The Columnist Manifesto

To celebrate the end of classes this semester, I joined B for a romantic overnight in TBCTNNY -- The Big City That's Not New York.



B goes there a lot for business travel and has become such a regular at the Hotel We Stay At, that everybody there knows her. It reminded me of the scene in The Graduate where Ben (Dustin Hoffman) takes Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine for a drink at the bar of the hotel where he's been trysting with Mrs. Robinson. One after another, hotel staff walk by saying to Dustin Hoffman, "Good evening, Mr. Galdstone." (Gladstone is the alias he used to get rooms with Mrs. Robinson.)

The doormen and the concierge and the front desk clerks all stop and say to B, "Good evening Ms. Unger." "Nice to see you again, Ms. Unger." One of the doormen gives B a big hug.

Plus, they give us this luxury suite!



The bedroom is a corner room, with three windows, each with a window box. We eat chinese food out of cartons sitting in a huge window box.



The view of the street makes the cars look like toys. Not ant-sized toys, but shoe-sized remote control cars, awkwardly maneuvering on a toy city street.



The curtains, when you draw them at night, are wall to wall -- you get a cosey, enclosed feeling like I imagine you'd have in one of those old curtained Victorian canopy beds.

Our hotel affords a splendid view of the Jetson Towers.



I don't know the name of this pair of buildings, but clearly it either inspired, or was inspired by, the futuristic sixties cartoon, The Jetsons.



I guess now the 1960s futurism style counts as "retro-futurism."


Jetson Tower: One of the alluring design features at the time was
undoubtedly the above-ground downstairs parking ramp.
Looks like a big corncob, doesn't it?


Jetson Towers, in the snow.