On a recent melancholy evening, two young women—one in want of a job, the other disappointed in a man—took an elevator to the twenty-sixth floor of the Beekman Tower. Both sought levity and, perhaps, a celebrity: the rooftop bar, about two months old, advertised that Frank Sinatra had loyally visited a previous iteration, for drinks and, maybe, a heartbreaking song. Instead, the women encountered several quiet customers, most in sweaters, drinking to light techno. Yet they also found, on an enclosed patio, a velvety red banquette good for consoling, undisturbed and unjostled. A beatific hostess appeared in the candlelight. Did the women want drinks? Oh, but they did, and they were grateful to her for not wincing at one woman’s decision to pronounce “Pain Killa” with an “a,” as written on the menu. At the bar, the twosome ordered again (pink prosecco poured sybaritically over sherry and Campari), beneath a taxidermic bird—an albino pheasant, clarified the bar staff, after a brief conference. The pair took in this deceased fowl, and observed, through the cathedral-like windows, the coy, unforthcoming façades of Midtown East. The effect was to make them feel as if they were in a birdcage, doomed to contemplate unreachable possibilities they should know better than to want. They looked down, through the bar-top glass, at photographs from the establishment’s original incarnation, in the nineteen-twenties, as a residence for sorority girls turned working women. “The sweetest group of girls this world has known,” went one sorority song, memorialized on notepaper under emptying cocktails, “whose standards are as good as pure as gold.” ♦
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