Hotel on Rivington

Hotel on Rivington

When first opened in 2004 -- a shiny, 21-story all-glass postmodern monolith in the shabby, six-story Lower East Side -- the Hotel on Rivington was hailed, by critics and fans alike, as the great frontier of New York's gentrification, an effort to remake the city not with bulldozers but cranes, not like Robert Moses but like the Tower of Pisa. Though the hotel offers visitors exceptional luxuries and amenities -- panoramic floor-to-ceiling views, tempur-pedic mattresses, Japanese soaking tubs, heated bathroom floors -- the critics have been largely vindicated. Built on the cheap, the structure has already aged considerably, not a beacon but a dingy and damaged monument, a failed experiment that has nevertheless been repeated a dozen times elsewhere in the neighborhood. The hotel bar is a chic but inviting street-level space that is hugely popular--and, despite the expense, deservedly so--but the highly-touted restaurant (THOR) has been a revolving door for less and less impressive chefs since it's opening, and isn't good for much more than a lazy meal for hotel guests.