It is dark as spilled ink outside when Guy St. Elien wakes quietly at 3:30 each morning in Pennsylvania, silencing his alarm quickly so as not to wake his wife. It is lighter at 4:15 a.m., but the sun still hasn’t cracked open across the sky yet; that it will do when he’s almost to his destination, lighting up the buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens, boroughs he’s known all his life, boroughs that at this hour almost appear touched by some sort of silvery-fingered god. By 6 a.m., the sun will have fully risen and by then, some two hours after he left home, Guy St. Elien will walk into a place quite far from his physical home but another home to him nonetheless: the Wythe Hotel on North 11th Street and Wythe Avenue in Brooklyn, where he is head porter and where has worked for the past 13 years, the longest-serving employee in the hotel’s history.
The rise in hotel porters is commensurate with the rise in travel. As travel became more and more commonplace in the late 19th century, luggage became larger; as luggage became larger, people had difficulty carrying it all themselves. Hotels, recognizing that need, developed a person for the job: porters to move luggage. Luxury hotels took it a step further in the late 19th century by adding a bell, and the bellhop—a porter who could be summoned with the ding of a bell—became ubiquitous.
In time and with history, the responsibility of the porter expanded: escorting guests, grabbing laundry, opening doors, checking premises. In much of the same way—with time, with history—Guy’s role evolved, too.
The first thing Guy does when he walks in the doors of the Wythe Hotel is to check in with the overnight porter. He asks how the night was. He asks if there were any issues. If there are no issues, he moves on. If there are issues, he solves them.
Guy puts on a blue jacket over his white shirt and green tie. He speaks with the front desk to begin sketching the contours of his working day and what to expect—how many guests will check in, are there any VIPs. Are there any special requests? If it snows, Guy shovels. If he has downtime, he does a curb walk, walking west from Wythe Avenue to Kent Avenue along North 11th Street to check that the sidewalk is clean and there is no trash. If there is to be an event, he walks through a side entrance and into an atrium to check that it is prepared for the day.
When alerted in his earpiece that a guest needs help with his bags, he knows just how long it will take to get onto the elevator, up the room, to load the bags, and to be back down again. “Six minutes,” he says, wheeling the cart into the elevator cheerfully and calmly. “I know the building from upside down, inside out. And anything, any question you need, everybody comes to me because, you know, I’m the most experienced guy here. I’ll always find a way to make it happen,” he says.
Guy started in security. Fifteen years ago, he was working part-time, watching over the empty building that would soon become the Wythe. He met someone working for the hotel, and she invited him to interview for a job, so years later when the hotel owners canceled their security contract—no longer needed, since they’d be open—Guy stayed, one business to another, the building all the same.
In 2012, the Wythe was a harbinger of things to come in Williamsburg. It was the neighborhood’s first boutique hotel and at the time, seemed a gamble: opening in a former factory in an abandoned area of the Brooklyn waterfront. But people arrived anyway, surprising hotel ownership and bypassing expectations.
At first, Guy knew nothing about hospitality. Everything he’s learned, he’s learned here—much of which he is quick to credit to Peter Lawrence, the Wythe Hotel owner, who interviewed him for his initial position. Guy started his day bringing coffee to guests who requested it in their room; back then, he carried two phones. One would ring for a coffee order, another for luggage assistance, and Guy would go, balancing it all, calculating times and numbers and room distances in his head.
In time, that work grew to be too much, so Guy graduated, but always with the same focus on the guest. When he started, he tells me, he was shy—wanted to keep to himself. But he soon realized that this was a home for visitors, and he felt the need to be more welcoming. Peter coached him, he says. Now Guy will ask: Is this is your first time in New York? Anything we can do to make you enjoy your stay? If you have any questions I don’t have the answer to, we have a great team with a lot of knowledge, so we will figure it out for you. Don’t you worry about it.
About that great team: The Wythe Hotel comprises hundreds of people, and in my afternoon with Guy, he nods, waves, smiles, laughs, jokes, confers. He is prompt and attentive but never gives the feeling of needing to step away, even though there are very clearly times he needs to step away, his earpiece buzzing with chatter, something catching the corner of his eye.
Haley, Wythe Hotel’s reservations manager, has worked with Guy for a year and a half. “He’s like a rock,” she says. “He’s so vital to the world functioning and to the good vibes. He doesn’t ask for anything. He’s always available and always helpful. And isn’t that what you want from a coworker?”
Dye, a door attendant, has worked with Guy for three years. “He’s very friendly, very relatable, and an approachable person. He makes you feel at home. He feels like family to me.”
Says Wythe Hotel owner Peter Lawrence, who met Guy all those years ago: “He has been the cornerstone of the Hotel Service Team since we opened in 2012, and his ability to reliably bring a calm, kind, and gracious presence has enriched the day to day for his colleagues and our guests and visitors.”
The idea of home. Home in some ways is Haiti, where Guy was born but hasn’t visited in years due to the gang violence and political turmoil. Home is the aforementioned Pennsylvania. Home is Brooklyn, where Guy landed at age 14 and keeps seeing shift all around him, thanks to hotels like the Wythe. “I watched not just this building, but this neighborhood, change,” he says.
Home, he expresses in no uncertain terms, is also the Wythe proper, which has taught him what he knows about hospitality and brought the world to him through its guests. It’s where he’s been on the frontlines of tragedy and trauma: during Hurricane Sandy, watching the water coming, staying with several other staff at the hotel for a week. During COVID, he was the last person to leave and the first person to reopen, and ended up staying at the hotel for a year, helping where he could: in the first three months of COVID alone, the Wythe Hotel gave away 2,000 room nights to local frontline medical workers. “The good, the bad. I’m always part of it,” he says.
To hear Guy tell it, there has been a lot more good. After mentioning to his coworkers that he was planning to propose to his now-wife, they arranged to have room 805—now the penthouse—prepared, cleared, decorated. He had no idea what he was doing, he says; he just floated the idea. “The whole team was there for me and made it happen,” he says. “I was going to surprise her, and they did it all for me. That will stay with me forever.”
Forever can be a long time to consider, and so when I ask Guy about his plans for the future, he smiles because even though he has other plans and hobbies and dreams—a photography business with his wife, cooking Haitian food on the weekends, to travel to his timeshare in the Dominican Republic and really not do much of anything but be catered to—he is certain his future will include the Wythe Hotel. “This is one of the best bosses I have worked for, and he understands people, and he lets you be yourself. I can do 13 more, I will do it just for him [Peter],” he says.
Understand. The world isn’t just out there, it’s also inside the walls of this hotel, which offers up room and board, yes, but also a microcosm of countries and communities. It’s not about just talking to people and lifting their bags. It’s also about listening, really listening, and trying to understand one another. Says Guy: “The world comes to you. That’s the beauty of it.”
