Downtown Accommodations

I've been to New York City more than two dozen times in my middle-aged life. We used to stay with a friend of the Mrs. who lived in Brooklyn, but eventually she got married and moved to a smaller apartment (and now they have a toddler and live in New Jersey), so we started staying in hotels.

I've stayed in a dozen different hotels in Manhattan. Some were very nice; others were merely places with a bed and a bathroom. On a couple of occasions I was alone and only there for one night, so where I stayed didn't matter so much. Nowadays, though, I tend to make hotel choices pretty carefully. I like comfort and privacy.

This is preamble to me telling you about the hotel where we just stayed, which we both felt was the best overall hotel experience we have had in Manhattan. It's called Andaz; it's a stupid name, but a great place. Andaz belongs to Hyatt Hotels, and is meant to be their equivalent to boutique hotels like Starwood's W brand. We stayed at the W on Lexington Avenue several years ago, and found the room small and mediocre, plus there was a definite cooler-than-you vibe among both guests and staff.

The Andaz Wall Street is nothing like that. It's warm and welcoming from the moment you come through the revolving door. In fact, there's usually a hotel staffer there to turn the door for you, which is especially helpful when you are maneuvering luggage. There isn't a front desk per se; there is a counter in the middle of the lobby, but staff may be found on either side of it, or roaming around.

We arrived earlier than expected, but checking in early was no problem. We were checked in while sitting on a sofa off to one side of the lobby by a staff person with a small netbook computer. (I asked about iPads; he said they are getting them soon.) Then we got a brief introduction to some of the amenities Andaz offers at each of its hotels (at the moment there are only five locations; one of those is in London, the others are in Hollywood, San Diego, and in Midtown across from the New York Public Library).

There are free newspapers, and a little "pantry" area at one end of the lobby with some complimentary snacks (cookies, apples, candied walnuts), sparkling water, orange juice, and a barista station. Yes, there is a person there whose job is to make coffee for you. So instead of a gunky in-room Mr. Coffee or a vat of industrial-solvent coffee that's been sitting for who knows how long, you get a freshly made cup of coffee, espresso, tea—whatever you feel like. There's also free wifi throughout the hotel (as I'm sure you know, one of the most obnoxious gouges of the hospitality industry is that, typically, the higher-end the hotel, the more likely it is that you will have to pay an outrageous daily charge for wifi).

The clerk went to the desk to make our keys, then escorted us up to the room and showed us around, because there was more good stuff to come. The word "minibar" can send even the most seasoned business traveler into a cold sweat. Some hotels leave a bottle of sparkling water on the desk as a "welcome gift," but if you drink it they charge you $8. Some hotels have sensors in their minibars that record a purchase if an item is merely moved, when maybe you just had some leftovers you wanted to store in the little fridge. At Andaz the in-room snacks and drinks are free, except for alcohol. So you can relax and drink a bottle of water, eat a chocolate bar, nibble on some Terra chips.

There are a couple of cool tech bits: there is a control panel next to the bed for the lighting, with settings that adjust the various lights in the room accordingly: work, relax, night light, etc. There are also buttons to lower or raise the window covers, which is really cool and fun to watch.

And the room? The standard room is about 350* square feet, larger than some hotels' upgrade rooms. (Where we stayed back in November was a nice enough hotel, but there was barely enough space in the room to get around the furniture.) The added space makes a big difference. There was a nice comfy chair between the bed and the window, with a reading lamp next to it. The bed was extremely comfortable. There were cushions on the windowsill so you could sit and look out. The bathroom was huge by hotel standards, with a four-by-six-foot (yeah, I measured it) walk-in shower with one of those rainfall heads.

The location is only a brief drunken stumble from South Street Seaport, and there's a new (only partly open, at the moment) waterfront park along the East River in the same general area. A few short blocks to the south is Battery Park. The subway lines are to the west relative to the hotel, but the closest one is only two or three minutes away, and you can walk over to the others in less than ten minutes. (Wall Street is pretty short.) And the financial district is a lot less crowded on weekends than, say, Soho or Midtown. The hotel even hosts a farmer's market on Saturdays.

As more people are choosing to live in lower Manhattan, more amenities are appearing. The city's ubiquitous Duane Reade drugstores have been getting a serious makeover, with better designs and product selections, and things like fresh produce. There's one directly across the street from the hotel, but they also just opened a ridiculous, kind of awesome 22,000-square-foot store a couple of blocks up Wall Street, where you can get a shampoo or a manicure, plus there's a smoothie counter, a prepared food section, and a sushi bar. This stuff is geared toward the thousands of folks who work in the financial district, but visitors can certainly benefit from it too.

I got an excellent deal on this stay through Jetsetter, which is the travel arm of the flash-sale site Gilt (if you're interested, you can sign up here). I paid about half the standard rate, but you can frequently find decent rates on the travel site Oyster, along with lots of real photos, not ones taken by hotel-hired pros or PR people.

(*I got this number from the hotel's web site.)