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The New York Observer

Trendy Hotel Gets Big Whiff of Brooklyn

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October 14, 2008 | 2:57 p.m
85 Smith Street.<br /> (Kristen Joy Watts/The Brooklyn Paper.)
85 Smith Street.
Kristen Joy Watts/The Brooklyn Paper.

An upstart innkeeper on trendy Smith Street is facing off with transit officials over the decision to put a bus stop right in front of his hotel's entrance.

Bertrand Nelson, general manager of Hersha Hospitality Trust's newly opened Nu Hotel, tells The Brooklyn Paper that his lobby is filling up with bus fumes and that bus riders are fouling up the hotel's restrooms.

“It’s a weird place for a bus stop,” [Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Joe] Chan told The Brooklyn Paper at the Nu Hotel’s opening party last month. “For a guest’s first experience [to be] inhaling a bunch of bus fumes — it’s less than an ideal way for them to experience a morning in Downtown Brooklyn.”

For that matter, it's a pretty weird place for a hotel, as guests also often see handcuffed prisoners being escorted into and out of the Brooklyn House of Detention across the street.

“I tell them it’s an episode of Law & Order," Mr. Nelson drily told the paper.

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