The Jane Hotel Ballroom
113 Jane Street
New York, NY
Originally built as a seamen’s lodge in 1908, the brick building at 113 Jane Street has had a colorful life over the past century, hosting everything from washed-up sailors to rock concerts, budget hotel guests, and a playhouse. Now Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, the restaurateur-hotelier duo behind the Maritime Hotel and the Waverly Inn, have reincarnated it as a boutique hotel that makes up for its small bedrooms with a multi-room, two-bar ballroom on the ground floor. In preparation for its June opening, MacPherson and Goode stripped the original walls, floor, and ceiling, and tore down a mezzanine left over from the building’s playhouse days (“Quite ugly,” recalled MacPherson) which had blocked tall, arch-shaped windows. In its place they built a new, nearly freestanding mezzanine that preserves the windows’ integrity and light, and holds a bar overlooking the ballroom floor. Walls now sport a wainscoting of Majolica tiles salvaged from demolished buildings in Buenos Aires, and a silk wallpaper that softens the acoustics. Nestled in a small, adjacent space is the second bar, lined with mahogany and crowned by a latticework ceiling inlaid with panels of expressionistic stained glass. A diverse menagerie of furnishings hails from flea markets, antique stores, India, and Egypt, rounded out by several large mohair sofas that MacPherson and Goode built themselves. Then there’s the literal menagerie: a ram, a fez-sporting monkey, and a pair of preserved peacocks hang from the ceiling and walls, appearing quite at home in the faded grandeur of their now hipper-than-ever surroundings.
