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New York's Hudson Hotel Balances the Chic and Fantastical

by Denise McCluggage

Young, hip hotel stayers don't put things in drawers, don't mind touching both walls of their room with outstretched hands and don't much care if room service takes a few hours as long as the place has an edgy design, CD players, Internet access and a rep as the "in" place to hang.

At least that seems to be the trend for so-called boutique hotels of which the Hudson Hotel on West 58th street (near Columbus Circle) in New York is a prime example. It was opened to much hoopla in October of 2000 by Ian Schrager who might have invented the genre of hotel as theater or in-spot-night-spot (after all there is Studio 54 looming large in his past.) His re-do of the Royalton across the street from the Algonquin was buzz-fodder a decade or more ago.

The 1000-room Hudson was once a women's residence (elevator rumor said for abused women). The closet-dimensions of the rooms, apparently unchanged, suggest none had a hobby of swinging cats. Clearly some heavy duty remodeling went on and designer Philippe Starck has produced what I think is an exclamation point, quotation marks and a double dash of a place. Though not all agree.

I first experienced the Hudson, as one of some 300 journalists ensconced there by a consortium of carmakers for the New York auto show last Easter week. I might well have been the only one of the motoring writers who didn't grouse about it. All the elevator conversation consisted of grumblings about the shoebox rooms, the absence of any place to put anything, the dudgeon-dark hallways, the turtle-paced room service and the unresponsiveness of management to complaints about linens not being changed every day.

Uh, well, as I said I dug it. Enough to return on my own for a week of theater-going in mid October. Though far from being young and not hip since it was spelled "hep" I nonetheless fell for the Hudson. Why? It's the Starckian style that ranges from chic to cheeky that did it. For me the Hudson works great as an environment for amusement, fantasy and fun.

It's not meant to be your 30's-movie luxury hotel - bug-eyed dogs leashed to fur-smothered matrons; it's meant to be a to-the-moment fashion statement that you wear for sleeping. Staying here - and enjoying it - reveals as much about you as the book in your pocket, the shoes on your feet and the music in your earphones. Or so Ian Schrader might say. As for me, I just like spaces and objects that make me chortle. (Laughs come easy, it's those chortles one lives for.)

But let's deal first with my colleagues' gripes in no particular order.

The gray dark hallways. Hey, it's bright enough to see where the feet go, so what's the problem? A minority again, I liked the scattered pools of light. Maybe because I imagined a trench-coated Jimmy Durante turning in each spot for a wave before moseying on to the next puddle of bright. Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, indeed. (A cultural reference probably lost on Generation X and Y.)

Those unchanged sheets. Had my friend been more observant he would have seen the printed card that said if you wanted fresh linen put that card on your pillow. As for the manager taking three days to respond to him, inexcusable. But I never deal with managers.

And as for leisurely room service, that's another thing I rarely deal with. Particularly in New York. I like to find neighborhood diners with round stools at the counter. Or bakeries and delis and then maybe stroll around snowing doughnut powder on my black jacket.

Now for the smallness of the rooms. No escaping that. Except to imagine you are on board ship. Not by chance is the dark wall paneling reminiscent of an ocean liner cabin. To lighten the mahogany is a filmy white curtain, floor to ceiling, which pulls across the wall to separate the entry from the room. I smile. Such a ploy. But the room seems airier and a bit mysterious because of it. Chortle.

In my room for the first stay in April, such a curtain offered teasing visual separation from the bedroom (all but carpeted with bed) from the shower! Yes, the tiny bathroom, white as a birthday cake, was half walk-in shower. The wall of the shower was a full plate glass window. (There's also a more opaque curtain in the shower should modesty prevail.) My second room lacked that glass.

A neat and minimal stainless steel desk and chair edge the foot of the bed. Inviting with a high-style lamp but useful more in fantasy. In actuality the desk was a rare place apart from the bed on which to put anything. Using the desk as a desk always involved transferring stuff to the floor or the bed. And somehow the absence of drawers or shelf space made me feel guilty for needing them. Like I was cluttering an Architectural Digest photo with my human presence.

In my April room I was blessed with a rather serious closet (no doors of course.) Maybe it was five feet long with a center stack of shelving flanked by two hanging spaces. A clothes-putting place - what a concept!

My second room was a scosh larger in floor space, but the closet was half the size with no handy shelves. I had to keep my suitcase on the luggage rack and live out of it. Bummer for a week.

There's one nice "storage" touch - something that looks like an elongated soap dish is fastened to the wall near the door. No burrowing for door keys in that confusion on the desk.

And another. A sort of small gilt barrel pulls out from under the glass bedside shelves and thus nearly doubles the putting-on space. My Sony Vaio laptop even fit, bless its tiny-ness.

So as a solo traveler I like the Hudson rooms. They're very New York. My Greenwich Village flat, where I lived shortly after the rocks cooled, had a 10x10 living room with the other spaces appreciably smaller. But for a couple, not so marvelous.

Two colleagues, both over six feet tall and lumbered with lots of camera equipment, laptops and clothes for a New York working week, were seriously inconvenienced by the shortfall of footage in their room. And when he gave her space to dress for dinner by removing himself to the bar he really went ballistic - they wouldn’t let him in the bar because he had no reservation! (That's the price for being placed in an "in" place.) The management also failed to respond to that complaint. No wonder his jaw dropped when I told him I was returning to the Hudson by choice.

So my friends hated the place. "Don't you like the style?" I asked. She: "Love the style, hate the function." FYI.

The Hudson indulges in the preciousness of not having the hotel's name on the building's exterior. Worth a chortle. I found that little conceit, as I found much in the Hudson, more camp than pretentious. Though Hudson haters like to call it pretentious. Pretentious of them.

After entering an odd sort of space a narrow escalator (in a rather bilious light) takes you up to the lobby. It seems to be roofed in a vault of vines. A great crystal chandelier hangs in careful asymmetry over the long massive reception counter facing you. Why would I not be surprised if a large worried rabbit in a waistcoat ran by checking his pocket watch? (I get these thoughts sometimes. I've not mentioned them before now.)

Maybe it is the view through the window behind the reception desk out on a garden with tall narrow trees and a huge watering can, taller than an NBA center. (Living in a culture given more to miniaturization I find gigantisms particularly appealing. Log-sized pencils, baseball-mitt chairs. And now this watering can.)

The outdoor space has long outdoor tables and chairs but also large floor cushions and low tables in clusters, like a restaurant specializing in couscous. This looks like a wonderful partying place but my odd timing has always found it empty. I liked it empty.

At the end of two hallways flanking the outdoor room are two wonderful spaces. One with factory-high brick walls all around is the so-called cafeteria (though I was wait-person-served when I was there.) Great long narrow communal tables, heavy oak, give me more flash images of Alice-in-Wonderland. I swear I heard a Mad Hatter. Perhaps it’s the high baronial chairs at tables' end. Prep school tables and benches and then that. Worth a chortle. (And try sitting in one of those and not pick up the check.) A pleasant and unique place to eat, indeed.

If you tire of people-watching, attend to the doings in the on-display kitchen smack in the middle of the room. Or find shadow patterns in the great brick walls in the play of light.

At the end of the other hallway is a delightful room, the library. And not library in name only. You don't know anyone with a coffee table that could hold a tenth of the books of that genre available for contented perusing while deep in a leather chair. Cue the rain please. A fireplace. Table groupings. A bar in the corner. A purple-topped billiards table under a veritable igloo of a light. And whimsical cow portraits in stylish millinery high on the wall. Worthy ancestors.

But I have not mentioned what is probably the Hudson's main attraction, certainly what draws the non-guest celebrities and entourages up the escalator. I speak of the vast glass-floored bar with its Louis Whoever furniture lighted from below. The bar is sandwiched in light with the ceiling a stilled whirl of color created by Francesco Clemente. (All this bardom is over your head as you ride the escalator and directly across from the reception desk.)

Actual fact, I never entered that space. The Hudson is like one great pop-up book and that's one page whose intricacies I did not explore. I liked the view of it from the lobby, like a holiday store window with the mannequins playing at being real people. I sit in a chair that probably was chain-sawed from a solid log and watch. Then move to another fanciful seat. I think heaven has a flea-market and Schrader and Starck know where it is.

Okay, now let's talk marketing. As if Schrader isn't expert enough he hires some live ones. Before his hotels are built the buzz, like a swarm of steroid-crazed honeybees, builds beyond the horizon. The Hudson used a neat device: to style and youth and in and cool they added affordability. Room prices starting at $99, the publicity crowed. That got the Hudson mentioned in every budget or discount hotel website on the Internet.

And the Hudson made the cover of Travel + Leisure representing a story on the best hotels under $200. Even the wise traveling Zagats talking to Bryant Gumble on CBS gave the Hudson a welcome breeze of airtime. "How can they make money at that price?" Bryant asked, ingenuous as ever. Well, the answer is, of course, that "that price" is a chimera. (Maybe that's the source of these unbidden Alice in Wonderland images I kept getting.)

Probably there is a $99 room. Hey, two or three out of the 1000? But I think it is all croquet with the queen. And I don't care.When I first checked into the Hudson I looked at the slip of paper they gave me about my room. The price was listed as $325 a night. I checked with other journalists. The rate for one whose room was unimportantly larger than mine was more than $400. Another said his was $175.

The Zagats appeared to believe that the $99 room charge was real. "But for very small rooms," they told Bryant. Well, I reckon the only room in the hotel smaller than my April room was summoned by the press of a button and went up and down.

As I left I asked at the desk for a rate card. The sweet young thing (all are sweet and young at the Hudson) said: "Oh, we don’t have a rate card. It just depends on who calls and when."

I wonder if management knows she is saying that?

Anyway, armed with that information when I decided to make by periodical pilgrimage from New Mexico to New York for immersion theater I called the Hudson p.r. department. I said I was going to write about my trip to NYC and would probably mention the Hudson and I would like the best room rate available for the week. I did not mention $99. A few weeks later I was called back and told I had a room for $125 (taxes take that to almost $150.)

To me, a devotee of cheap motels that's heavy duty. But what else was a dispossessed freeloader to do? My friends with whom I usually crash in the Big Apple had sold out and moved to California. It wasn't $99, but it wasn't $325 either. And it was within walking distance of every museum and theater I intended to visit.

My plans were made in mid-summer. After September 11, I called the Hudson to assure them I was still coming. I had the impression that wasn't the usual call they were getting in the wake of the disaster.

I had a dandy time. Cool and hip and chortling. That Hudson is jes' fine.

(Note: I must relate an elevator story. On my first time at the Hudson I missed no few elevators. Fully loaded? No. Neither the elevators nor me. It's that they arrived at the floor quietly and unnoticed, sighed open and shut again, while I paced back and forth in front of them like a bear in a carnival shooting gallery. If I was at one end of the bank the elevator at the other end came. This time at the Hudson I noted with delight that they had installed two smart round lights by each elevators - one red, one white - to proclaim its imminent arrival and direction of travel. Now that's good design.)

For more information on The Hudson and other Ian Schrager hotels, click here.