I came of age and came to New York before Sex and the City, so I was spared the ungodly standards of glamor that show established. SATC inspired a whole generation of young women to move here and run around in super-high heels and super-expensive clothes. That’s one kind of fabulous, to be sure, but for me the deep glamor of the city lies elsewhere: in street life, in slang, and in the secret spaces of the city.
I’ve attended line-ups at a midtown precinct, a runway show at Lincoln Center, play-off games at Shea and Yankee Stadiums, a two-dollar burlesque revue at a basement lounge in the Village, and a Star Wars themed party on an East Harlem rooftop. Each time I felt that I was in a privileged place very close to the heart of the city, as I did again last month at a cocktail reception on the forty-fourth floor of Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower in midtown. From photographs and firsthand accounts I knew all about the building’s skewed feng shui escalator, the deafening lobby waterfall, and the look-at-me diamond-patterned exoskeleton, but nothing prepared me for the awesome urban glamor of the event space. To the north there was the entire spread of Central Park, unfurled like the map of a medieval kingdom. To the south there were the blocks of the west side, lit up with a phosphorescent glow. The space wasn’t huge but the canted columns and glass made it feel, somehow, as if we were not enclosed, as if we were floating free above the city. That felt pretty spectacular.