Living with Legends

UPDATE — Both Elevators Are Now Out of Service!  People are huffing and puffing up and down the stairs.  The Service Elevator is being overloaded with equipment for fashion shoots and will probably soon be out of service too!

I didn’t get a chance to check out the Pool Art Fair which took up most of the 1^st and 2^nd floor guest rooms over the weekend, but a few of our local critics weighed in: “Mediocre, what passes for art these days,” one had to say.  “Loved the video on the first floor,” another reported.  (I noticed that a none-too-subtle critic had crossed out the “P” in Pool and inserted an “F” on one of their signs.)  And on Sunday morning, one sleep-deprived short- term guest asked me if I was the person who had held that all-night party in the room next door to him.   (Really, is it worth it to annoy and inconvenience all the other guests and residents in the hotel just for the sake of a bunch of day trippers?) While walking down the stairs there was almost always a bottleneck at the second and first floors. Luckily, I live on a higher floor–although many art fair attendees seemed to feel they had the run of the hotel.  One thing is for certain: many of the people who stopped by did so mainly to get a chance to look at the hotel.  A couple of our neighbors reported that people attempted to walk into their apartments, saying things like, “Is there art in here?” (At the previous Pool show, residents complained that people were running up and down the fire escapes, whooping it up—and probably that was going on at this show as well.)  What are we now, zoo animals on display?  Many residents tried to head off the inevitable breakdown of the elevators by encouraging the visitors to use the stairs.  We hope that BD made enough money from these art folks to cover the cost of repairing the elevators – as one is currently out of service and the other is acting mighty screwy.