“Dubai on the Bowery” Has Neighbors Outraged

The new Cooper Square Hotel is making enemies left and right

Neighbors of the Cooper Square Hotel have had their fill of the "d-bags" that frequent the new hot spot.

"You cannot be this close to people and expect them not to retaliate," Carrie Schneider, a writer whose window is three short feet from the patio bar, told The New York Post.

A June 2 meeting has been scheduled for neighbors of the hotel to come together with reps from the hotel to discuss their increasingly troubled relationship.

As recently as September, residents of the tenement building that now cowers in the shadow of the Coop were trying to be philosophical about the situation.

“I won’t order from room service,” Hettie Jones, 74 and resident of 27 Cooper Square since 1962, told The New York Times. “But it will be nice to finally have a doorman.”

Now that the hotel and its second-floor patio bar have opened, folks in the nabe have become less welcoming, particularly to patrons who wander out well past the 9 p.m. closing time.

"About 2 am a drunk woman came out to the patio and wondered at its beauty. I pulled out the megaphone and said in a store announcer kind of voice 'Attention Cooper Square Hotel douchebags: shut the hell up and get off the patio,'" one person wrote in to Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.

"Didn’t work. She said 'That makes my new york experience complete' and continued to yammer away. The hotel made a half-hearted effort to get her out of there."

Jeremiah himself foresaw just such problems in April, at the outset of what he calls "Loudmouth Weather."

"Now that it's really spring, I find myself worrying about the people who live in the building that abuts the Cooper Square Hotel. The tables and chairs have been set out on the outdoor patio. With its glass stairway to another outdoor bar, it's only feet away (in some places, mere inches) from the neighbors' windows. Their nightmare is just beginning."

The gathering storm has earned the Coop such unflattering nicknames as the Sore Thumb, the Big Vibrator, the Giant Shampoo Bottle and Dubai on the Bowery, according to Jeremiah.

But while many hate what the building has done to the East Village, others have found themselves charmed by what it brings to the skyline.

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