NYC Hospitality Innovator Sponsored By Heineken: The Wythe Hotel's Peter Lawrence, Encouraging Us To Wake Up In Williamsburg

I want to talk about the nightlife scene in Brooklyn. How much of what you do revolves around the nightlife scene here? Is it a big focus? “Not at all. We completely naively built that little bar up [on the rooftop] thinking it would be this nice little hotel bar for people to bring their friends and for the guests to have a cocktail – and the second night we opened there were 40 people in line waiting to go up and I was like “Oh.” No it’s totally great, but as you know it brings a certain set of problems, with people sleeping above and below and how do you make sure the bar is great and also protect those people’s options to go to bed at 9:30pm if that’s what they want to do. It never was really part of the plan from day one to be part of the nightlife in the way that you’re talking about it, but the Brooklyn nightlife scene is obviously really vibrant and I think that it’s really difficult to do something out of the box in Manhattan these days, the rents preclude the idea that if you’re two smart kids that want to max out your credit cards and open a bar for $50k - you cant do that in Manhattan anymore, you can do it in Brooklyn.”