Sound familiar? A new hotel towering over the Bowery created by two successful young hoteliers. A hotel with three separate entertainment venues including a somewhat exclusive basement restaurant? Right now, I bet you're nodding and thinking, "Ooo, that does sound familiar! In fact, it sounds like the Bowery Hotel!" Well, you're both right and wrong!

Yes it does sound like Bowery Hotel, opened by Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, of Chelsea's Taavo Somer-designed restaurant named Gemma, a subterranean sushi bar AND a hotel restaurant. But now we must discuss the truly weird project called the Cooper Square Hotel.

This story has more Byzantine plot twists than a Lost episode but includes Amiri Baraka's widow, priapic cries and and Gregory Peck. That's Gregory Peck, the hotelier who, with Matthew Moss, run LA's Crescent Hotel. What it also includes is a 23-story hotel with three separate entertainment venues, one of them a somewhat exclusive basement restaurant with a separate entrance. Add to that an outdoor garden with a liquor license and two assisted living centers on the block and you have all the fixings for an epic showdown wherein, we guarantee, some concerned citizen will start screaming, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it!"

Cooper Square Hotel Fully Revealed [Curbed]
Bowery Hotel [Gridskipper]
Great Article on Neighborhood Opposition [Villager]