As far as I know there are two types of hotels in New York. There are the ones I go to now, using an app that shows me good deals for luxe stays based on daily vacancies. These places are modern, well-appointed, display vintage claptrap in the lobby, and feel like Wes Anderson movie sets. The bar has some kid with a thick mustache making gin and tonics with smoke on top or whiskey sours on dry ice saucers. There are tiny balconies that peer over bar courtyards where the actually rich residents of the last industrial haunts of Brooklyn chirp over 80s and 90s synth music. They are the “you had to be there” set, chasing nights I’ve never known and stopped being pretty enough for years ago. The other kind of hotel is the sturdy economy chain where the lobby is minimalist, aqua or mauve, dead silent, and offers nothing but the frowns of broke-down business travelers or layover louses who couldn’t bear to stay under the flight path of JFK jet-liners all night. What kind of brain can sleep that way? I like the new-ish hotels and their wood floors and I have shared too many dates to count where I know there’s no risk of remembering the place, being remembered, or running into anyone with half-a-lick knowledge of the real New York. I can chill out with transient folks, and order egg whites over $40 hash with no regrets and the carnal memory of nights long gone. These places won’t outlast the chains, but neither will these dates, the pants I’m wearing, or the audacity to spend a weeknight fronting like a baller in my hometown cityscape. Love groans out of creaky doors and rusty umbrella caddies. Love can afford a specialty chocolate mini-bar snack.
