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Hotel Gansevoort (Photo: Kareem Black) |
Someone once described the so-called Boom Boom Room, the lounge on the eighteenth floor of the Standard Hotel, as being like “the hottest nightclub in Sweden.” With its beige tufted-leather banquettes, brass railings, and giant flowerlike column in the center of the room, it struck me at first as an unholy marriage of Maxwell’s Plum, Studio 54, and Regine’s—but on a spaceship. Sort of. In any case, when you walk in for the first time, you feel as if you have been transported to a better place and a more interesting time … L.A. in the eighties? Vegas in the sixties? Berlin in the twenties? Decadent epochs, all. Even the view is too much. When you stand in the center of the club, you can see the Statue of Liberty and, with just a slight rotation of the head, the Empire State Building. If you were to spin in circles like Diana Ross, you would feel like you were inside a human-size zoetrope.
Tonight the Boom Boom Room is the site of a private record-release party for Alicia Keys, who is here with her boyfriend, Swizz Beatz, and her mother. Tyson Beckford and Spike Lee are among the throng (so early nineties). Beyoncé and Jay-Z (so 2010) arrive, the D.J. drops the needle on “Empire of State of Mind,” and Keys leans into the chorus (“These streets will make you feel brand new / Big lights will inspi-ah you”) Everyone smokes on the vertiginous step-out balconies. The staff, who are dressed like flight attendants (but from a different time!), seem to be as drunk as the guests (but cuter). People are dancing, but mostly they are drinking. And gulping down little hamburgers like they are at a Fourth of July picnic, grease dripping off their happy chins.
The scene outside the hotel is almost as mesmerizing: SUVs and limousines—clown cars all—are disgorging dozens of pretty ladies, all of whom look like Kardashians. Everywhere I look I see Khloés and Kims and Kourtneys and Kylies—some blonde, some drunk, some plump, some skinny, with clipped-in curls and major shoes moving with strange purpose in clouds of perfume. They seem to be heading in the direction of the Hotel Gansevoort, to its nightclub, Provocateur, designed to be “female friendly” through the use of purple and pink décor and “sensual music.”
http://nymag.com/nightlife/features/67140/
