"Due to gentrification, the Ear Inn now allows poodles."

I mentioned how much I loved Philip Johnson's Glass House a while back; I didn't know that Johnson's last commission was a NYC development called the "Urban Glass House," a glass and concrete condo loosely reinterpreting the original (right next to the historic Ear Inn, and not too far from Bill and Amy's apt):


Turns out the developer who's responsible for the Urban Glass House is also building a hotel around the corner from our apt in the West Village (on a footprint that used to be the home of Mookie's vet). Though it's getting the usual NIBMY reaction from local critics (it'll be the only hotel in the immediate vicinity, and I suppose that risks undermining the small-town feel of the WV a bit), the proposed version looks pretty cool to me from a design perspective. Rather than a glass and steel design that has become pretty popular in lower Manhattan, it's going to mimic the brick facades that are more common in the neighborhood: