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Rooftop Smoking: Gramercy Park Hotel
Original pieces like Schnabel's Picasso 1 and a mounted sawfish snout
decorate the hotel's lobby.
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The lobby feels very much like a private salon, but it also has a gallery ambience you can't help slowing down for. The furniture is plush and vaguely papal-looking, the drapery heavy. Checkered tiles lead to a large, hand-carved fireplace, ablaze and crackling even in the summer. The salon aspects, however, are tempered by wood surfaces you'd never see in a château, and some twentieth-century original works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst. Artist Julian Schnabel, who co-designed the hotel with Schrager, threw in a few of his own pieces, including a pair of mounted serrated sawfish snouts that menace the lobby floor like a surreal antithesis of colonial ivory. They look as though they were stolen from the American Museum of Natural History. Would Bogart have tolerated this? No matter.
Off to the side under an arched entrance lies the Jade Bar, where the predominant color scheme changes immediately from crimson to green. Have a quick drink here, admire the marine-life hues and then turn left into the much larger Rose Bar for another chromatic shift back to red.
The cloistered Jade Bar is just off of the hotel's entrance behind a pair
of velvet drapes.
| If you arrive before 9 P.M., you can wander in without a reservation. Both Jade and Rose are outfitted with modern art. I could use buzzwords such as whimsical, eccentric, evocative or mysterious to describe the rooms, and true, they'd all be accurate descriptors, but there's a mood that those words fail to capture. Monkish attention seems to have been devoted to creating a candle-lit environment as appropriate for prayer as it is for drinking. And many of the design elements seem to tell a story. The wood on the lobby pillars, for example, could've been pulled off the hull of a shipwrecked vessel slumped on some Southeast Asian shore. Or the floor tiles salvaged from a Moroccan church ravaged by a religious war. Pity that both the Jade and Rose bars would've made such nice smoking rooms.
Once you have had another drink and can no longer resist the urge to light up a cigar, your room key should activate the elevator, taking you straight to the private terrace.
The ascension ends on one of the 16th-floor corridors that wind through a series of interior club rooms which, like downstairs, also serve as de facto art exhibits. One chamber holds a celestial canopy of lightbulbs suspended from its ceiling.
A view of the city and direct access to the roof-top gardens as seen
through the Sophia club room.
| All of the rooms lead out to the verdant terrace. On a recent visit, I took a seat in the southeast corner and lit up a Nicaraguan cigar. It was quiet on the rooftop garden and that's how Schrager envisioned it -- a tranquil extension of Gramercy Park below and a nod to the terrace gardens of old New York. Flowers blossomed along the ledge, vines hung in pergola fashion, and soon I was handed a cocktail menu. I'm guessing the drinks are allusions to the overall decor -- curious concoctions with no obvious classifications. The drink I chose was called a Maca Martini, a mixture of Sagatiba Cachaça, elderflower liqueur, fresh lime juice and apple cider. I found the punch of the Cachaça (Brazilian cane juice rum) to go well with the strong Nicaraguan tobacco.
Late supper service is offered on the roof if you don't want to smoke on an empty stomach. Or you can dine at Wakiya, the hotel's high-end Chinese restaurant serving food inspired by the cuisine of Shanghai, Szechuan, Canton and Beijing. Either way, this botanical oasis is full of interesting impressions that complement the cigar-smoking experience, whether it be that of low-keyed conversation or quiet contemplation. And if you wish to stroll the last of the private parks, guests are also granted privileges to the gated grounds of Gramercy Park itself.
Gramercy Park Hotel
2 Lexington Ave.
New York NY 10010
Tel: 212-920-3300
Web: www.gramercyparkhotel.com
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