Team Party Crash:
Getting High at Rock Center
Though usually leery of well-coiffed publicists flinging business cards like ninjas and hemorrhaging exclamation points, the horde of them the other night at Brasserie Ruhlman was oddly appealing. Alexia MacIntosh, Carolyn J. Nurnberg, Michaela Klink, Julia Berry; names crackling with possibility and promise. And promise they did. As the assembled journalists gulped cocktails and sipped teacups full of gazpacho, MacIntosh -- of Top of the Rock -- promised the "most amazing view in New York." Michaela Klink, of Lonely Planet, promised a "wonderful evening." To celebrate the release of Lonely Planet's Cities Book, we were being treated to drinks at Brasserie Ruhlman, a trip up the Rockefeller Center, drinks at Hotel Gansevoort, and finally more drinks at Elmo, a restaurant in Chelsea. Laid back, nursing a gin-and-juice, I took in the eager spiels and popped a crostini laden with beef tartar into my ready-to-be-spoonfed mouth.
Top of the Rock manages to impress despite the most misguided efforts of its sponsors, Swarovski Crystal and Target, who have contributed a weirdo crystal wall and an LED motion-sensor "breezeway," respectively. Sixty-nine floors above ground -- that's one floor per each person stuck on the Roosevelt Tram -- the city reads as a miniature of itself, Red Hook a glance from midtown and the Bronx merely a rotation of the head away. Tourists love this crap, but as a New Yorker, the experience is surprisingly vertiginous, a perspective mind-fuck. How can this tiny land mass account for so much of my mental real estate, one reporter asks. Up among the setting sun and gilt sky, we journalists scurried excitedly about finding our own apartments, flecks in the distance, and our lives, smaller flecks still. Though $17.50 may be a steep price to pay for a view , no matter how breathtaking, it is but a pittance for a perspective change and a chance to get 850 feet closer to Heaven.
Hotel Gansevoort, the next stop on the junket, effaced whatever feelings of humility we had found in Midtown. Though Lonely Planet had provided a Party Shuttle, I -- remembering a creepy experience on the Barenaked Ladies tour bus in high school -- rode down the West Side highway, tracing the boundary of Manhattan we had seen a few moments before. Hotel Gansvoort juts out from the Meatpacking skyline like the luxurious sleeping priapas it is. Once more, we were shown the many extraordinary features the hotel has to offer. In one room, the group -- now tipsy and wan with intoxication -- was herded into a suite that cost mere mortals $675 a night. By far the most extraordinary thing besides the view (which would have the most disdainful hipster slack-jawed and gaping) was the special Gansevoort-produced CD. Guests, hypothetically, could set their bags down and within minutes be listening to great classics like "Funkease" by Divalicious, "I'm In Luv with Her" by Rocchio, "Funky Funky" by Tripin' [sic] Tiger, and my favorite, "Lounge Out" by Winpus Le Puff.
Elmo, gayer still, is a Chelsea restaurant and, according to charming and loveably dorky Lonely Planet author Beth Greenfield, a "performance space." By the time we rolled up, the only performance I observed was happening in the boys' bathroom. Everybody in the group was shlizzled by this point, so while one nameless partygoer complained how black Oakland was and sprayed crumbs of calamari as she cackled, I stumbled into the dark warm night of a city both immense and quickly made small.
Brasserie Ruhlman [Official site]
Top of the Rock [Official site]
The Cities Book [Lonely Planet]
Hotel Gansevoort [Official site]
Elmo [Yelp]
Previously: The Cities Book, Team Party Crash: LA.com's Broadway Bar Vodka Bash, Team Party Crash: Blue Owl Lounge, Team Party Crash: The Night I Kissed Wonkette, Team Party Crash: Valleywag Gets His Spot-On
