Getting there

For our recent family event, we stayed at The Livingston Hotel in Brooklyn, NY. We had a reduced rate due to the event having a block of rooms. The hotel truly was central to many restaurants - be it a corner bagel shop or a full service restaurant. Even though it was in Brooklyn, it was a short drive (~30min) from LaGuardia Airport in rush hour, and the same amount of time to the 9/11 memorial on a Saturday around noon.

Lobby/Patio

The hotel was easy to miss during the day, as it was set back from the sidewalk, so one only saw the privacy wall with plants at first glance. That privacy wall protected a small outdoor space with several tables, each with 4 seats, and a modern abstract wall mural. The lobby was small and made great use of space with coolers for water and wall nooks for snacks.

The Room

There was a short hall from the lobby that led to the elevators and the bar/restaurant. There are 2 elevators that were constantly in motion. The hotel is 22 stories, and much of it has only 5 rooms on each floor. There are some suites, but I'm not sure how many floors and how much of a floor they took up. We stayed in a deluxe room with a king bed, 1205. It was a great amount of space, including a small couch and small tables. The bathroom had a barn door, behind the barn door the 'throne' did not have it's own door. The shower had two frosted glass walls and had body wash, shampoo, and conditioner built into the wall. It had a main shower head and a wand. There were no shelves for one's own toiletries nor a ridge for shaving legs.

My mother-in-law was in a room much smaller with a single queen sized bed. One BIL and his partner had a room with two queen beds that they stated had only 9 inches between the bed and the wall.

Food and Drink

We went to the bar/restaurant on three separate occasions. The first was Friday afternoon as our room was not quite ready. We met Bartolo, the bartender. My dude, this man has skill. Daniel had an espresso martini and I had a cosmo. The second time Daniel and most of the family went there for breakfast and said the food was really good. The third time was me waiting on others, and I had one of Bartolo's creations, a sunset. That last trip I met Ty who was filling in while Bartolo took a break. He did Bartolo's recipe proud!

Service

The front desk folk we most interacted with were Mike and Abdul. Both were rays of sunshine and funny as heck. It was a pleasure each and every interaction. They also brought up ice for my MIL to ice her knee.They bent over backward to make our stay pleasurable.

Sundry

• There is a roof top patio, one side was bigger (and louder) than the other side. The larger side had some loungers, bistro tables, and chairs. There were under railing lights, making it soft lighting in the evening. The smaller side had 2 loungers and a few chairs. It felt darker on that side.

• There were not places in the room to hang more than one towel. We asked Abdul what to do. The answer was to put the towels in the hallway and housekeeping would replace them.

• Housekeeping as a standard would be done every four days, but it can be asked for more frequently.

• I had some Amazon packages delivered to the hotel, that luckily I didn't need until the last day. (We couldn't find our luggage scale before leaving home.) Sadly, my packages were delivered to another business down the street. Mike and Abdul were fantastic about checking for me. When I got the delivery notification, I found that Amazon had sent it to 292 Livingston not 291 Livingston. Sadly, that business was closed for the holiday weekend, but Tuesday morning when they opened they brought them to the hotel. According to Abdul this happens every few weeks.

• There is a known issue where the shower door doesn't fully shut and thus floods the room when one showers. When we mentioned it to Abdul, they didn't waste time sending an engineer to fix it.

• The shower floor is very flat, so water stands rather than easily flowing toward the drain. Unfortunately, there isn't much that engineering could do about that.

• We had differing feelings about how hard/soft the bed was. Daniel appreciated having both a soft and hard pillow.

Final Thoughts

The hotel, for what it is, overall exceeds expectations. Daniel describes it as a minimalist European boutique hotel; I call it more industrial. Did we want to stay in a hotel like this, no. But for the holiday weekend, it was a good deal cheaper than all other hotels in the vicinity, mostly due to the wedding block rate. In looking at the pricing for this next weekend as a comparison, it is comparable in price to nearby hotels.