40 hotels in Brooklyn... some imaginary

While the Brooklyn Eagle reported about all the upcoming hotel projects coming up in Brooklyn, they said this about the existing hotels:

They join The Marriott on Adams Street (656 rooms with its new addition); the conjoined Aloft/Sheraton on Duffield Street (500 rooms); Hotel Indigo, also on Duffield Street (164 rooms);

And Brownstoner dutifully republished the information here. These article follow up an Eagle article from December 2009 talking about the ongoing construction of Hotel Indigo.

The Duffield Street Blog now has exclusive photos from inside the hotel! It is the most cutting edge hotel, neo-post-modernist design, as you can see from this photo taken January 29, 2010:



Somehow, everyone missed the grand opening of this exciting new hotel.

....Maybe because the opening didn't happen. Brownstoner already reported on the BS of statements touting the opening of Hotel Indigo by the end of 2009. So I guess the folks at Brownstoner have stopped reading Brownstoner, and few bother to fact-check press releases.

Duffield Street photo essay

Here are photos from January 6, 2010.

The new gym:


The hotel at 237 Duffield Street. Several reports a few months ago said that this would be open by the beginning of 2010:



The foundation of the V3 hotel at 229-231 Duffield Street. The previous building had a false wall in the basement that several academics think could have been a stop on the Underground Railroad:


Another view of 229-231 Duffield Street construction:


This building is slated for demolition by the NYC Economic Development Corporation:


This building is also slated for demolition. The ground floor is home to an African-American themed bookstore:


Another set of buildings slated for demolition in order to make way for a mini-park and underground parking lot:


The former site of the Albee Square Mall. This is the planned location of the City Point project, recipient of Stimulus funds. For more on this project, read Feds’ CityPoint bailout is a bad use of taxpayer dollars:

Is Hotel Indigo going to be completed this year?

The New York Post, it seems, published a developer's press release without bothering to fact checking. Here is what they wrote about V3 in MORE INN STORE FOR B'KLYN:

Ground will be broken next week on a 19-story, 130-room boutique hotel on Duffield Street between Willoughby and Fulton streets, Long Island City-based V3 Hotels said yesterday.

Three other hotels are already under construction on the same block, and together would bring another 645 rooms. That includes the hip 23-story Hotel Indigo, also built by V3, and new Sheraton and Aloft hotels.

The V3 hotel is expected to open in spring 2011, while the 165-room Hotel Indigo is to be completed by the end of the year.

A few other publications followed suit, including Brownstoner and The Real Deal. The part that is off-base is the completion date of Hotel Indigo, which is planned for 237 Duffield Street. Here are photos dated June 19, 2009. :





Apparently the scaffolding at 237 Duffield has come down in recent days, suggesting that the end-of-year completion date is pure fiction. When the hotel was first announced in 2007, it was slated to be completed at the end of 2008. Here is the Brownstoner post from August 2007.