finished,” he said as hammering clamored in the background.

He hoped to complete another two floors of rooms by the time the first guests arrive in two weeks or so.

THE COOPER SQUARE HOTEL’s nearly four-year-long (and counting) gestation period may not be the lengthiest in local lodging history—“the Mercer was a seven-year project,” said Mr. Ortlieb, who helped launch the luxurious Soho lodge in 1998—but it is certainly among the more tumultuous.

Even the hotel’s own publicity materials concede that the project has been “somewhat controversial.”

Angry placard-wielding neighbors vigorously protested the hotel’s sprawling three-level food-and-beverage program (total capacity: 588) before management finally agreed to a long list of conditions, including some rather early closing times for the outdoor eating and drinking areas. The second-floor terrace’s 8 p.m. shuttering will send summertime revelers inside before sunset.

The squabbling continued internally, as well; the hotel’s developers, Matt Moss and Gregory Peck, two former high-school friends from Long Island, had a falling-out. While both retain an ownership stake, Mr. Peck is no longer involved in the Cooper Square’s operation, instead focusing on other projects in California and elsewhere around the country.

“I’m happy for the hotel to open,” Mr. Peck said over the phone from Los Angeles last week. “I think it will be well received. Otherwise, I’m developing a hotel in San Francisco and hunting for others.”

Happily stepping up as the public face of the project—amid all the controversy—was Mr. Ortlieb, a German-born former executive vice president at Ian Schrager Hotels, who has otherwise toiled in the shadows of bigger-name hoteliers over a 25-year career in hospitality, ranging from Claridge’s in London to the MGM Mirage in Las Vegas to the Hotel on Rivington on the Lower East Side.

“I went through it with André Balazs and Campion Platt when they broke up,” said Mr. Ortlieb, referring to the original partners at the Mercer. “I still opened the hotel.”

Mr. Ortlieb now oversees the entire operation under the auspices of MK Hotels, a fledgling management firm formed in partnership with Mr. Moss, himself a rookie hotel operator.

Talk about hitting the ground running: At least two prominent Manhattan hoteliers are rumored to be closely watching the upstart management company’s progress, with an eye toward possibly acquiring the Cooper Square, should it become distressed.

“I have tremendous confidence in Klaus’ ability to manage the hotel,” Mr. Moss, the developer, said, further dismissing any talk a sale. “Our intention is to own this hotel for years to come.”

THE HOTEL HASN'T done itself any favors in falling behind schedule: The ever-increasing occupancy levels and room rates that fueled the Manhattan hotel industry for the past four years are now leveling off, according to industry analysts.

Rates at the Cooper Square will start at a below-average nightly rate of $275, a lower-than-expected price that Mr. Ortlieb suggested was more about the ongoing construction than the overall economy.

“We still don’t have enough hotel rooms in the city,” he said. “The first week of December, you can’t get a hotel room.”

For his own part, Mr. Ortlieb has done his best to publicize the new hotel. Appearing in the August 2008 issue of GQ magazine, the lighthearted Mr. Ortlieb bluntly summed up his overall hospitality philosophy: “I tell everyone at my hotels: Provide everything the guests want except hookers and drugs.”

He further confessed his own tendency to make off with hotel ashtrays.

Speaking to The Observer last week in a model sixth-floor room, outfitted with imported Italian tile, modish furnishings, stacks of old books and a copy of Playboy from 1963, Mr. Ortlieb said he hoped future hotel guests would follow his kleptomaniac example. “I actually, to a certain degree, want you to steal,” said the avid smoker, who personally designed the Cooper Square’s signature ceramic cigarette trays. It’s about marketing, he said. “You’ll remember me!”

He insisted that public opinion of the property, humorously described on the Internet as “vibrator-shaped” and mockingly dubbed “Dubai on the Bowery,” was finally turning in the hotel’s favor.

“When this building went up, everybody was against it,” Mr. Ortlieb said. “And now, all of a sudden, it’s turning around—people actually like the building, which is interesting.”

“Right?” Mr. Ortlieb asked a hotel publicist, who was standing nearby. “When you read the blogs?”

“Yeah,” she said sheepishly.

“I don’t read the blogs,” Mr. Ortlieb confessed.

cshott@observer.com

More on the future of the city's hotels with hospitality expert John Fox in this week's print Observer.

Mr. Ortlieb, 50, a partner in the hotel's management company, MK Hotels, suggested the somewhat divisive 21-story, 145-room, Carlos Zapata-designed lodge may be just weeks away from opening.

Among other permitting issues, developer Matt Moss, who was also on hand for the festivities, said he was still trying to obtain a certificate of occupancy. (Mr. Moss' original partner in the project, Crescent Hotel developer Gregory Peck, did not attend.)

Los Angeles-based chef Govind Armstrong commandeered Mr. Ortlieb's kitchen and home office for the fete, serving up samples of porterhouse, squab and a creamy celery soup with strips of bacon.

The hotel's forthcoming Table 8 restaurant will be Mr. Armstrong's third location after L.A. and Miami.

Another innovative noise-reducing restaurant? A whopping whole other shark-fin-shaped hotel? Perhaps the bigger question: Will affable hotelier Gregory Peck still be around to see it?

Mr. Peck declined to comment about possible construction next door; his supposed partner in the Cooper Square Hotel at East Fifth Street, Matt Moss, won’t discuss plans for the site, either. “We haven’t really publicly commented on what our plans are for those properties,” he told The Observer, deferring further questions to a publicist.

Even some of the hotel’s own investors are having a tough time getting answers.

“I believe I am being and have been excluded from decisions, which as an investor member I have a right to participate in,” said stockholder Robert Becker, who, frustrated over long-ignored questions about this “next phase” of the project, went public with his complaints, posting an angry letter to Mr. Moss on his personal Web site this week.

Mr. Becker said he was “surprised” to find out that several other Cooper Square investors, led by Long Island financier Charles Feinbloom, who also owns two Hilton hotels in Plainview, N.Y., recently purchased the two lots directly adjacent to the nearly completed hotel, without so much as a head’s-up from Mr. Peck or Mr. Moss.

“These lots were to become, possibly, a restaurant-lounge and/or expansion to the Cooper hotel so we (Cooper investors) would be able to leverage the brand, amenities and staff of the Cooper Hotel next door,” according to Mr. Becker’s letter.

Albeit owning just a modest stake in the more than $65 million Cooper Square development, Mr. Becker had been hoping to boost his assets with a piece of the property-acquisition action, which the hotel’s head honchos had discussed only months before. “It remains my understanding,” he wrote, “that all investors in the Cooper Hotel would be given the opportunity to participate in the purchase of these adjacent properties when, and if, they became available.”

Mr. Moss suggested that the land deal was above-board and that all the investors were unified—except for Mr. Becker. Perhaps not surprising is the fact that the aggrieved investor came to the project not through Mr. Moss, but rather through Mr. Peck, an old family friend, who seems to know a thing or two about getting brushed to the side of a promising development, too.

The testy investor relations merely underscore a lingering rift between the Cooper’s two principals, Mr. Moss and Mr. Peck, former high-school classmates from Long Island, both in their early 30’s, whose prior friendship didn’t exactly translate into a workable business relationship.

Coming into the Cooper Square deal, Mr. Peck was a young hotelier who, having worked alongside industry titans Ian Schrager and André Balazs, had just acquired the first hotel of his own, the Crescent Hotel in Beverly Hills, and was looking to open another in downtown Manhattan.

“I had been negotiating and was very close to acquiring what is now the Bowery Hotel,” said Mr. Peck, who ultimately lost the space to local hospitality honchos Eric Goode and Sean MacPherson. “Fortunately, I was able to find a property up the road on Cooper Square.”

Mr. Moss, meanwhile, a former employee of the Related Companies, had just finished building Riverhead Centre, a 50-acre, 400,000-square-foot shopping center in Long Island.

They decided to join forces. “The timing was good for us, in terms of finding the opportunity, and wanting to try to develop it,” Mr. Peck explained. “We moved forward and started putting the pieces together, which is a lot, you know, from investors to the professional team, which includes the architect, Carlos Zapata.”

Mr. Zapata and Mr. Peck had already known each other many years. “We looked at doing several other projects together,” he said.

Mr. Peck also enlisted Klaus Ortlieb, then general manager of The Hotel on Rivington.

The duo further lined up a group of wealthy investors.

“It was a good team,” Mr. Peck said.

BUT, SOMEWHERE ALONG the line, amid significant construction delays and testy neighborhood opposition of the massive Cooper Square project, the two partners had a major falling-out.

Was it the critics? The regulatory rigmarole? Conflicting management styles? A woman? A source close to Mr. Peck indicated it was a series of conflicts.

Mr. Moss insisted the two remain friends. But the partnership formerly called Peck/Moss has never been the same. The two guys now employ separate publicists for the same hotel.

Ironically, it is not the experienced hotelier, Mr. Peck, but rather the former retail mogul, Mr. Moss, who is calling the shots at Cooper Square. He and his new partner, Mr. Ortlieb, will manage the place under the moniker MK Hotels.

Mr. Peck is still involved, according to both sides, although his partisans fear he may be pushed out entirely. In a prior interview with The Observer, Mr. Peck said, “Peck/Moss is still together and will be together through the opening of Cooper Square.” And after that? “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

If Mr. Peck is at all perturbed by his former partner’s seizing of the reins, he tries awfully hard not to show it. “Look, I want to be in the business for a long time,” he said. “I want to be as positive as I can.”

Maybe that’s just the professional hotelier in him—gracious until the bitter end.

“The project we conceived is compelling,” he told The Observer. “Fortunately, it’s moving forward and I think it’s going to be a great new hotel.”

Under the deal, outlined on local Community Board 3's Web site, the builders have agreed to restrict loiterers, taxis, and limos along East 5th Street and prohibit smoking on the hotel's second-floor terrace -- located just 30 inches from some neighbors' windows.

There will also be no music in any outdoor areas, no dancing in the basement lounge, and no sidewalk cafe on East 5th Street, among other provisions.

In exchange for the developers' compliance, CB3 will conditionally support the 21-story hotel's vast alcoholic beverage program, which includes a 95-seat restaurant and a 30-seat bar on the first floor (combined capacity: 203); a 40-seat outdoor dining area; a 23-seat bar and restaurant on the second floor; a second-floor outdoor terrace (capacity: 77); an outdoor garden (capacity: 187); and a basement lounge (capacity: 136).

Among them: The Cooper Square Hotel near Astor Place, slated to open this coming spring. Given neighborhood concerns and "rumored falling out between developers/hoteliers Gregory Peck and Matthew Moss," the oddsmakers expect delays until August.

The oddsmakers also cast doubt on Jason Pomeranc's Thompson Smyth Tribeca on West Broadway, scheduled to open next summer. "With Thompson opening two more hotels in NYC in early 2008 ... will this Tribeca property fall behind? .... All answers say a delay is inevitable."

Why so skeptical?

"Last year, our opening picks performed poorly," according to the blog, which points to Andre Balazs's Standard New York and Mr. Pomeranc's Thompson LES as delinquents. "With the exception of Six Columbus, none of the other hotels featured opened."

- Max Abelson