A New Meatpacking District Standard

If you’re here for the sexy side of the Standard Hotel, visit Sexy Futures: A Sexy Voyeurism: New York’s HIgh Line, The Standard Hotel & the Whole Darn Neighborhood. Beware: the photos are naughty.

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We’re back in the High Line, the old freight railroad that’s been transformed into a park on stilts. André Balazs’s modish Standard hotel is open for business. Rising from one of the city’s most sought-after sites, in the heart of the Meatpacking District, two glass-curtain slabs literally jump the tracks of the High Line,

Hotelier André Balazs, standing on the High Line, with the Standard towering above him. Photographs by Todd Eberle.The new Standard is situated on a small plot of land that is one of the most intensely sought-after development sites in the city. According to Vanity Fair, MePa—until recently a Weegee-esque province of bloody-smocked meat workers and transgender prostitutes—has become a high-rent district of shops, restaurants, and clubs.

The Standard, is a Le Corbusier–style glass-slab building, floating above the High Line. Theoretically built in the architectural inspiration of Manhattan’s Lever House, it’s not a particularly attractive building to me, driving by.

The rest of the design world apparently disagrees with me, generally calling the architecture pre-emptively fabulous.

“We had to be sensitive to this new landmark,” Balazs continues. “It tramples through our site, but it also defines it. That said, we wanted to not be overly shy or reverent toward it. Whatever we put up there would have to jump the train tracks.”

One of the streamlined guest rooms, with a midcentury feel.The  New York Standard joins already hip siblings in LA and Miami.

For more on New York’s High Line redevelopment project: see Cultural Creatives: The High Line.

See also Anne’s YouTube RedTracker: High Line video: