Gowanus hotel will have speakeasy-style coffee bar, community pig roasts

Another hipster-catering hotel will join the group of trendy accomodations to pop up in Gowanus over the past few years. Baltic Huis, on Baltic Street between Bond and Nevins streets, will open to the public in October 2017, bringing along with it rooms endowed with smart home tech like Amazon Alexa’s and smartphones, as well as a lobby with a speakeasy-style coffee bar.

A press release elaborates:

Neon signs will point the way to the hotel’s hidden spaces; a celebration of a lost history found. One of those hidden spaces is a subterranean coffee shop serving impeccably turned out coffees, lattes and cortados, vital to the start of any New Yorker’s day. With the whisper of a secret Dutch password, other treats such as rare Japanese whiskeys “might” be available - paying homage to the city’s lingering speakeasy spirit.

The hotel revels in the area’s industrial past, the release says, and that becomes apparent through its calling out of its proximity to the Gowanus Canal. (Baltic Huis is the first hotel to partner with the Gowanus Dredger’s Canoe Club, who do just what their name implies: canoe the Gowanus Canal.)

Gradient Architecture also incorporated “a clean concrete aesthetic” into its design of the 33 guest rooms and brought “industrial relics” into the hotel’s lobby.

The hotel will incorporate a green element with hallways lit and showers warmed by solar power. The building’s green-ness will extend to its backyard garden and red brick patio, an “adult playground with neighborhood cookouts and pig roasts, community garden parties and more.”

Hotel guests will also be offered complimentary Citi Bike passes and custom maps of local graffiti and history tours.

Baltic Huis, which borrows its name from its street and the Dutch word for home, was developed by Greenwich Street Equities.

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