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

[This mural on the outside wall was designed by Steve Powers aka ESPO] “This little tag line that the outer borough president came up with is what we sang while we were trying to get money for the project: ‘the fourth largest city in America.” What were some of the biggest hurdles you faced at the beginning? "At the beginning just convincing a bank that it was feasible at all. When we started everyone was still riding high and money was free for all sorts of working ideas. It was probably the best thing for us that that stopped being the case, we had to really work at convincing people to finance a project like this. Because otherwise this doesn’t happen – it becomes a Hilton or another chain."