Arlo Williamsburg

We lived on Wythe Avenue, just down the street from what was then The Williamsburg Hotel, so our stay here was a staycation and the journey to it was a stretch of our own pavement. Which room we had, we cannot remember. As neighbours we knew the place from the roof and the bar, coming in for drinks and for the pool on a day pass, and that is the hotel we remember.

It opened in 2017, eight floors with interiors by Michaelis Boyd, and since a sale in 2023 it has traded as Arlo Williamsburg. The suites are not short of jokes: one has a chair carved in the shape of an open hand, and a gold pineapple holding up the glass coffee table. One bathroom is more serious, and better for it: glossy turquoise tiles laid like brick, and a freestanding bath at a full-height window with the Empire State Building in it. Five of the twelve room types have City View in their names, and those are the ones to ask for.

The roof is the reason to come. The pool is 40 feet long, with Manhattan laid out along the far side of the East River. Up here too are a covered terrace, sofas set out on artificial turf under a glass canopy, and the Water Tower, a glass drum banded in timber with a deck running round it, where the cocktails come with the skyline. On a quiet weekday we would sit up there with a drink and a book and look across the water at the city, feeling lucky to be living in it. Non-guests can still buy a day pass, as we did, though the pool shuts through the winter.

Weekends were another matter: the roof was a poser's paradise. Resident DJs now play the pool every Saturday and Sunday from noon, and the Water Tower has DJ nights on Fridays and Saturdays, which hardly suggests the posers have moved on. The skyline is the same on a Tuesday. The crowd is not. Weeknights were good downstairs too, where in our time the café bar had live music and it was worth dropping in for a drink and whatever was on. Some of the musicians were far better than a hotel bar on a weeknight had any right to expect. The ground floor now belongs to Sungold, pasta and wood-fired pizza, with a lobby bar beside it.

Out of the door, Williamsburg does the rest. Bedford Avenue and the L train are seven minutes' walk, with Music Hall of Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bowl in the streets around it, and the East River Ferry is ten. On the waterfront, Domino Park and East River State Park look back at the same skyline as the roof, and on Saturdays Smorgasburg's food market sets up in East River State Park: somewhere to spend the hours while the roof belongs to the posers.