This is where I’d like to live if I could return to the 20s. Imagine standing on the deck in a tux, watching the sun set, replentishing your drink from a flask of contraband hooch, listening to some mad hot jazz band in the adjacent room. One problem with that scenario: it wasn’t open in the 20s. It was built at the end of the Jazz Age, but the Depression killed it before it opened its eyes. It sat vacant and incomplete for a decade, and was brought to life in the 40s - a fact I never knew until I put this site together. That explains one of the building’s greatest mysteries: the green-and-black tiled bathrooms. Put simply, this building has the best men’s room, anywhere. Square sturdy porcelain and big green-and-black tiles. It’s gorgeous. But I could never figure out why they’d build something in the 20s, rehab only the the bathrooms 15 years later. Now I know. It declined in the late 50s and 60s, but was brought back to life and rented out as a party venue. (People did, and still do, live upstairs.) On a November night towards the end of the 80s a friend asked me to attend a big yuppie mixer here; she sweetened the scene by naming all the people who’d attended the previous iterations of this party, and had found their mate. Well. I didn’t expect to find a wife here, but I went along anyway. I’d never been to this place, and it seemed like the height of swank society. I was not disappointed. A huge ballroom - you can see the windows in the illustration - with a long balcony suitable for Gatsbyesque stances (serene, distant, smoking with a pensive air) and a staircase perfect for a dramatic entrance. Two hours into the party, a couple of women sat down at our table - sisters, it turned out. I struck up a conversation with one of them, and we hit it off. I got her number on the way down the grand staircase. I walked back to my car, thinking: that’s the one. That’s the woman I’m going to marry. And I did.