Dispatches from rooms one shouldn't quite be in.
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.
There is a coffee lounge on the second floor of the W hotel at Union Square that is, technically, for guests only. Your correspondent has not yet been asked to leave.
The Sony Building is no longer the Sony Building, but most New Yorkers still call it that, and the lobby is now a public garden one can walk into off the street.
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.
About. Cricket Drake walks into Manhattan rooms she has no particular business being in, and writes about what's there. Hotel lobbies, atria, members clubs as a prospective member, residences as a prospective buyer, gallery openings as a passerby. A surprising portion of the most beautiful interior real estate in this city is open to anyone who walks in as if she belongs. The deal is implicit. The rooms are mostly empty. This is the record.