There is one large communal table in the lobby of the Ace Hotel on Broadway and Twenty-Ninth where, on any weekday between ten and four, you will find a dozen people working with their laptops open and nobody saying a word. The table is twenty feet long, dark wood, lit from above, and the chairs around it are mismatched in the deliberate way of people who could afford to buy them new and chose not to. The Ace is the room that established this whole genre in New York — the hotel lobby that functions, in practice, as a free coworking space — and it has been operating that way since 2009 with no apparent objection from anyone.

The hotel itself is in the old Hotel Breslin, a 1904 brick-and-limestone affair the original architects intended as a residential apartment-hotel and that has been at least four different operations since. The lobby was redone by Roman & Williams in the late aughts, which is the kind of provenance one mentions because it explains why the room feels intentional in ways most hotel lobbies do not — the lamps are not lamps, they are lighting decisions; the rug is not a rug, it is taste.

The deal here is the cleanest in the genre. You walk in. You take a seat at the long table, or in one of the green chesterfields by the fireplace, or at the bar, which serves Stumptown coffee from the Stumptown that is literally inside the hotel. Nobody asks you anything. You can be there for eight hours. People have started entire companies at that table. Two friends of your correspondent's met their now-spouses across it.

The Ace differs from the Edition or the Bowery in one important way: the Ace lobby is loud. There is music. There are conversations. The communal-table convention is that one does not stop typing and one does not start a phone call without standing up and moving to the bathroom hallway. This makes the Ace excellent for solitary deep work and inappropriate for anything requiring quiet — which, if one has been at the Edition, may take a moment to recalibrate to.

Two practical notes. The fireplace seats are the prize and go by eleven; arrive earlier or commit to the long table. Outlets are scarce; the table itself has two power strips along its length that fill quickly. The bartender knows what an espresso is and will not patronize you if you order one. The wi-fi works without a guest code; the password is on a small framed card on the bar that has read aceguest continuously since the hotel opened, which tells you everything you need to know about what kind of place this is.

The Ace is the room that made the rest possible. Long before the Edition figured out that the lobby could be the product, before the Ned moved the convention upstairs, before the Knickerbocker built a Times Square bar that doesn't make you feel like you're in Times Square, the Ace had the long table and the open door and the unspoken understanding that anyone behaving like a person belonged at it. The genre exists because the Ace decided to invent it.