So this Saturday, my friend, singer Darling Cait, held her birthday party at the Loft Suites at The Ace Hotel. There will be a whole post on that fiasco later but long story short, ultimately the party went off without a hitch and it was quite gorgeous, no thanks to The Ace Hotel.  I, personally, had to spend the majority of the night running up and down from the ninth floor to deal with management who seemed to be trying to make us miserable on purpose, and retrieve guests from the bitter cold and bring them upstairs.

ANYWAY LIBERTY HALL….

While it is quite obvious that The Ace is doing everything in it’s power to not be the next Jane, the Ace lobby bar is quite the hot spot for media elites – I even ran in to Gawker founder, Nick Denton.  By 1o:30 PM, you could not even get in to TAH unless you were a hotel guest, or a hotel guest was coming outside to get you * how I spent 75% of the night.* Around 12:30, 30 minutes past the curfew Ace Management set for us – *yes, that’s right, although we dropped mad loot on the room, everyone had to be out by midnight, and they had hotel security monitoring the hotel room to ensure that happened* we migrated down to Liberty Hall, the Ace’s newest lounge.

Pics via Eater

While the space is definitely aesthetically pleasing with a cool speakeasy atmosphere, the crowd was bleh.  And the music – well there was no music – the DJ never showed up and while there was some hotel employee fiddling around on his Macbook, he eventually called it quits around 2AM.   Needless to say, we are glad we didn’t reserve a table with bottle service – it’s not really that kind of place either.  The theme at Liberty Hall is luxury meets no frills.  The table, chairs, and couches *which are very comfy!* are very antique-y opulance with a touch for comfort homeliness.  The bars and DJ booth are made with folding tables – very makeshift.  Word on the street is The Ace plans to use this space as a music performance space and open a separate piano/Tin Pan Alley/Boxing themed bar from Ken Friedman.  Although I am not sure if  The Ace Hotel even needs three large bars plus the Breslin, but whatever.

The Liberty Hall definitely has a lot of potential as a nightlife competitor.  The space is definitely cool – but its kind of boring if that makes sense. I am not sure what the hotel’s intentions are with LH, if they want to be a nightly hotspot, or just another alternative to The Lobby Bar.  I guess we will see what happens once they roll out their performance space element and really get things together.    As of now, you get to Liberty through the main lobby.  No door man. No questions. You just walk right on downstairs.  I even went in carrying a drink from my hotel room (FTW!)  My friends and I used to chill at the Lobby Bar quite often and we were super stoked when we heard they were opening up a new ‘speakeasy’ type place – but overall we were disappointed. If you are heading to The Ace, I would just kick it upstairs.  The music and scene is much better.

Liberty Hall at The Ace Hotel
20 W 29th St @ Broadway
[DOWNstairs]