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my office building
Mar. 26th, 2004 07:18 pmIn New York, every building is a story. We know this, as we have all watched or read too many things that have relied on this particular device. Many of us have also lived in buildings with excessive, bizarre, or disturbing narrative, and know that truth is always stranger than fiction.
My current office building is ever so very much like this.
It's in a weird neighborhood for starts, a no-man's land bordered by the Flatiron and Sewing Districts and the beginning of mid-town shopping (at 34th street). It is a mish-mash of small businesses, wholesalers and importers, and any number of establishments who if they did tell you what they did, would probably not be telling the truth.
Amusingly, I worked across the street from this very building when I first moved back to New York ten years ago, and frequent the same deli now, as I did then. They neighborhood hasn't changed much; it's just gotten more populated, and that's hardly for the better.
One of the most irritating fixtures of the neighborhood is the wholesalers, or rather their customers. Not the retailers that come to stock their stores, but the random people who buy in bulk enough to do their shopping there. Especially during the holidays, but pretty much all the time, the neighborhood is filled with people carrying trashbags of their recent purchases, all of them trying to take up as much room on the street as possible, and asking if I'm intimidated, usually because I am white, small or impatient. It's one of those minor things that makes NYC frequently intolerable, and makes you spend really more time than is necessary pondering whether it's turning you into a bad person.
My office building is, through several bizzare faults of its own I'm about to explain, something of a neighborhood fixture. This can be blamed on two things: Gwenyth Paltrow and the Hip-Hop Loveshack Closet. I know you want to hear about the closet first, but we're starting with the girl.
Basically, Gwenyth Paltrow, when she's actually engaged in being an American or at least a resident of New York (there's this drama about her and a fake British accent you may or may not have heard about), attends a yoga studio in my office building. For this reason, the local UPS drivers, of which there are more than you could possibly imagine, spend most of their day camped outside our building smoking cigarettes, talking and asking us if we've seen her, even when she hasn't been in, in weeks, or months.
Of course though, if you've got a pack of random guys hanging around waiting to spot a celebrity, they have to find a way to occupy themselves (since they are clearly not delivering packages, as my own recent experiences with UPS would confirm), hence the Hip-Hop Loveshack Closet.
Our building has a security guard, who hangs out with these guys, and does what he can to play the part of cool neighborhood fixture. As Paltrow already has a bodyguard and can't be produced on command, he's been methodically constructing an entertainment center in the lobby of our building, or, more accurately, in its maintenance closet.
The interior of the closet has been painted black. It also contains a disco ball, some neon, a lot of black light, lots of police-siren type lights, and an absolutely deadly sound system.
Most of this is kept shut off (or at least at a low volume) until about 5pm, at which point, the door is thrown open and our pathetic little side-street lobby becomes a blinking, swirling, thumping hip-hop paradise, complete with security guard singing loudly about ho's, bitches and whatever the hell else.
It's pretty funny, but if you're tired, relentlessly startling.
No one in the building seems to notice much or comment on it. Not the literary agency next door to my office, nor the casting directors a few floors below, nor the awful woman always talking about her botched plastic surgery in the elevator, nor the employees of the once mighty but now fallen Internet company, nor the person who always takes their microwave popcorn into the elevator and rides it around to all the floors to torture us all (yes, really).
I wonder about the security guard, about the narrative there. Maybe he cares for his aging mother and hence has to have this little paradise at work. Or perhaps it a thing that's just evolved through the contribution of building employees (and UPS drivers) over the years. I don't ask, it's easier not to. And probably more interesting without facts simple and supplied. But it really is something.
Something.
My current office building is ever so very much like this.
It's in a weird neighborhood for starts, a no-man's land bordered by the Flatiron and Sewing Districts and the beginning of mid-town shopping (at 34th street). It is a mish-mash of small businesses, wholesalers and importers, and any number of establishments who if they did tell you what they did, would probably not be telling the truth.
Amusingly, I worked across the street from this very building when I first moved back to New York ten years ago, and frequent the same deli now, as I did then. They neighborhood hasn't changed much; it's just gotten more populated, and that's hardly for the better.
One of the most irritating fixtures of the neighborhood is the wholesalers, or rather their customers. Not the retailers that come to stock their stores, but the random people who buy in bulk enough to do their shopping there. Especially during the holidays, but pretty much all the time, the neighborhood is filled with people carrying trashbags of their recent purchases, all of them trying to take up as much room on the street as possible, and asking if I'm intimidated, usually because I am white, small or impatient. It's one of those minor things that makes NYC frequently intolerable, and makes you spend really more time than is necessary pondering whether it's turning you into a bad person.
My office building is, through several bizzare faults of its own I'm about to explain, something of a neighborhood fixture. This can be blamed on two things: Gwenyth Paltrow and the Hip-Hop Loveshack Closet. I know you want to hear about the closet first, but we're starting with the girl.
Basically, Gwenyth Paltrow, when she's actually engaged in being an American or at least a resident of New York (there's this drama about her and a fake British accent you may or may not have heard about), attends a yoga studio in my office building. For this reason, the local UPS drivers, of which there are more than you could possibly imagine, spend most of their day camped outside our building smoking cigarettes, talking and asking us if we've seen her, even when she hasn't been in, in weeks, or months.
Of course though, if you've got a pack of random guys hanging around waiting to spot a celebrity, they have to find a way to occupy themselves (since they are clearly not delivering packages, as my own recent experiences with UPS would confirm), hence the Hip-Hop Loveshack Closet.
Our building has a security guard, who hangs out with these guys, and does what he can to play the part of cool neighborhood fixture. As Paltrow already has a bodyguard and can't be produced on command, he's been methodically constructing an entertainment center in the lobby of our building, or, more accurately, in its maintenance closet.
The interior of the closet has been painted black. It also contains a disco ball, some neon, a lot of black light, lots of police-siren type lights, and an absolutely deadly sound system.
Most of this is kept shut off (or at least at a low volume) until about 5pm, at which point, the door is thrown open and our pathetic little side-street lobby becomes a blinking, swirling, thumping hip-hop paradise, complete with security guard singing loudly about ho's, bitches and whatever the hell else.
It's pretty funny, but if you're tired, relentlessly startling.
No one in the building seems to notice much or comment on it. Not the literary agency next door to my office, nor the casting directors a few floors below, nor the awful woman always talking about her botched plastic surgery in the elevator, nor the employees of the once mighty but now fallen Internet company, nor the person who always takes their microwave popcorn into the elevator and rides it around to all the floors to torture us all (yes, really).
I wonder about the security guard, about the narrative there. Maybe he cares for his aging mother and hence has to have this little paradise at work. Or perhaps it a thing that's just evolved through the contribution of building employees (and UPS drivers) over the years. I don't ask, it's easier not to. And probably more interesting without facts simple and supplied. But it really is something.
Something.
