The Bowery Hotel

The cornerstone of The Bowery Hotel says 1954. The hotel went up between 2002 and 2004, on the site of a garage. The date has some claim to the corner all the same: the Dry Dock Savings Bank stood here from the 1870s until 1954. Eric Goode, who founded the hotel with Sean MacPherson, weighed a modernist Japanese scheme first, and the old world won outright. The brick tower wears iron stars and steel windows gridded like a warehouse's. In the lobby, velvet and leather armchairs are drawn up to a stone fireplace with a pointed arch, and nothing is playing: MacPherson wanted the place a notch more adult than their others. Upstairs, green velvet chairs sit at a small table in the window, and a bath set in marble looks out over the downtown rooftops and their water towers.

Recommended for grown-ups who want downtown Manhattan on foot, and a fireplace to come back to. The New Museum is across the street, and the hotel lends bikes free, which turns the East Village and the Lower East Side into a loop rather than a string of cab rides. Gemma, the trattoria downstairs, cures its hams by a wood-fired oven under green tiles, and sends up the room service too. The lobby bar is kept for hotel guests, and those who have stayed call it cosy. Dogs are welcome, and so are children, with a cot for the Studio Suite. Katz's Delicatessen, nine minutes' walk south on Houston Street, counts its years from 1888, when the deli belonged to the Iceland brothers and the Katzes had yet to arrive: on this stretch, the date on a building is open to interpretation.