March 20, 2006

Blue Moon open, kosher restaurant coming late spring

Housed in a converted tenement building, the Lower East Side's new Blue Moon Hotel is courting guests who want to be surrounded by history even while they sleep.

Before renovation, all the upstairs living quarters had been empty for six decades, owner/developer Randy Settenbrino said, except for a lot of abandoned items now incorporated into the hotel -- from cast iron stoves and colored-glass bottles to shopping receipts and a little boy’s French and Hebrew homework. (Morris Adler, if you're still alive, your P.S. 42 homework from October 1936 is now hanging on the walls of the Blue Moon Hotel.)

Originally a five story tenement, it had 15 single-room apartments with shared bathrooms in the hallway, one double apartment, and commercial space at ground level. But as a renovated boutique hotel, three stories have been added on top but the dimensions of the rooms are nearly unchanged, save for new bathrooms in each room. Back in the day, each room would have been home to "a couple families – five, six, seven, eight children -- maybe more," Settenbrino said.

A stove salvaged from one of the apartments now serves as the lobby's coffee and tea station, some rooms have their original walnut shutters, the bathroom doors are original to building, the tile from the vestibule has been reworked into the lobby's floor, and collages have been made from ephemera found at the site. "Prince Fahmy's Marriage is Finished by Two Bullets in the Great Hotel Savoy" screams one headline from the Sunday News, July 6, 1930. A cigarette ad touts that "20,679 physicians say Luckies less irritating." Even the frames are made from wood molding saved from the building's renovation.

A two-level kosher restaurant, which Settenbrino hopes to open in late spring, will serve lunch and dinner with an "immigrant-fare menu" of East European Jewish and Italian recipes from Settenbrino's family. It will be called Sweet Dreams. By this summer, half of the hotel's lobby will be converted into a wine bar.

Settenbrino, a painter by training who also operates New Amsterdam Real Estate, was coy when asked about the real estate listing that has the Blue Moon on the block for $20 million. "If somebody wants to pay that price, if they understand what it's about, they understand the integrity, it could be for sale," he said.

The Blue Moon is as much about Settenbrino as the history of the neighborhood. He painted the mural and a series of framed paintings in the lobby, assembled the collages and oversaw all the work he didn't actually do himself.

"This is not off-the-shelf stuff," he said. "Nothing’s cookie-cutter here."

The carpet has a "Victorian feel," (which along with the bedspreads might make you think not only "period feel" but "grandma’s house.")

Although there is free wireless Internet throughout the building, not all rooms have desks. Many rooms have generous balconies, though no patio furniture as of yet. The rooms are large by Manhattan standards, with mini-refrigerators and several with convertible couches or trundle beds. The TVs get cable, including stations in German, Italian, Russian, Hebrew and Spanish.

Still in its soft opening, guests weren't evident the day NewYorkology toured the building last week. Settenbrino declined to say how many guests have stayed at the hotel thus far, but said it's "more heavily booked on the weekends."

The starting rates are $275 during the week and $330 on weekends, which he compared to three other hotels and called Blue Moon "great rooms and a steal for the money."

Nearby, the Howard Johnson Express Inn has a room for this Saturday night at $189; The Hotel on Rivington starts at $350 this Saturday and the Holiday Inn Downtown/SoHo is booked on Saturdays until April 8, when a room can be had for $259.

The Blue Moon Hotel is located at 100 Orchard St. just below Delancey, map.

Earlier: Blue Moon Hotel opens in restored tenement building

March 20, 2006 11:43 AM in Architecture, Downtown, History, Hotelology

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