“Someone has taped a handwritten sign to the fire hydrant outside that reads "Not a trash can" — and yet.”

The 6 train spits you out at Spring Street and you walk north on Bowery, which is one of those New York streets that changes personality every two blocks like it can't commit. Down by Delancey it's restaurant supply stores and lighting showrooms with dusty chandeliers in the windows. By the time you pass the old CBGB address — now a men's clothing boutique, which tells you everything — the street has decided it's fashionable. The hotel is at the corner of Bowery and Stanton, across from a place selling $17 smoothies and diagonal from a guy on a milk crate selling used paperbacks for a dollar. Both economies are thriving.

You don't check in at a desk. You check in at a kiosk, which either feels like the future or like buying a train ticket in Rotterdam, depending on your tolerance for self-service. The lobby is doing a lot — books stacked on low tables, a communal living-room arrangement with strangers on laptops, a coffee bar that pulls decent espresso until late. It's designed to make you feel like you're in a co-working space that happens to have beds upstairs. A group of French teenagers is sprawled across one of the couches arguing about something with the passion only French teenagers can muster. Nobody asks them to leave. Nobody asks anyone anything, really. The whole citizenM philosophy is that you're an adult and you can figure it out.

A room the size of a theory

The rooms are small. Let's get that out immediately. CitizenM calls them "compact" the way airlines call legroom "optimized." You get a king bed that takes up most of the space, a wall-to-wall window, and a pod bathroom with a rain shower. That's it. That's the room. Everything — lights, blinds, TV, temperature, the color of the ambient mood lighting — is controlled by a tablet on the nightstand. I spend a genuine fifteen minutes cycling through lighting options like a kid with a new toy. There's a setting that turns the whole room a slow-pulsing violet, which I imagine is intended for romance but mostly makes you feel like you're sleeping inside a lava lamp.

What the room gets right is the bed. It's absurdly good for the price point — the kind of mattress that makes you suspicious, like there must be a catch. The catch, I suppose, is that the bathroom is separated from the sleeping area by a glass wall. Frosted, but still. If you're traveling with someone you're not fully comfortable with, this is worth knowing. If you're solo, it's a non-issue, and the rain shower is strong enough to make you forget you're in a glass box in a 20-story tower on the Bowery.

Sound insulation is decent but not perfect. Around 2 AM on a Saturday, you'll hear the Bowery doing what the Bowery does — a bass line from somewhere, a cab horn, someone laughing too hard at something that probably wasn't that funny. It's not disruptive so much as ambient. You came to New York. New York is outside your window. Complaining about it would be like going to the ocean and being annoyed by waves.

“The Bowery changes personality every two blocks, like a street that can't commit — and that restlessness is exactly what keeps you walking.”

The street does the heavy lifting

The real argument for this hotel is the door it opens onto. Walk south three minutes and you're at Freeman Alley, where Freeman's restaurant hides at the end of a graffitied dead-end like it's embarrassed to be found. Head east on Stanton and you hit Katz's Delicatessen within ten minutes — get the pastrami on rye, obviously, and don't flinch at the line because it moves faster than it looks. The New Museum is a five-minute walk north, its stack of off-kilter white boxes visible from the hotel's upper floors. For coffee that isn't the lobby's, Café Integral on Rivington does a Nicaraguan pour-over that's worth the slight detour.

The rooftop bar, cloudM, is open to non-guests too, which means it gets crowded on weekend evenings. Go at 5 PM on a Tuesday if you can. The view north catches the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in the same frame, and for a few minutes you get to feel like you're in one of those photographs your grandparents had on their wall, except you're holding a US$18 cocktail and the light is doing something golden and unreasonable to the water towers.

One thing nobody mentions: the elevators are slow. Not broken-slow, just contemplative. You'll wait. You'll check your phone. You'll make brief, uncomfortable eye contact with the person next to you. It's a bonding experience, in the way that all mild shared inconveniences are.

Walking out

Leaving on a Sunday morning, the Bowery is quieter than you expected. A woman is hosing down the sidewalk in front of a restaurant that won't open for hours. The paperback guy isn't at his post yet. The smoothie place is closed but the lighting showrooms are already lit up, chandeliers burning for nobody. You notice, for the first time, a faded mural on the building across the street — something about a boxer, half-covered by scaffolding. It's been there longer than anything else on the block. It'll probably outlast the smoothie place too.

The B and D trains at Grand Street station are a seven-minute walk south. The M15 bus runs right up Bowery if you'd rather stay above ground and watch the city scroll past.

Rooms at citizenM New York Bowery start around US$179 on weeknights, climbing to US$280 or more on weekends. For that you get the bed, the tablet, the glass bathroom, and a Bowery address that puts half of downtown Manhattan within walking distance. No minibar, no room service, no pretense. Just a very good sleep on a very interesting street.