At least tourists like the maps.

These last few weeks, to hear some people tell it, you'd think that New York's streets have been endangered by one of the greatest threats to public safety that the city has ever seen (not to mention the worst aesthetic blight since the Ugg craze). Comparisons have been drawn between the Department of Transportation and the Taliban. There have been impassioned pleas, there have been fits of yelling and, of course, there have been lawsuits. But now, perhaps, we'll finally get some respite from all the bike rack hatred as New Yorkers shift their hatred to the bikes themselves.

Citi Bikes will be arriving in the next few days—some 800 of the 6,000 bikes are already docked at stations—and New Yorkers will be able to take them out for a spin starting Memorial Day. It's just too bad that the incessant whining over the bikes is likely to sound very much like the incessant whining over the racks, led first and foremost by the chorus of sanctimonious ninnies going on about public safety.

Public safety seems to be the trump card these days when it comes to complaining about anything you don't like. It's also incredibly useful for garnering press attention and an effective response, even when the complaints are not justified.

Earlier this week, the New York Post reported that the co-op at 175 West 13th Street, which had sued the city for putting bike share racks in front of  its building "nearly saw its worst fears realized Sunday when emergency responders had trouble getting to a 92-year-old resident in distress."

Worst fears or just the non-event that bike rack-hating residents were waiting for to bolster their flimsy case? Residents eagerly painted a picture of EMS responders stymied by the waist-high racks for the Post, the co-op board president called the racks an "impregnable wall" and the board's lawyer quipped that it was "good news is the guy's not dead."

The 92-year-old's wife gave the most heartbreaking account of all, telling the Post that "the ambulance couldn’t even come up to the building. The ambulance couldn’t get to him."

Which was not actually true at all, according to the New York Fire Department, which released a statement from fire commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano reading, "Contrary to a news report today, FDNY EMT's had absolutely no problems responding to and providing medical care to a patient on Sunday on West 13th Street in Manhattan.  The FDNY has been working closely with DOT on this initiative and we have not experienced any problems nor do we anticipate issues operating at or near bike racks that have been situated on city streets."

Then, rather than owning up to the fact that the breathless account was overblown, the co-op doubled down and was seemingly rewarded when the DOT removed several racks directly in front of the building (the DOT said that it had been planning to remove the bike racks before the "incident.") Never mind that parked cars would ostensibly be just as much an impediment, if not more,  than the bike racks. And that there would be very little street parking in the city if the DOT created emergency zones in front of every residential building. (The DOT responded to The Observer's interview request by pointing to the Fire Department's statement.)

What's more, the removal didn't even placate the building residents, who are apparently too crotchety to navigate around any bike racks and are still suing the city because they believe that any bike racks in the vicinity of their building present traffic and safety concerns. We just hope that these people don't catch wind of how dangerous cars are.

So in days to come expect lots of whining and clutching of chests and news organizations around the city mobilizing to interview little old ladies and grouchy drivers about how unsafe bike share is. How it presents real public safety concerns. How it's an impediment to traffic. How someone is going to get hurt. When what they are complaining about is the fact that bike share will be a little inconvenient for anyone who's not using bike share. And what they're forgetting is that to live in New York is to be irritated by endless construction and sidewalk-blocking tourists and noisy neighbors. To be constantly inconvenienced, in other words, by other people doing things that have nothing to do with you.

The three townhouses are not the best raw material for a 60-footer. (Property Shark)

On March 19, the charming 11-room townhouse at 159 East 64th Street came on the market for $14 million, joining its once-removed neighbor at 163 East 64th, which was asking $24.9 million at the time. Then, almost simultaneously, the mansion in the middle—161 East 64th Street—was revealed as the Kips Bay Decorator Show House. Traditionally, the Kips Bay Show House has hit the market after its time in the spotlight—we imagine it would be hard to persuade an owner to turn his or her house over to teams of decorators and hordes of visitors otherwise—and sure enough, last week the show house was listed for $16 million with Sotheby's broker Roger Erickson.

With all three for sale in a row, we couldn't help but ponder the possibilities. Given the gaga real estate market, mightn't some deep-pocketed buyer take a fancy to the 60-foot-wide mega combo mansion?

Not very likely, brokers told The Observer. For starters, the windows (and hence the floors) of the three buildings almost line up, but not quite. Though this doesn't stop some owners from attempting a combo (Steven Croman is creating an uber townhouse from two very unaligned buildings on East 72nd), it is not advisable. Additionally, the home's facades do not match, so the buyer would either need to craft a new, unifying exterior for the gigantic manse or embrace a patchwork palace.

But even more importantly, the combined asking prices of the three townhouses—a dizzying $54 million—would not merely be stratospheric for a block this far east, but would break the townhouse sales record of $53 million set by the Harkness Mansion in 2006. (A record that was sadly tarnished when Larry Gagosian bought the mid-renovation mansion for $36.5 million five years later.) And that would simply be the price for the raw materials, to say nothing of the renovation costs.

"I don't think it would be economically feasible—or at least not very smart—to buy the three townhouses at the prices they're asking," said one Upper East Side townhouse broker.

"Who wants to have a 40-foot or 60-foot mansion a block from Third Avenue?" asked another.

Further snuffing out any remnants of our fantasy, 163 East 64th is now technically off the market. Though its former broker, Halstead's Eva Penson, hinted that the owner—Kenneth Laub—was still interested in selling. Which didn't surprise one top Upper East Side broker: "The house has been on and off the market for years," the broker said. "It's a distinguished facade, and immaculate, but frankly I can't see a house on this block trading for anything with a two in front of it."

And what of the sales prospects of the other houses?

No. 159, which once house famed florist Renny Reynolds, is unusually charming—it has an interior courtyard and carved Spanish ceilings—but it is a "bring your architect" situation and the price is not low.

Meanwhile, No. 161 has enjoyed one of the best advertising campaigns that money can't buy. But many brokers we spoke with expressed doubt that seller Richard Sharp would be able to get $16 million for "a very standard, very elegant house" that he paid only $6.5 million for back in 2003. (Another broker was less forgiving, calling it "tarted up.") Though at least there hasn't been any wear or tear in the last decade; Mr. Sharp admitted to The New York Times that he never moved into the townhouse and lives in a two-bedroom rental a few blocks north—he found the prospect of decorating too daunting.

But while the three townhouse combo might be off-the-table, that doesn't mean a two townhouse combo is out of the question. The buildings lie right outside the Upper East Side Historic District extension, so a facade change wouldn't be impossible and, as Mr. Erickson, No. 161's broker, pointed out, the combined price of 159 and 161 would be a more palatable $30 million.

"I could certainly see someone wanting a 40-footer," said Mr. Erickson. "And with the interior courtyard of 159 with the two-story atrium of 161, a combination would be very interesting."

Mary Help of Christians Church on Avenue A was built over an old Catholic cemetery.

The dead may not literally walk among us, but they can certainly cause headaches for developers. In 2006, work on Trump Soho was temporarily halted when human remains were discovered at the construction site, where a Baptist Church once stood. Last year, plans for a development in Queens were nixed after the property—home to a colonial-era cemetery—was landmarked. And back in 1991, the federal government was forced to significantly alter plans for its $276 million federal office tower in Lower Manhattan after uncovering the 17th and 18th-century remains of hundreds of African Americans.

Now, several preservation and community groups are pleading with developer Douglast Steiner to his abandon plans to demolish the Mary Help of Christians Church complex at 181 Avenue A (between East 11th and East 12th streets), because the buildings were built over a former Catholic Cemetery.

Known as the Old St. Patrick's Cathedral cemetery and later as the East 11th Street Cemetery, the area was an active burial yard from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries. In 1909, the Catholic Church decommissioned the graveyard and moved the bodies to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Or rather, they moved some, but maybe not all the bodies to Queens.

"When they closed the cemetery, it's unclear if they moved all of the remains," said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. "News accounts from the time refer to the church moving between 3,000 and 5,000 bodies, while there were some 40,000 bodies buried at the site. It could be that the reports were inaccurate, but..."

Mr. Steiner bought the development site for $41 million last fall and recently filed demolition permits for the church, the school and the rectory with the DOB. The developer is rumored to be planning a residential tower at the site with ground-floor retail. A spokesperson for Mr. Steiner said that renderings from a Ripco Realty listing spotted earlier this month by EV Grieve were not for the project, but rather another address.

Mr. Steiner himself has been rather unforthcoming about the project. Through a spokesperson, he declined to comment on the possibility of human remains at the site.

Of course, if there are remains at the site, the Catholic Church wasn't very squeamish about disturbing them when it built the church, the rectory and the school. Why should a developer be more fastidious?

Well, besides the fact that the church presumably had a priest and some holy water on hand to soothe any restless spirits, building on a burial yard isn't as easy as it used to be. Mr. Berman said that if human remains are discovered during construction, work must be stopped until the police and archeologists are called in to identify the remains and determine how work can move forward—a process under the jurisdiction of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The GVSHP and several other community groups are asking Mr. Steiner to avoid the possibility of unearthing any skeletons and to build on the adjacent church yard, which lies outside of the old cemetery border. They rallied Wednesday evening at Mary Help of Christians Church to make their request and to reveal news of the potential conflict with the not-to-so-recently deceased Villagers.

"Aside from the fact that it would be a good thing to do, there's a huge plot of land that he could build on while preserving a unique and wonderful building and creating a much more unique and valuable development site," said Mr. Berman. "It's not like we're saying, 'Don't build.'"

The plea is not an unreasonable one, nor is some kind of adaptive reuse unimaginable—churches have become luxury condos before. But it appears that preservationists and the local community—as evinced by an earlier, failed effort to block Mr. Steiner's demolition attempt with a landmark designation—are primarily concerned with the historic buildings, which would be saved if Mr. Steiner backed off so as not to dig into a potential boneyard.

"The church buildings are a testament to the Italian immigrant legacy in New York City and remain living monuments," Sara Romanoski, the Managing Director of the East Village Community Coalition, wrote in a statement. "As a community, we ask the developer to recognize the opportunity for incorporating these architecturally significant buildings into the new development."

A rendering of the Dattner Architects-designed building slated to rise at the site.

Fifty-five units of affordable housing may not do much to stem the tide of gentrification washing over Williamburg, but they will allow a not-insignificant number of low-income families to stay in the increasingly expensive neighborhood.

Today, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced that it has selected MDG Design and Construction and the North Brooklyn Development Corporation to build a mixed-use affordable housing development at 337 Berry Street, the site of a former Landmarks Preservation Commission warehouse. The development team was selected nearly a year after an RFP went out for the project, which will include 55 low-income units, ground-floor commercial space for a grocery store, community space for tenant services and an open space for use by future tenants.

The old LPC architectural salvage warehouse that currently stands at 377 Berry.

The announcement comes in the midst of rising community outrage over the dearth of affordable housing units promised by the city as part of the 2005 Williamsburg rezoning. Earlier this week, DNAinfo reported that eight years after pledging to build 1,345 affordable housing units on city-owned land in North Williamsburg, only 19 units, or two-percent of the promised tally, have been completed.

A rally is even scheduled for today to "commemorate eight years of broken promises," according to DNAinfo; Community Board 1 Chairman Chris Olechowski told the news website that "displacement is the horror of what takes place without thinking through what you're doing to your local people" and urged local residents to attend.

“What a great honor it will be to again work alongside my lifelong neighbors and friends to continue our fight to combat displacement in our community," said Richard Mazur, the executive director of North Brooklyn Development Corporation, in a release about the project. "Through our collaborative work with all the members of Mobilization Against Displacement (MAD) we have again taken another positive step toward lessening displacement in our community while fulfilling the greatest need in Community Board 1 today—the availability of quality affordable housing."

The mixed-use complex will rise on three city-owned lots between South 4th and South 5th streets, the site of an old Landmarks Preservation Commission warehouse, which was used to store old doorknobs, transoms, newel posts and any number of other architectural fixtures and ornaments salvaged from demolition sites; the items were then sold at low-cost to the public, so they could be used to restore buildings that had earlier been stripped of their own historic fixtures. (The program ended in 2000 due to budgetary constraints.)

The affordable housing units will be available to families earning between 50 and 60 percent of the area median income, which is $49,950 to $51,540 for a family of four.

The project displayed "the City's commitment to thoughtfully repurposing its resources to benefit the community,” wrote HPD Commissioner Mathew Wambua in a statement. "I look forward to seeing this once vacant warehouse transformed into safe, quality affordable housing that will expand housing opportunities for working-class families in this community.”

As for the project's other goal of enriching "the character and vibrancy of the neighborhood and act as a catalyst for future growth in both the public and private sectors"—we'd hardly say that Williamsburg is need of any development catalysts.

The opening night celebration of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic—which drew 2,900 aficionados, arrayed in tuxedos, sequined gowns, lacy sheaths, smoking jackets, velvet blazers and all manner of hats and feathered plumes—was a lavish, debauched spectacle befitting the outsized, increasingly dominant role that craft cocktails have come to play in the city’s drinking culture. Tickets, despite costing $195 to $395, sold out rapidly.

The press invitation had cautioned us to eat dinner beforehand—though there would be food—and to pace ourselves, both of which turned out to be not so much advisable as mandatory for staying upright throughout the four-hour bacchanalia. There was music and dancing, along with stilt walkers and living statues, plus sweet and savory edibles, but all these offerings paled in comparison to the drinking: 73 different cocktail stations, many of them serving multiple varieties of specialty cocktails, splayed over four massive floors of the library.

There was such an abundance that revelers would frequently take only a few sips of a drink before abandoning it in search of the next and possibly better drink. Waitstaff (about 600 people were working) wandered the fête, swaybacked under the weight of buckets laden with half-full glasses, gingerly stepping through the increasingly drunk crowd. A crowd that was not only under the influence of excessive quantities of alcohol, but in the grips of a mania. How else to describe the rage for craft cocktails that has swept the city of late, leaving in its wake a thirst for ever-more elaborate concoctions and an army of tipsy devotees who think nothing of paying $18 apiece for them?

Jay Beam—“B-e-a-m, as in Jim Beam”—a bowler-hatted aficionado, and his companion, Joyce Darbyshire, were clutching cans of negronis, a new product for enthusiasts on the go who don’t want to haul around the raw ingredients: gin, sweet vermouth and Campari.

“We used to drink wine, but, well, wine is just wine,” said Mr. Beam.

“We just got so into cocktails, they’re fascinating,” Ms. Darbyshire explained. (Yes, that’s her real name.) “Reading up on the history of a cocktail, then going into a bar and watching someone make it for you …”

“Of course, when you get a glass of wine, it’s not like it’s just someone pouring a glass of wine,” Mr. Beam interjected, “but cocktails are an art, a craft.”

“It’s an alchemy!” exclaimed Ms. Darbyshire. “You wonder, ‘How did you ever think to put that and that and that together?’”

When neo-speakeasies like Milk & Honey and Please Don’t Tell first started opening their unmarked doors in the late ’90s and early aughts, they helped to revive an American tradition that had been largely moribund since Prohibition—when the craft disappeared under the constraints of grim ingenuity—bootlegged booze being often very bad. Rather than accentuating good spirits, 1920s drinks were designed to mask inferior ones, resulting in scarcely quaffable creations like the Alexander, made of gin, crème de cacao and cream. And when it came to bad drinks, the hangover was a long one.

The speakeasies took a craft which had been straitlaced and relatively unimaginative in even the best bars and transformed it into something inventive, edgy and exciting, reviving forgotten classics, pushing the envelope and educating barflies on the differences between Woodford Reserve and Maker’s Mark. Cocktails went from being the thing you had before or with dinner to an event in and of themselves. The hush-hush appeal of the speakeasies, and the theatricality of a lot of the bartending that went on there (Apotheke put their bartenders in lab coats), only made the movement more irresistible.

A decade later, a scene once contained to neo-speakeasies has reached a level of total saturation. Neither the scuzziest dive nor the most beer-and-a-shot-centric sports bar seems exempt from the froufrou cocktail menu.

“In the 1990s, New Yorkers were drinking gin and vodka martinis. Now people are walking into bars demanding drinks with carambola and spicy honey,” said Raff VanCouten, who manages the bar program at the whiskey bar Maysville.

My local wine store in Bed-Stuy carries both Aperol and Damson gin liqueur (just the libations a Brooklynite might need to pick up on the way to a barbecue), and the Greene Grape market in Fort Greene offers not only aromatic bitters but orange, lavender, cardamom, chocolate, Peychaud’s and barrel-aged whiskey bitters.

“You can’t open a restaurant now without having a specialty cocktail list,” Anthony Caporale, an instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education, told The Observer. “Having one doesn’t make you better and different anymore. But not having one ensures that you’re different—and worse.”

Cocktails are a natural fit for a city in love with connoisseurship, status and drinking. As Moby, who no longer drinks, said in a Believer interview last year, “Certain places have a specific or accidental utility. Perth, Australia, is a great place to be a surfer. And lower Manhattan is a district for drunks ... No one comes to New York to be healthy; they come in listening to ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and get off the plane wanting to get drunk.”

In addition to be a rather boozy city, New York is also a very competitive one. Bars now vie to outdo each other with expensive and edgy concoctions. Bacon bourbon or a salt pork Campari no longer seem shocking; nor does the $200 price tag on a martini made with 1950s Gordon’s gin (not a spirit known to improve with age) at the Experimental Cocktail Club.

The spread of the craft cocktail movement has also meant a glut of fine but ultimately forgettable cocktails—the infinite variations of the gin, St. Germain, lemon and soda water cocktail, invariably named after a street by the bar to disguise its sheer ubiquity—along with some truly terrible ones.

By the time I made it to the Manhattan Cocktail Classic gala, I had been drinking heavily for the better part of two weeks and was very familiar with the multitude of ways that a cocktail can go wrong.

There had been cocktails of cotton candy vodka and blue curacao, drinks with essence of leather and hints of lilac, meat-flavored martinis, a shot of something called ass juice, and a large, flaming tiki mug filled with condensed milk, Jamaican rum, Bacardi 151, Grand Marnier, Lillet Blanc, orange juice, lemon juice, angostura bitters, absinthe, cinnamon and mint.

I had downed cocktails that cost more than entire dinners. I had been pleasantly tipsy and I had been fairly drunk.

I had set out to try both the strange-sounding combinations that give off the whiff of potential brilliance and the multitude of terrible drinks that have thrived parasitically on the city’s thirst for bespoke cocktails, from the celebrated cocktails at Angel’s Share to the daiquiris made with real marshmallow Peeps at an Astoria sports bar.

And so it was that I found myself one evening in the Dakota Bar, an Upper West Side establishment, willing myself, against my every natural impulse and inclination, to order the Ice Scream Soda, a $14 cocktail of cioccolato liqueur and Ketel One vodka, topped with club soda and served on the rocks. Besides the name, which was ominous enough, it was worrisome that the “cioccolaco liquor,” as it was written on the cocktail menu, was either misspelled or a mysterious spirit that Google had yet to learn about.

Sipping the mud-colored concoction from a straw, I found that the fizz of the soda assaulted the tongue first, and then the burn of the vodka struck, “like an attack from behind enemy lines,” as my drinking companion put it. It would have tasted very like a watery egg cream if not for the piercing flavor of rubbing alcohol. The chocolate manifested itself as a kind of chalky undertaste, which called to mind Mia Farrow’s criticisms of the sedative-laden chocolate mousse in Rosemary’s Baby, filmed at the Dakota, the nearby landmark from which the bar takes its name. Otherwise, the connection between the recently opened bar and the famous co-op seemed tenuous.

Poorly executed and ill-conceived drinks are two of the most common bugaboos of the craft cocktail movement. Many bars hire cocktail mavens to create menus for them but don’t follow up by hiring bartenders who are seasoned or skilled enough to execute them. Even a twist on a classic can often be disastrous in the hands of bartender who doesn’t know what he’s doing—a misfortune that recently befell Sarah Fina, a bartender at Red Rooster, when she ventured out to a new bar in Clinton Hill.

“They put an old-fashioned in a shaker and started shaking and I was like, ‘Oh no, don’t do that! You’re bruising the bourbon!’” Ms. Fina said. “A lot of places try to do all these fancy things, and they don’t even know the basics.”

Of course, innovation is a large part of what makes cocktails so delightful—it’s the thrill of the unknown and the desire for new tastes and sensations—food and drink being two of the places where people are willing to splurge. Just as Chanel perfume is an entry point into the brand for those who cannot afford the clothes and shoes, so a cocktail, even at $20, offers an attainable luxury experience: a comfortable seat in a pleasant setting, an attentive bartender, a chance to sample a different kind of lifestyle without buying a $200 dinner.

There are bound to be some bad cocktails and spectacular fails as the form evolves. But even a $20 bill for a disappointing drink doesn’t seem so bad in the grand scheme of things—unless, of course, the drinker succumbs to that all-too-familiar temptation to just have one more.

Seemingly counterintuitive combinations are often among the most delicious. Shrubs—or colonial-era cocktails made with fruits preserved in vinegar, have recently been revived to the delight of many. And who would have predicted the widespread popularity of a vodka, clamato, Worcestershire sauce, angostura bitters, lemon, pepper, olives and celery cocktail otherwise known as a Bloody Mary? As Wayne Curtis has noted in the pages of The Atlantic, both martinis and Manhattans came from “the freakish idea of mixing wine and spirits.”

But there are limits. Almost every bartender I talked to agreed that making a good cocktail was a matter of balance (sweet, sour and umami—the bitters) and there are some ingredients that just don’t seem to blend in any agreeable way.

“We’ve all had failures before we found something we could get behind and put on a menu,” said Douglass Miller, an assistant professor at the Culinary Institute of America, ruefully recounting his own Waterloo: “Fish sauce. I couldn’t make it work. I was trying fish sauce and bourbon drinks. Also, carbonated milk. It’s big in Japan.”

Of the two cocktails I tried at the well-regarded speakeasy Angel’s Share, one was the nearly unquaffable tiki drink—named, rather fittingly, the Devil’s Kick—and the other was perhaps the most unexpectedly lovely and surprising drink I have ever had the pleasure of sipping: a cocktail of white truffle and pear vodka, grapefruit puree and tonic.

At Apotheke, a cocktail lounge in Chinatown, I had the misfortune of meeting the White Widow, a frothy mauve drink made of white rum, hemp milk, hemp seed, orange blossom, water, egg white and heavy cream. I inherited this from a friend, who declared that drinking it was “like licking an attic” and persuaded the server to bring her a delicious elixir of vodka, lemongrass and cilantro instead. Sadly, my own drink—the Pancho Villa (mezcal, grilled corn, poblano pepper, agave nectar and lime)—was just as unpalatable. It tasted like a charcoal briquette soaked in tequila.

“The problem,” said my friend, eyeing the White Widow warily, “Is that no one would want to kiss you after you’d been drinking this.”

But the real problem was that the drink not only seemed likely to snuff out the possibility of romance, but “possibility” as a general category, betraying the promise that is built into a cocktail. A cocktail, particularly a good one in a pleasing setting, seems not only to open up possibilities, but to suggest that one is clever and brave enough to take advantage of them. A fundamentally cosmopolitan beverage, it carries with it the allure of the city—as a place where anything can happen and often does—while suppressing more sober realities: the incipient hangover, the long subway wait late at night, the profound statements that will sound pompous in a less forgiving light.

A cocktail is a fundamentally aspirational drink, one that confers on the drinker the flattering sheen of urbanity and suggests an attractive, idealized self: daring, adventurous, sophisticated. The kind of person who might not be invited to an endless circuit of cocktail parties and galas, but would like to be.

As the night wore on, the mood at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic changed in the way that parties do—imperceptibly at first, a rising volume, the women doing the little foot-shifting dance they do when their feet start to hurt—and then, seemingly, all at once. Shoes came off, people began to take photos of themselves with breadsticks and straws in their mouths, miming the act of smoking a cigarette in a fancy holder, and couples started to lean against each other in the sort of dog-tired slump that you most often see late at night on the subway. Suddenly, the corridors were bathed in the eerie glow of iPhones as revelers abandoned the here and now, hoping for a fix in the form of a promising electronic communiqué.

By midnight, the evening’s early magic had all but worn off. There were broken glasses and emergency stain removals. I mistook a woman’s smeared glitter eye shadow for tears. The crowd around a food station with mini take-out containers of sesame noodles blocked the better part of a hall—I myself had consumed three such containers, along with a twist of salted caramel, a dollop of absinthe and burnt sugar ice cream, two cheese-encrusted breadsticks, a tiny mound of gravlax soaked in gin and juniper, a bourbon profiterole, an acorn soda, a celery soda, and the better part of four cocktails.

Soon, the lines for the bathrooms were snaking into the halls. I spotted one woman making off with several loaves of bread from the table upstairs. Another whom I’d stopped to question about her passion for cocktails shrugged. “New York’s an alcoholic city. Does it matter what you drink?” she said, excusing herself to go get another one before they stopped serving altogether.

—Additional drinking by Laura Kusisto, Jessica Yusaitis Pike, Feliks Pleszczynski, Emily Anne Epstein, Hunter Walker and Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke.

kvelsey@observer.com

The mysterious artist appeared one day and started painting. (credit: Amanda Cohen)

The artist appeared on our block two weeks ago. A lean man with inky fingers covered in silver rings, he wore a cap, a small button fastened to the bottom of his shirt—“I love porn”—and a menthol-flavored Marlboro tucked behind one ear. He would arrive around 9 a.m., arrange his scroll of paper, his pot of ink and his various clips on the sidewalk between The Observer offices and the adjacent Japanese barbecue joint, remaining there, painting intently, until 6 or 7 p.m. As he painted, he scrunched himself into contorted positions and seemed not to take breaks or register the passersby, who invariably stared.

We were curious about the new arrival on our block. Though of course West 44th between Eighth and Ninth Avenues hardly belongs to us alone. We share it with a lumber yard, a theatrical supply company, the Intercontinental Hotel, several parking lots and a convenience store whose clientele appear to buy nothing but lottery tickets. And, as we recently learned, we also share it with the dingy walk-up where Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas spent the last years of his life and committed suicide in 1990 at age 47, impoverished and suffering from AIDS.

It was the walk-up, No. 328, that had brought the artist to our block. He is, we learned when we spoke to him one smudgy evening after he had finished packing away his supplies, a Frenchman named Thomas Henriot. Four years ago, after reading all of the writer’s work, Mr. Henriot started working on a project about Arenas, who was not, Mr. Henriot told us sadly, “as recognized as he should be.”

Mr. Henriot chose to paint the places that Arenas had loved, and lived. This involved some time in Brazil and a lot of time in Cuba, where Arenas had spent most of his life, persecuted for his homosexuality and imprisoned for his writings, which had to be smuggled out of the country in order to be published.

“He has such an incredible story, because when he was in jail, persecuted by the regime, he still managed to write,” Mr. Henriot said. “There is a book he wrote, Otra Vez el Mar, it is about 700 pages, and he had to write it three times. He wrote it and the police took it, he wrote it again and they took it again. Finally, he wrote it a third time and that time it was published. This strongness, this absolute creativity!

“I am not pro-Castrist, I am not anti-Castrist, it’s not political,” he continued. “With my work, what I try to prove is that painting is a space of liberty. This is where I cross Arenas.”

Thomas Henriot is in the midst of a multi-year project about Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas.

When we spoke, Mr. Henriot had just finished the second panel of a triptych of the exterior of 328 West 44th, a finely detailed painting—he uses an ancient Chinese brush and ink technique—that he flipped over at the end and covered with strokes and blotches of diluted ink that soaked through to the front. He had been in the city for two weeks and intends to stay for two months, during which time he plans to paint other places Arenas had loved—he wrote a lot about Central Park—and some of the people he had known.

As for our block, there had been “a lot of good meetings,” he said, people he’d spoken with about Arenas, Colombian immigrants who worked nearby and chatted in Spanish (“much better than my English”), the building security guard who, as Mr. Henriot put it, “protects me really nicely,” with bathroom breaks and cups of water.

As for 328 West 44th, he had not been inside and he did not know which window had been Arenas’s, but he likes it better that way.

“It’s good because every window I paint I am wondering. I try not to know anything about a place when I start, I want the knowledge to come through the painting,” Mr. Henriot said. “It’s almost like a meditation. I was here for nine hours today and I feel blessed to be able to do this. I mean, it’s my duty.”

We studied the building for a moment.

“It does not surprise me that this was his home because it’s the only one like it on the block,” he said, finally. “And without the steps”—here he pointed to the fire escapes zigzagging up the building’s elegant but rundown facade—“it could be a building in Havana.”