The lesson took a few visits to absorb, but it goes like this: at the Edition, on a weekday afternoon, you can sit down in the lobby for as long as you like, and nobody will ask you anything. Not the doorman, not the front desk, not the bartender. You are a piece of room temperature.

The Edition is in the Met Life Clock Tower at 5 Madison Avenue, the older of the two limestone towers that anchor the north side of Madison Square Park. The building is 1909. The lobby inside is dim in the way expensive places are dim — every surface absorbs sound, every lamp is amber, every painting is unframed and forty years old. Green armchairs by the fireplace. Bar to the right. A staircase upstairs that one rarely takes.

The thing to understand isn't the design. It's the social contract.

A hotel at this tier exists in a particular bind. The lobby must feel inhabited. An empty $1,200-a-night lobby reads, to the guests, as wrong. The bar must have someone at it. The chairs need bodies. So when one walks in dressed reasonably and sits down, the hotel does not object. The hotel needs you. You are decoration. The deal is implicit: behave as if you belong, and you do.

This logic, once internalized, opens a fairly large part of New York. The Edition is one of perhaps forty hotels in Manhattan where the lobby is genuinely walk-in friendly between eleven and six. The room rates are immaterial. The signal is the lobby's design intent: was it built to be sat in?

The Edition's was. The chairs face one another in conversation pairs. The fireplace works. The bar serves espresso in the afternoon. The wifi is guest-only but the bandwidth is generous, and your correspondent has never been asked for a room number.

Two practical notes for the new arrival. The chairs by the fireplace are the prize and go quickly; arrive before two, or settle for a banquette. The bar seats are more anonymous and easier to hold for hours. The bathroom is past the bar to the left; one walks through with the slight air of returning.

The Edition affords a thing Manhattan rarely permits for free: to sit indoors, alone, in a beautiful room, for as long as one wishes, without the implicit pressure to leave that haunts almost every other interior in the city.