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
