Lipstick Building

When I moved in a few doors down from Philip Johnson’s blushing tower, I immediately sensed something was off. I didn’t know much about it, like how Bernie Madoff operated his $65 billion Ponzi scheme from the seventeenth floor or how the tubular shape was meant to do away with the privileged corner office. What I noticed instead was how depressed people looked as they filed into the lobby each morning and how, eight or ten hours later, they piled into the ground-level Wolfgang’s, celebrating what I imagined to be a class-action victory against some oppressed group. Women in pencil skirts and men with ties thrown over their shoulder clinking martinis and sawing through $80 ribeye steaks, which said more to me about the life of the building than its deceptive curves ever could.