Illo: David Saracino

The Observer was arrested last Friday for entering the subway through an emergency exit. We were cuffed, frisked and led by a police officer through the station. Commuters with tote bags stared.

We found ourselves in a holding cell in the Union Square station precinct with a man named Felix, who had been brought in for sharing a MetroCard with his pregnant wife. Two others came, and then left with desk appearance tickets.

But we would be joining Felix in central booking. We had a warrant, an open container summons, a relic from a summer in 2008. Ah, right: the G Train, with that girl, drinking Sparks out of a brown paper bag.

Eventually, the two officers unlocked the cell, put us in our cuffs and walked us outside. One had a cigarette for Felix.

“Do you want to share it?” Felix asked as we stood by the police van.

An officer took the half-smoked Newport from his lips and placed it to mine. Then we got in the van and drove downtown.

The police facilities of Manhattan are convenient to the city’s hottest new club, Le Baron. We squinted across Columbus Park, trying to make out the shadows of legs on heels set to brave the black-and-red door. That night the joint was to hold a soft opening for family and friends. We would not be in attendance.

Instead we sidled up to the bars at central booking, aka The Tombs. It was an inauspicious end to what had been a highly entertaining week. On Monday, we’d downed bottle after bottle of red wine at Inoteca with a model and her friend, an actress poised to have her breakout role in one of the year’s more anticipated indie films. On Tuesday, we’d attended the after party for Coriolanus at 44, drinking double Dewar’s on the rocks alongside Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson and Jessica Chastain. Wednesday, we knocked down Ketel One cocktails at Milk Studios to toast rock photographer Aaron Stern’s new book, Everyone Must Be Announced. Then we went to the party for Haywire, at Sons of Essex, drank enough tequila and champagne to invite the guests back to our apartment and then decided to dance at Electric Room, before hitting an after party at a model’s loft in Gramercy. And Thursday, we went to the opening of Tribeca restaurant Super Linda and enjoyed super-spiked margaritas before stopping by a boozy dinner at Lucien and an after party in the basement of Acme, the Great Jones Street restaurant recently spruced up by the owners of Indochine. Upstairs at Acme guests from the premiere of Man on a Ledge still lingered, so we joined them for a drink, too.

An hour after getting locked up, we fished out a tip sheet from the Coriolanus premiere, complete with headshots lest us red-carpet reporters not recognize the less bold of the bold-faced names.

“Is that your parents?” asked a young pen-mate.

We quickly folded the tip sheet away.

It eventually became apparent that no one would see a judge until midday Saturday, so around one in the morning we started to tell stories.

“Look, my nigga, you either get out of here or you go to The Island,” a man, let’s call him Ben, said, sitting beside us. “That’s Rikers, and like most of you niggas I been there.”

“Yeah I been there,” said another man. “With this mothafucka!”

He was pointing at Felix, who had stuffed his head in a puffy jacket, trying to sleep.

“This a hotel compared to The Island,” Ben went on. “You got rats and shit, plus the showers. You ever been to the showers in Rikers? You hear screams.”

Certain topics could last for hours. They debated the merits different strains of weed. Sour or purp, the eternal question. They argued Spanish Harlem girls versus Brooklyn girls, discussing the differences anatomically and in detail. They discussed relationships. A guy who called his girlfriend on the cell’s phone got mercilessly ribbed for being mushy (“You got a pussy down there, nigga?”).

The young man to the right of us shook himself awake, mashed the tips of his fingers into his eyes. It was around 4. The florescent lights blazed and never dimmed, like a casino.

“Anyone got a light?” the young man asked.

“You ain’t got a cigarette, do ya?” someone replied.

“Nah, man,” the kid responded. “I got some bud.”

“You crazy.”

“Want some?”

“Look, what you in here for?” Ben asked.

“Gun.”

“Yours?”

“Buddy’s”

“It marked to any bodies?”

“Two.”

“Son, how old are you?”

“17.”

“Look, you’re going to The Island for longer than you’ve been living, so if I were you I’d flush that shit. Save yourself a few years.”

Breakfast was dry Corn Flakes and it came and went. Around eleven in the morning—after snow, the wives and girlfriends said through the phone, had blanketed the city—the first group was called up to see the court-appointed lawyers. And then to the courtroom, which resided somewhere in this invisible city of cells. On one side, freedom; on the other, back to The Tombs with a ticket to The Island.

It was now five in the afternoon and we had been notched into a chain gang, led up a series of spiral staircases painted shit-yellow and placed in another cell, this one with access to the public defenders. The boxes into which these lawyers came were confessional booths. The men could admit their sins and hear the necessary penance.

“But we’re both set,” Felix said.

Our friend was sitting beside us as we waited to hear our names called to see the judge. It was now nearing 8:00 p.m., 26 hours under lock and key.

“We’ll get ‘time served’ and walk out of here,” he went on. “Will you wait for me? In the lobby or some shit? We’ll walk out of here and smoke a cigarette. I wanna give you my number.”

After a day of cinderblock and cornea-burning white light, the courtroom’s soft maroons were of another world. The judge slammed a gavel clearing both the subway violation and the open container citation from our record, just as we knew he would. We were free. We’d tell this tale at movie premieres and fashion parties.

We waited awhile for Felix, and then a bit longer, until it became clear which side of the courtroom had claimed him.

That night we attended a party in the East Village thrown by a reporter for a national daily newspaper. He was moving, and had decided against transporting his liquor cabinet. The guests spent a few hours solving his problem as the snow outside crusted to ice. After a nightcap at Welcome to the Johnson’s we walked up our stairs on Houston Street and unlocked the door. It never occurred to us before, but our apartment is about the same size as a cell in central booking.

What? Doesn't everyone dress like this?

A few minutes before Lil Wayne and his entourage walked into El Privado, a low-lit basement space beneath Chelsea’s Hotel Americano, a fellow attendee turned to The Observer and said what the rest of us were thinking.

“You know what would make this party even better?” she said. “If they were playing Aaliyah ... and I had some weed.”

The now-sober rapper’s history with the herbal stuff, including a high-profile arrest for possession here, is enough to get the crowd thinking of toking up. That we were at the unveiling of his Trukfit skatewear line—inspired by the bong-happy aesthetic of teenage skate punks—well, that could only help. The clothes, designed by the rapper, were nothing if not faithful to the source material. In two rows, cut men stood in camo’d-out cargo shorts, tiny backpacks, backward caps, headphones and Ray-Bans.

Also: their skin, from top to bottom, was slathered in glittering silver paint.

We had left the party for a cigarette—a perfectly legal one, alas (at least to the extent cigarettes are still legal in New York)—when a caravan of black Escalades pulled up, smothering the 27th Street art gallery that once housed Bungalow 8. Most were decoys, but out of the important truck walked a small man in sunglasses and dreadlocks, with teardrops tattooed beneath both eyes.

We rushed back inside.

Those waiting by the bar for another free drink had already been alerted and left the booze behind to try and snag a glance of the Young Money label boss. The line of streetwear-minded men lined up to speak to Weezy resembled the Tumblr dashboard of an intern at Complex. But their outfits could not top that of the man himself. Trukfit tee, luminous metal grill fastened to his teeth, hot pink cap ...

“Did you see what shoes he was wearing?” someone in the jumble beside his booth said.

Ah, yes, his kicks: moon boots designed by Terence Koh, conceptual artist by way of Mars, for the boutique darlings Opening Ceremony.

The Observer approached Wayne as he left his roped-off booth to check out a few of the models.

“Ah, New York is awesome!” he said to us, sipping a mini-bottle of Coca-Cola and looking around at his party. “I just wanted my brand to be a reflection of myself and how I handle things and how I look and how I go about things,” he explained.

The models were forming a semicircle around him, and then he removed a white stick from his mouth.

“Do you always request a lollipop at these things?” we asked.

Perhaps it was an allusion to one of his biggest hits—or maybe not.

“Oh, yeah,” Wayne said, giving us an intent look. “I got a sweet tooth.”

As the rapper-turned-designer made his way back to the booth set aside for him, a distinctive stench crept out from the nook that housed the men’s room.

“It smells like fire down here,” a guest said.

“Well, yeah,” said another. “It smells like something.”

We headed for the door in question and gave it a push. It appeared to be stuck.

“Lean against it!” we heard from inside.

We shouldered ourselves in and found a standing-room-only situation: packed against the walls of the cellblock-size box were six men in glittery silver facepaint, dressed head-to-toe in Trukfit. The walking jawlines in board shorts were occupying the bathroom.

We were about to retreat back through the half-open door when one of the silver men asked his fellow models for a lighter. No one responded.

“Here,” we said, thumbing out a red Bic from our pocket.

“Let him in, let him in!” the silver faces said.

And so we handed the lighter to the model in the front, who had before him a rolling paper spread out on the counter—the receptacle for a spectacular amount of glowing green sticky-perfect nugs. One pair of shiny hands rolled the weed into its paper holster, and another sparked the flame.  The effects took hold quickly enough.

“Look at you!” one of the models said.

“Me?” The Observer said. Everyone seemed to be moving into us, like a dolly zoom, and pointing.

“We gotta get you some facepaint!” said another model.

“Oh, shit!” said another model, who was touching his metallic chin and looking in the mirror. “I didn’t realize I was still silver!”

“We gotta get this shit off!” said another.

Then one of the models motioned toward the door, beyond which lay promises of crab cakes, which—given our state—would soon become the best thing any of us had ever tasted.

“No, it feels good,” he said, rubbing his face. “I look like platinum, man. You’ll see, Imma get on the subway just like this.”
nfreeman@observer.com

Is it self-awareness or self-loathing? (Peter Arkle)

The grand plan was to stay sober for the month of January, and it failed. It collapsed the moment we touched down in the Bahamas and felt the silky warmth outside the Nassau airport. The whole place was wet with the prospect of booze—its bars, its dewy palm trees, its bikini-wearing swimmers, its cerulean wading pools. The plane’s tires hit the tarmac, and from then on, rum was god.

In the boxy cab we removed our loafers, took off our socks, stuffed them in a spare pocket of a hand-me-down attaché case and shoved our heels back into the miniature leather gondolas. The engine growled down hardy roads, handling the this-way-that-way roundabouts with the finesse of an arcade pinball.

It was 13 degrees in New York and we had taken up our father’s offer of a trip to Paradise Island.

The Atlantis Casino Resort revealed itself all at once. The skyline resembled a monstrous coral reef that decided to gasp for air. Inside, were marble citadels festooned with mock-Roman buttresses. Beyond that, an array of maritime myth figures with tide-blown hair stuck to the ceilings. There were more aquariums than elevators, not to mention the hanging gardens, the thrones for photo ops, the fountains—a lost city reassembled, cobbled together from the garage sales of billionaires.

Inside the resort, everyone was drunk. The old men in shirts that flapped in the air conditioning, sneaky 17-year-olds with room keys connected to their fathers’ credit cards, day-tripping cruise ship skippers laid over in the Bahamas for the night, gamblers, dancers, swingers, bachelors—and us, drunk (despite our previous resolution).

It was the rum, that sugar cane spirit, the thing once responsible for the economies of these blissful islands. Maybe there’s a reason why we never drink rum in New York City.

“Señor Frog’s?” the taxi driver said. “Well, sure, but it’s for the teenybopper set. I usually work by the Hilton, right there, and they’re so nice when they’re sober. But then, ugh, later, well, they’re lifting each other up, drunk.”

It was our last night, and we were passing the boutique row in the main drag of the town—Coach, Cartier, United Colors of Benetton. We had been drinking most of the day.

“I have a friend who works there, at Señor Frog’s,” the cab driver said. “I tell him, man, what did you put in those children’s drinks!”

The cab stopped and by the deck of Senor Frog’s the receiving line of stumbling girls in tank tops grabbed at the wooden railings. The spring break aesthetic had been thawed out for winter. “I’m a Vageterian!” read one of the signs on the wall. We walked beside them to the bar, had frozen rum cocktails, and watched as the stragglers went after desperate pairings. The rum moved their feet and behind them cruise ships the size of Central Park began to inch out of the bay beside Paradise Island.

“Stay here?” a girl said into her phone outside. Bahamian men barked, “Cab! Cab!” at us as they pulled up out of waterside alleys, curling lips of tide flouncing beyond the dock. She too swayed tipsily as the DJ dipped hints of keyboard—a new song—into his mix, and it evaporated into the opening melody of Rihanna’s “We Found Love.”

“I don’t even want to be here,” said the girl into the phone.

Upon returning to the Atlantis, we encountered a slurring man in Nantucket Reds and a checkered shirt who was flailing against three black guards trying to contain him.

“A little too much of grandma’s medicine,” our cabbie averred.

Inside, we made our way to a club called Dragon. The dance floor worked its way around the bar in a crescent, with a roped-off section just beyond it, and buckets of ice—waiting for their bottles—lined the marble countertop. Nothing foreign, but nothing comforting; any resemblance to New York made this whole economy of sun and rum further from a thing we could like. An enormous white man who self-identified as a Harvard graduate, living in a penthouse nearby, was nice enough to fill one of the buckets with Patron.

He turned to our brothers, who are identical twins.

“I love twins, but usually of the other gender,” Harvard said. “I love fucking twins. Man, I gamble, and I play better when I’m fucking.”

We did a shot of Patron.

“You have any problems,” he added. “You let me know.”

We did have a problem. Beyond that roped-off section stood a girl with far-away eyes, eyes like an untouched ocean, dancing like the undulations in a lava lamp. She was standing with three men, each wearing a similar pec-hugging shirt.

But she was leaving, out of the club and back toward the stone temple hallways, back toward the hotel suites. Before we could say anything, though, she smiled, took the man’s hand and was gone.

We ended up standing at the bar next to our father.

“You know, I’ve been watching you. You drink too much,” he told us.

nfreeman@observer.com

The party is just getting started.

A fight broke out seven hours into the new year.

“You’re my fucking brother,” shouted a man on Houston Street. “I’ve known you for, oh, how many fucking years, and you know, on our mother, I would never hit somebody.”

The stomping and tears echoed four floors below our apartment. From out our window, where we were smoking, the two men ended a long night—stretched into daylight—with an argument kicked up along the shuttered storefronts of the Lower East Side.
The sun was trickling in over the fire escapes that drip down buildings to the East River and they went on, bellowing.

“I can’t believe you,” another man responded.

The Observer, safe in our bedroom, listened while nursing a leftover can of beer.

“Well fuck you!” the first man yelled back.

Sirens bounced around the numbered blocks to the north. A few cars drove by, mostly cabs scrounging for the last bits of the New Year’s Eve revelers.

The window’s vantage was such that we could see the belligerent pair, but they could not see us. We could listen to a snippet of their night, but they could not hear our story.

New Year’s Eve in New York City smashes together its denizens, first in restaurants then bars then after parties then late-night pizza places. But we’re all strangers, alone together. Each new calendar starts with a story, its disconnected characters ignorant of the intersecting plots.

Here’s ours.

The Observer woke late on the last day of 2011 to a pile of detritus beside our bed, coughed-up air of stale beer tickling the room’s corners, a light whiff of spent sweat and mixed perfumes—we had thrown a big party the night before New Year’s Eve (in retrospect, perhaps a misstep). The mess evaporated along with the day’s remaining afternoon hours and after a wine-soaked dinner out-of-town friends swung by the place for a cocktail.

Out the window, the Empire State Building glowed red and green, a yuletide holdover.

“We have so much booze,” a friend texted. That was all we needed to hear, and a cab ferried us through the waves of pedestrians—tiny armies of heels—to Union Square. A few had come up to the fifth-floor loft, where a projector displayed ambient whirligigs on a white wall, screen savers set against the desktop of the party. It switched to Times Square when the ball dropped.

With each bottle of champagne came new arrivals to the party, which at its peak boasted a mix of actresses, DJs, public relations reps, artists, writers, promoters and even a professional magician. 4:00 AM occurred, and we moved on.

There was a party downtown, on Walker Street near Broadway. With a last gulp of communion we stepped outside to see the activity in the Union Square Park, a loud gathering that spilled into the streets.

“Who lives here again?” we asked as a door opened to the Soho loft. Francesco Civetta, the DJ formerly known as Izzy Gold, manned a laptop surrounded by giant canvases, some hanging framed on the walls, others stacked in batches of three. It was quite a place to dance in. Religious trinkets from the far east were scattered on shelves, a long picnic table made for an ideal smoking spot and a series of halls led the adventurous ones to plush bedrooms.

The paintings, their black outlines, their profanity, their cave-art carnality—we recognized this artist.
“I think this is Harif Guzman,” we said to our date, as we peered over at the skeletons repeated from canvas to canvas. His work once covered the now-gone Don Hill’s. Then, we saw Mr. Guzman make his way through the crowd. It was, in fact, his place.

But the party ran out of beer, and we left to an apartment in Little Italy. When we entered, someone was already passed out on the couch.

“Did someone leave the gas on in here?” a friend asked after we climbed the six floors.

We checked the stove and found the errant knob.“Maybe I was trying to kill myself,” the couch-dweller said. That was our cue to leave.

And so we found ourselves back at home treating ourselves to a solo nightcap as the argument between brothers raged below. The night was over; the day had begun.

Just before we began our first sleep of a new year we caught the last snippet of the story unfurling below, leaving the rest of the plot out of earshot.

“I know you want to be the prince of the whole fucking world, but you can’t be prince of the whole fucking world,” the first man said to his New Year’s Eve cohort, and to the rest of New York City. “All I’m saying is, don’t choke.”
Happy New Year. Don’t choke.
nfreeman@observer.com

“Look at you,” Mr. Talese said to us as we sat down. “The only guy in the room without a tie, and the best-looking guy in the room!”

(Mr. Talese, of course, was clad in not only a tie, but a great one, and a waistcoat.)

Crab cakes (as ever) arrived and we dispatched with them as James Woods and Jay McInerney gave saucy toasts to Mr. Pfeifer, a New York survivor. Then, at a break, Gay Talese turned to us and asked the thing you ask around this time of year.

“So,” he said. “How was your 2011?”

We took our glass, now tinted red, downed it, caught the eye of a server and flitted a hand.

“It turned out pretty well.”

Did it? we immediately wondered. The memories, or at least the best of them, were barely memories at all—dimmed by drink and swathed in postmidnight darkness, the past year hardly even happened. And all the people, the parties, the pomposity, the pleasure: it was a year our friends say they taste only in reverie, dreamt up during the hours when most of town, even this town, has chosen the bed over the bar. But we clock in late and turn in even later. It was a year of living nocturnally.

Mr. Talese turned toward us.

“And why do you say that, Nate?”

The next glass of wine arrived, and we guided it toward our lips.

“Well, I met so many people …”

“Like who! Tell me, tell me everything.”

Quite the interviewer, this guy. But would Mr. Talese care about, say, Kanye West? We thought about back in February (lo, those many months ago ...), when we met him at the George Condo opening. “I don’t talk to the fucking press!” Mr. West insisted, loudly, before apologizing and regaling us with stories from recording Watch the Throne with Jay-Z in the depths of the Mercer Hotel. Would Mr. Talese care? Perhaps not. Running around with Mila Kunis and Scarlett Johansson at the White House Correspondents Dinner, that’s a good story, right? Or maybe ...

“I did meet Mick Jagger,” we blurted out.

He turned to us, intrigued anew.

“Mick Jagger! How did you manage that?”

Truly, how did we? Amid the security barricades that had descended on the Dream Downtown for the Marc Jacobs party, we received word that Mr. Jagger would be stopping by the Electric Room. And then he actually did.

Yes, the Electric Room, that new super-intimate Britannia-gone-Banksy living room—we did find ourselves there at a few too many bleary-eyed nights. After the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the models all ended up there. Same with most of the events during September Fashion Week. We’d find ourselves discussing media gossip with the ever-talkative Courtney Love, or watching Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen cozy up to the same art stars who put on the gallery opening earlier that night, or avoiding Lindsay Lohan and her entourage. All the flashy faces, ruled over by Nur Khan, the man who tends the hot spot’s embers.

And, if propulsion insisted, we would then head to Kenmare to collect a few more punches on the dance card. That place was like a second home, really. But just as the year’s excesses imperiled our health, it imperiled our hearth, too: Kenmare closed last Thursday, hours after we walked out—dance partner in hand—to face the 5 a.m. Lower East Side chill.

“You know, Gay, maybe I stayed out a bit too late sometimes, but those nights are worth it, right?”

A hunk of buffalo meat, rare and bloody, had arrived in front of us.

“Well, it depends on the night,” he said.

What nights would those be? we wondered. There was the Rag & Bone afterparty in February that launched Westway, the sleazetastic strip joint-gone-nightclub. It would be a pretty PG-13 place for the rest of the year, but that night was gleefully X-rated: as “Welcome to the Jungle” blared on the speakers the strippers came out to a roaring and adoring crowd.

But that’s a little too unrefined to tell Gay Talese about, we thought. Same goes for Alexander Wang’s beer-soaked keg party, and same goes for partying until sunrise with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, in a suite at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, after the band’s last-ever concert. Instead, let’s keep it classy—the mind wanders to drinking Italian 75s at the Carlyle to celebrate the Ferragamo show, which was held at the James B. Duke mansion. Or maybe the Brazil Foundation party at Hotel Americano, taking in the view of the Chelsea High Line surrounded by long legs and thick accents.

With these tales on our tongue another friend of Mr. Pfeifer’s, a war buddy, stood to salute the servicemen in the room, including Harvey Keitel. Another long soliloquy followed. And then soon enough we found our heady, day-drunk self being dragged outside for a smoke. We said goodbye to Mr. Talese and, thinking we would not soon cross paths, wished him a happy new year.

But just a few days later, having followed a dazed-looking Malcolm Gladwell into The New Yorker’s holiday party, we ran into a certain natty contributor to that magazine leaning up against the bar. Even among the dapper scribes who had piled into Bunker, a new club in the meatpacking district, Gay Talese was harder than hard. He again had on a three-piece suit, and again we were guilty of forgetting a tie.

“On your way out?” we asked after quickly catching up.

“It looks like it,” he said, putting on his topcoat. “Don’t stay out too late!”

nfreeman@observer.com

Illo: Chris Gash

Around the middle of the summer, brightly colored fliers started appearing on the Lower East Side, strewn across coffee shop counters and discarded on curbs. “Island Smokes,” they said. “A healthier, less expensive alternative to smoking. Amazing!!!” There was a cartoon palm tree swaying on some exotic atoll to drive the point home, but more intriguing was the word “discount.” And then the details: this wasn’t really so much an alternative to smoking as a way to do it cheaper. Island Smokes went for $29.99 a carton. Three bucks a pack. Peanuts.

That’s less than what you pay in the south. Less than West Virginia, even. A price tag to win over any pack-a-day New Yorker. Our heartbeat quickened and our palms grew hot—as if a pretty girl had walked through the door.

The location, the flier claimed, was at that bustling Chinatown border corner of Eldridge and Broome (next to Vanessa’s Dumplings, in LES-speak). But surely this place, such a cost-friendly refuge from Mayor Bloomberg’s war on cigarettes, was some kind of myth. There had to be a catch. It was too good to be true.

Turns out is true, but it’s too good to be legal. On Nov. 14, the city filed suit against the shop and its Staten Island sister store, insisting that the Island Smokes is in violation of the Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act. That edict forces each pack sold in New York to bear a stamp indicating that its price includes the government-mandated $5.85 tax—and Islands doesn’t collect a penny of that fee.

But the people behind Island aren’t panicking. The opposite, really: in 2012 they plan to open outposts in the East Village, Queens, and Brooklyn. If they can shake the feds, expect a total takeover of the city.

And at the center of the fight are the cigarettes themselves, the little paper tubes you fill up individually and place into a tin one at a time. It’s a personal, almost sanctified experience: You create each one yourself, only to burn it as a sort of divine sacrifice. To be a patron of Island Smokes is to get closer to your smoking.

It took a few months after salivating over that first flier for The Observer to seek out these legendary cigarettes. We walked across Delancey Street en route to the corner of Eldridge and Broome, and in the afternoon chill we lit a Marlboro—maybe our last brand-name cigarette. A few guys outside of the marigold-hued Spanish bodega shot the shit in spitfire Chinese, and after passing a man slurping up dumpling soup we saw a stoop on the right. “Island Smokes,” the sign read. The door was jammed, but we jiggered it and went inside.

“What do you want—mild, medium, full flavor, it’s all tobacco, natural tobacco,” a guy said. “You know the toxins in cigarettes, regular cigarettes, we don’t have those, it’s just the smoke.”

The attendant was pointing to a ten-page Wikipedia printout taped up on the wall. It was an addendum to Wikipedia’s “Cigarette” entry that listed, in full, the hundreds of life-threatening chemicals present in your normal plug of a Parliament or Marlboro. He repeated that his cigarettes have none of them. (He failed to mention, however, that they are still cigarettes, and they will still kill you.)

“Come on, let’s get you set up,” he said. In one hand was a plastic container stuffed yay-high with shards of that addictive leaf, and in the other a pocket-sized tin container. “Island Smokes,” the tin said.

On either side of the store sat pleased customers working the machines. Each device let out a whirr as the clumps of tobacco sifted from the hatch down to the guts of the thing. To make a cigarette, affix the pre-rolled tubelet to the nozzle at the bottom of the machine, press the magic button and watch the brown leaves scrunch nicely into the little paper pirouette. Then you have a cigarette.

“This working for you?” the man asked. His name was Kenny and his sparkly earring matched the glow of his cigarette’s cherry. Oh, yes, you can light up inside, and the ashtrays are placed at every seat.

We nodded, but we were lying. The first attempts at engaging with the future of cigarette addiction went horribly awry, one split cylinder after another. Could we attach the filter’s edge to the pursed lips of that rumbling  machine? Not at all. Could we act cool in front of scowling NYU girls in vintage Hermès scarfs? Not at all. Could we ever condone a simple smoke joint that tried this hard to be hip? Doubtful.

But it was winning us over. With muscle memory we got the rhythm down, and making these cigarettes proved easy. And the noises the thing makes! There was a quick nudge onto the nozzle, the this-way, that-way insertion followed by a ramming of the button and a thrilling big desperate vroooovvvroo-oooom noise, and then the leafy wonderment packing the paper in a fast rush. It was all over pretty quickly.

The vibe was Summer of Love, enhanced by the unrepentant Beatles-Stones-Hendrix soundtrack. Strangers were met with a Heyyy you! A few customers discussed plans to join a march supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. And those who asked how all this was legal (we certainly didn’t) were met with a simple explanation: It’s no different from picking up a pack of tobacco and rolling papers. But why roll yourself when you can hang out, listen to “Purple Haze” and have a robot do it for you?

Soon enough there were 20 little chimneys in our tin, mercenaries in the fight, and we left the place after smushing our third little monster out in the ashtray.

Immediately after, a friend’s birthday dinner offered an opportunity to see how the Island Smokes would go over with the uninitiated.

“Could I try one of those, instead?” said a friend, who blogs at the website of a weekly magazine. We had stepped outside of Zucco: Le French Diner on Orchard Street, and he’d pocketed his Camels at the sight of our tin. We gave him one.

“It hits well,” he said.

“Is that one of those cigarettes?” Greco, the restaurant’s owner, asked us. He had come outside, too.

We asked him what he meant by “those.”

“These,” he said. He was holding up a brightly colored flier. We said yes, gave him one, and Greco smiled.

We indulged in that pack without remorse and wound up back at Eldridge and Broome the next day. Another 20 fresh-packed smokes marked by the fingerprints pressed on them with each packing. Another 20 dimpled, imperfect man-made cigarettes we could call our own and love. Another 20 sons and daughters.

We left $4.50 poorer than we were before.

It was a night to go out, and we took our full batch to the Boom Boom Room, for the premiere of Another Happy Day, the new film starring Demi Moore and Ellen Barkin. It was a loud time, full of spilled cocktails and salty little canapes, and occasionally Olivia Wilde danced without regard to Kanye West songs. After a few drinks we crept upstairs, to the smoking balcony, where we unfurled out peacoat and snapped open the tin.

“What is that you happen to be smoking?” said a bright-eyed thin girl. Her accent was British and she had a Twiggy-gone-Seberg hairdo. We told her, she asked for one, and let the plume of smoke dissipate before the November expanse of Manhattan skyscraper ice palaces arranged in front of us.

She's a 23-year-old actress who most recently played Kate Middleton, convincingly, in the movie adaptation of the royal courtship.

She wasn’t sure what we meant when we said “Island Smokes.”

“It’s, um, from this place,” we said. “On the Lower East Side, where you make your own cigarretes, and, um there’s this... It’s five bucks a pack.”

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“Well, I’m afraid I am.”

“Take me there.”

We agreed to meet the next day, though the actress had one stipulation.

“No phones,” she said.

“What?”

“We’re not going to exchange numbers.”

“How will I know you’re coming?”

“I’ll meet you there at six.”

“6:00?”

“6:00.”

“Will you actually be there?”

“I want you to take me to this cigarette shop.”

The next day, in a white coat and rose-colored beret, the actress was standing on the corner of Eldridge and Broome smoking a Parliament—her last brand-name cigarette, she was convinced.

“You actually made it.”

We were walking up the stairs to Island Smokes.

“Of course,” she said.

She looked at her watch. It was 5:53.

“I didn’t want to be late,” she said.

After hearing of the city’s lawsuit, The Observer made a requisite trip back to that Chinatown corner. It had been a two-week break marked by that holiday trip home—our excuse was we had lost our tin over a late night in Washington, D.C.. It was a tin we’d probably never again hold. Not expecting the place to be open for much longer, we opted not to buy a new one.

“I can’t really talk about that,” Kenny said, regarding the lawsuit. “But, well, I’m not worried.”

We asked about the new location on Avenue A, the East Village outpost that was to be their first franchise.

“Oh, I don’t know what’s happening with that,” Kenny said.

And what happened to the big machine over there, the one that could make a carton of smokes in under a half hour?

“Not sure what happened with that, they took it away,” he said.

By then 15 smokes had been inserted, filled, packed and sealed. A woman asked us if we wanted a plastic bag to put them in. We looked at her, fished into our pocket, and found an empty pack of Marlboro Reds. We could stuff them into this, we told her. No one would know the difference.

Then, after packing our last cigarette, we walked outside, lit one and walked away.

And then the video froze, leaving her nude, immobile figure projected upon an enormous screen. The audience went silent. We forgot we were watching a movie.

For The Observer, who is not a morning person, it was a lot to take in at 10 a.m.

We were sitting in a marble back room at Gustavino’s to get the first look at the 2012 Pirelli Calendar, the latest edition of the most coveted time-keeping device in the world. It’s the stuff of legend. Only industry types and loyal high-rolling customers of the tire manufacturer can get their hands on it, this calendar, and for good reason: it features artfully commissioned spreads of the 12 most beautiful women in the world wearing nothing but what nature gave them.

The projector kept placing these indelible images before us: a naked Joan Smalls amid a woody, tree sap-smothered grove cupping palms beneath her stomach, Lara Stone spreading herself like butter on a plush wicker love seat, Natasha Poly enmeshed in a mangled hammock. Kate Moss topless against a barn, Kate Moss topless inside a barn, Kate Moss naked in a barn. Indelible images, and one for every month.

“It’s not sexy, like in-your-face sexy,” Mr. Sorrenti, the calendar’s photographer, said in a voice over. “I wanted it to be natural.”

The odd narration—seemed pretty sexy to us, Mario!—came after the photographer instructed a bare-bodied Ms. Stone to rest her arms upon the crags of a sloped rock. The Observer glanced away from the screen. Italian journalists and paparazzi buzzed among themselves, hauling cameras above their heads or punching keys on their keyboards. The foreign press corps vastly outnumbered its American counterpart. The reveal continued—more models tossing off bathrobes to dip their big toes into a fish-teeming brook, more models undressing and scaling the branches of abutting trees—as the journalists watched through thick black-rimed glasses. The Italian press, hopped up on only coffee and pastries, were glued.

“Just a few housekeeping things,” the master of ceremonies reminded us. “There’s no smoking in here.”

If only! The presentation was about to end; all that was left were the actual images, the chosen 12 that would make up the calendar. In virtual form, these 12 disciples waved hello to us onscreen, each nude shot of each model curling digitally into view before snuggling tightly out of sight. The bodies, all bare, claimed space before us for a mere second, then disappeared, never to be seen again. They fell like autumn leaves.

It was the closest we’d ever come, we thought at the time, to actually holding that cherished Pirelli Calendar.

Later that night, The Observer split a cab with a friend who writes for a fashion website and sped uptown through freezing drizzle—10 minutes of straightening the bow tie of our tuxedo—and by the time she finished changing from flats to heels we had rounded a rain-slicked Park Avenue and arrived at the Armory, which was to play host that night to socialistos instead of soldiers, a deluge of black and white spangled just barely by the bright dresses of the models and their acolytes.

The grand hall was split into parlors, girded by Corinthian columns and splashed with bright frescoes. The women waved off canapes, walking past a looking glass that could flash back at them the floating reds and creams of their dresses. The men had no use for a mirror: we all wore the same uniform, all held half-empty flutes, all pinballed from canape platter to fashion acquaintance and back.

“Oh, how was Miami!” said a man outside, as we caught a pre-dinner smoke.

“Well, I’m back here,” Amy Sacco said.

By the steps to the party, Ms. Sacco, who once handpicked lucky guests of her tiny Bungalow 8, again worked a door, but just for laughs this time. Of the people she deemed suitable for entrance: a group of Italians who, like her, were recently back from Art Basel, an actor who arrived in a suit he had just bought at H+M, and the professional hockey player Sean Avery.

Then we walked into the main atrium, a space big enough you could nearly fit Central Park inside it—perhaps even all of Manhattan. The trays of tartare gave way to dinner plates laid out on the many tables, the equinox of appetizers segueing to an Indian summer of extra-rare steak, and then to the chilly solstice of mocha dessert.

“Why does no one smoke anymore here!” said an Italian man lighting his next cigarette with the cherry of his last. “This is America, America of the Marlboro Man. But no one smokes. In Rome, everybody smokes.”

He noted the people around us outside—all Italians, he pointed out. Not to mention the guest of honor. The dapper Mr. Sorrenti is being hailed as the first Italian to shoot Il Cal—a point of pride for Pirelli—even if his mother was more Big Apple than Naples, and moved young Mario here when he was 10.

“I used to look at the Pirelli Calendar so long ago,” the proud Mama Sorrenti told us later in the night. We had just watched the same video we had seen that morning, the making of the calendar. Adrian Brody and Julianne Moore were at her table, both glued to the screen.

“I started to tear up,” Ms. Sorrenti told us.

After Andrea Bocelli took the stage and began crooning an Elvis song, three young women whisked The Observer away from the table and outside to a cab that peeled off fast down Park Avenue, barreling toward Soho with a cargo of one tipsy reporter in a tuxedo, three glam, slim figures in evening gowns and one cardboard package containing the 2012 Pirelli Calendar.

The wine-drunk revelers at the generous Wooster Street loft grabbed chairs around a dining table, stood on the couches, and did everything they could to get a view of the grand unveiling of Il Cal. We wasted no time in opening it.

And there it was, in the physical, in the flesh. Our friend brushed her hair back and revealed January’s picture—ohh, aahh, wooowww. The crowd whooped and yelled. They asked for more. We lit a cigarette, watching. Ohhhh, aaahhh, woowwww. Then the next month, the next month, the next month.

Ohhhh, yessss.

The calendar kept going as if it would never end, as if the number of months in a year was infinite. The pictures had lulled us into a timeless trance. Lara Stone, Milla Jovovich, Natasha Poly, their poses there and then gone, fallen like leaves, time passing faster and faster, the months flying out of the year, one after another until there were no more pages to turn.

nfreeman@observer.com

Illo: Peter Arkle

The first thing we noticed about the den of Angels was the smell.

Hours before the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the creaky freight elevator in the Lexington Avenue Armory rattled up to the fifth floor. As the doors opened, a sharp tang of beauty-product acid smacked up against us, a collision of perfumes cut with a sweet whiff of lotions, the clouds of hairspray gushing from big bottles and wafting throughout the space. Past two aisles of models in pink gowns, beyond the couch where the most beautiful women in the world sat tonging mounds of salad with silver implements, was Karlie Kloss, a St. Louis native who, at 19 years of age, may be the most important model in the world.

“You don’t need any glitter, Nate?” Ms. Kloss asked The Observer, offering a hand with a big gloop of the shiny stuff. “It’s not the look you’re going for today? You don’t want to be an Angel?”

“Well, of course, if you need someone else for the show …”

“Put on some wings—I have an extra pair!” she said giggling. “In case someone drops out last-minute.”

The makeup artist was dabbing the girl’s eyelids with a soft purple, and when she was done Ms. Kloss batted them at her, and then at us, practicing. Though not the only model making her debut in wings—she was among a freshman class of 12 girls, the largest ever—Ms. Kloss had become the de facto face of the newcomers due to her startlingly young age and, well, her face. For some, this is a problem. Over the years, this unapologetic spectacle of skin has gone unmolested by the torchbearers of family values (it airs on CBS on Nov. 29), but it has rankled some to hear that such a young lass would be strutting the runway in the skimpiest of lingerie.

As her sisters in this elite sorority massed at the other end of the room—their hair curled, straightened and extended, their tan skin shimmering and immaculate—Kanye West made his entrance, at which point each Victoria’s Secret Angel walked over to pay her respects, supplicants to a priest. The cameramen clamored to get their shots.

“I think he’s the center of attention,” noted VS Angel Chanel Iman, who was once linked to the rapper romantically.

We stood around chatting with Miranda Kerr, an Australian model, about the $2.5 million bra she would wear that night. Lily Donaldson, a British model, told us of her passion for cooking Thanksgiving dinner for her fellow expats in New York.

But it was Ms. Kloss who put things in perspective. “Oh, my god,” she said, looking around at the other models. “I grew up in St. Louis—I’m an American girl, so you grow up and you idolize the Victoria’s Secret Angels. They set the standard of beauty in the eyes of teenage girls. I feel like I’m living the dream.”

On our way out, we ran into a serviceman in uniform. After spending three hours with women in their underwear, it can be easy to forget that this huge, antiquated edifice is, for the rest of the year, an armory.

“I work here, and I usually take today off,” he said. “But, hey, it could be worse.”

“In 2007, I was supposed to perform at this show,” Kanye West said later as he prepared to go on. “But I lost my superhero, and now she’s my superangel.”

Mr. West’s remembrance of his mother, who died a few days before his scheduled appearance, was a somber moment. The night’s only somber moment. What followed was an hour of street dancing, trapeze stunts, ballet routines, and clothes and the lack of clothes. There are no metaphors at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. A rose is not a rose—a rose is a two-story bed of petals each the size of a Volkswagen Jetta. The runway etiquette of Milan and Paris seems quaint when you see the models breaking whatever shallow fourth wall once existed to whoop and wave as their fellow Angels pass.

Desperate to top itself even as it unfolds, the show’s final act featured human cartoon character Nicki Minaj performing in the middle of a knot of graffiti-covered b-boy dancers. Rainbow confetti blanketed the air. Koonsian balloon dogs washed in glitter descended from the ceiling. The procession of models continued—they wore pink pajamas, slathered chrome, little orbs that looked like Dippin’ Dots, neon wings, futuristic heel-boots: a slumber party staged in a Blade Runner dystopia.

And closing the show was Karlie Kloss, who attained her own personal American Dream by walking down the runway in a dress that resembled a disco ball.

It would not be her last outfit of the night. In the back right corner of the Gallery at Dream, Ms. Kerr stood with husband Orlando Bloom (who declined to comment, offering The Observer no more than a bro hug), Maroon 5’s Adam Levine (with Angel girlfriend Anne V) and Leonardo DiCaprio, who was puffing on an electronic cigarette.

Then, suddenly, there was Ms. Kloss. She had opted for a backless black dress and massive heels. She had to lean down to peck us on the cheek.

“Was it everything you imagined and more?” we asked.

Ms. Kloss smiled.

“It was fantastic,” she said. The eyes of the world’s biggest movie stars—Mr. DiCaprio, Jake Gyllenhaal, even the married Mr. Bloom—homed in on the teenager. She didn’t return their glances.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” she said.

nfreeman@observer.com

Illo: Peter Oumanski

“I don’t recognize you,” said a man in a black negligee, black corset, black heels and two stuck-on circles of black mesh, one covering his mouth and another covering his crotch. It was early Sunday evening, Halloween eve, and he was talking to a man in a dress, with pink hair.

Somehow, he managed to nestle a cigarette into the small indentation in the spandex oral wrapping.

“I don’t recognize anyone.”

And how would he? Sprinkled along the charming stretch around 39th and Eighth were androgynous men in rubber-skin lady masks stumbling around on mermaid legs, models with their dainty cheekbones shattered by ballistics, beetle-eyed priests, monks, monarchs, morticians and their corpses, blacks swans, white swans, baseball stars, David Bowie, cops, criminals, African Queens.

But at La Escuelita, a gay bar, heavy on baile funk, which snuggles under the Port Authority’s vagabond-packed bus terminals, perhaps every night is Halloween. It doesn’t have to be the last day of October for a man to become “Jasmine International” and then have Jasmine International become Jennifer Lopez. Those men and women shuttled into town on Greyhounds just a few feet away—they could be men, they could be women. They could come to La Escuelita and be whomever they wanted.

The Observer was not sure whom we wanted to be. We had a red scarf pluming from a ratty tweed jacket, and round spectacles that profoundly limited our ability to see what was happening.

All this reinvention made for an appropriate place for Terry Richardson and V Magazine to host a Tea Dance and Halloween Revue, with models Joan Smalls, Candice Swanepoel, Sui He, Hanaa Ben Abdesslem and Bambi Northwood-Blyth in tow. A costume was required—Mr. Richardson couldn’t be himself, but anyone else at the party could without much trouble. All they needed were the large-framed Moscots.

“It is kind of odd, isn’t it?” the photographer’s girlfriend, Audrey Gelman, said to The Observer as we sidled up to the bar for two vodkas. A female model with brushed-on stubble and Mr. Richardson’s signature glasses had just walked by.

“He’s sort of everywhere.”

“Where’s he now?” we asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But he’s dressed as a Hasidic Jew.”

There was a quick compliment about our glasses, but she didn’t inquire further as to whom we were dressed as. So we slipped them an inch down and could finally see the scene unfolding—mostly a blur of zombie makeup and garish shoes, all of it spinning and reflecting off the mirrors and black glass. There was V editor Stephen Gan as a pharaoh. There was PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach smothered in silver glitter. “I went to Ricky’s and I said, ‘Hi, do you have any of these street performers’ outfits?’” he told The Observer, referring to the tin men who mime on the street for money. “And they didn’t have it in the Halloween costumes—they had it in the regular costumes.”

Ms. Northwood-Blyth, whose visage pranced around the room on multiple TV screens, stood near the stage in a long and lacy white wedding dress.

“It started out as a twisted bride and ended up Madonna—‘Like a Virgin’ Madonna,” she said. “What are you?”

We shrugged and adjusted our glasses.

“Oh, well, how about”—she grabbed our notebook and pen, scribbled a circle and little rectangle on the back cover, and held it like a camera—“you can be Bill Cunningham, and take a picture of me!”

We took the notebook to our face, she curtsied, and the fake shutter of the fake camera made a fake pop.

One person not in costume was Lady Bunny, though she did a pretty good impression of herself. We asked if Lady Bunny had a favorite costume, and then a woman dressed as Lady Bunny walked up to us.

“I’m her favorite costume!” the woman said.

Ms. Bunny ignored her and sized up the room.

“I host nights here at La Escuelita,” she said to The Observer. “Usually it’s reggaeton at 2 in the morning, with 18-year-old Latino and black kids. This is a little more fashion-y.”

“I want to get my picture with you!” the woman in a Lady Bunny costume yelled.

“And a little more white,” Lady Bunny said.

The bouffant-bearing-one’s main responsibility for the night was hosting the Halloween Revue, which showcased La Escuelita’s top-shelf lineup of drag queens pretending to be their idols. The Observer took a position by the edge of the stage, next to men in bondage gear with wads of ones in their palms, ready to slip the bills into the G-strings on display. (“They all have crack habits to support,” Ms. Bunny reminded the audience.)

“Is that a man, or a woman?” wondered a giant rabbit suit beside us.

We slipped down our glasses and stared at the silky rendition of J.Lo’s “On the Floor” that was exploding right in front of us.

“They’re all men,” we said.

With that, the performer’s robe came off and only pasties covered the naughty spots.

“My god,” said the rabbit suit, who would identify himself only as a British tourist. He was pointing and booing.

“It’s a man!” he yelled. “It’s a man! Get off! Get off! This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

But he stayed until the end, when Ms. Bunny closed the revue with some not-too-classy Amy Winehouse jokes. With the main event over, The Observer went upstairs and out into the world on the streets near Port Authority—everyone oblivious to the rampant performance below—where we ran into a friend sporting red lipstick and bunny ears.

“Who are you supposed to be?” she asked.

“Well,” we said, taking off the glasses. “Whoever you want me to be.”

nfreeman@observer.com

Illo: Andrew DeGraff

On one of the last busy evenings of Fashion Week, the suppertime clique that had turned up for the AnOther magazine dinner at the Fat Radish on Orchard was making the trek to the after-party. A breeze had split the night’s air. Most of the gang opted to walk, despite—or due to?—the hash brownies with which many, including The Observer, had topped off the meal.

Well, not everyone: Daphne Guinness, in heels that lifted her 10 feet toward God, cabbed it.

The gang sauntered over to the Bowery and, upon taking a left, entered meandering streets that looped like a child’s doodles—endless ovals of turns, each leading to an alleyway, a familiar passage, a dead end. We were looking for Apotheke. Finding it without a smart phone? Forget it, Nate. It’s Chinatown.

But we did have one, and so made our way to the elbow of Doyers and the swanky mixological wonder surrounded by kids, some on skateboards, many feigning confusion at not being on the list.

Inside, one found the same gridlock at the bar, but something was off. Everyone who had been at the dinner, Dasha Zhukova and Olympia Scarry and AnOther editor Jefferson Hack … where had they gone? Did they skip out for some other bash? What were we missing?

“Should we check out the downstairs?” our friend said out of nowhere, in a whisper.

So that was it. In a few moments we had ducked behind the bar, wedged through a tiny entrance, dodged the hanging pots and pans lining a maze of storage tunnels, and found ourselves in a low-ceilinged but expansive lair. This was Pulqueria—a forbidden city of nightlife fever dreams. One of those hidden places you stumble upon one night and forever after wonder where exactly it was, or whether it existed at all. To judge by the faces of those who had made it inside, the joy, the hardly hidden smugness at their discovery, it might have well been El Dorado.

Pulqueria is just the most recent night spot to upgrade its original offerings with a tiny, “hush-hush” venue-within-a-venue. With space in Manhattan running out and community boards in a prudish state of mind, well, you might as well dig down on the space you’ve got rather than try to expand outward.

As if we didn’t have enough nighttime anxieties, what with all of those velvet ropes and stony faced doormen. At any given time, at any bar in the city, there may be somewhere directly beneath you—or above?—where people are having a better time than you. How can you enjoy yourself when the real party is likely elsewhere? Look left, then right—is something missing? Start asking around about the other place, you know, that place. You know, the place.

Each sneaky spot’s got its own variation on the theme, but the defining characteristics tend to stay the same. These places are dark. The ceilings are low and the drinks—sorry, the mixologist-curated creations—are priced sky-high. True, none of them are secret for long, thanks to Twitter, streetsmart blogs and, ahem, New York newspapers. But we all know that’s not the point. They feel secret once you’re there, and that’s often enough to seal the deal.

Pulqueria joins an impressive roster of places in Manhattan peddling booze on the down low. There’s PDT, on St. Marks Place, which made a bit of a splash when it opened inside the Crif Dogs weiner shop in 2007. The charm there comes from an entry ritual worthy of Clark Kent: you slide into the red phone booth in the corner of the greasy spoon, pick up the receiver, and ask if there’s a table available. Which brings up a nice irony: if you see a phone booth in Manhattan these days, you’ll have a better chance of finding a drink than a dial tone.

The contrast between boardwalk grub and high-end gin is key here, and other joints are determined to milk the same clash. The Back Room—a bit of a misnomer, given that it actually has no “front”—lies at the end of an alley and past a sign that reads “Lower East Side Toy Co.” Those seeking the boîte Second Floor on Clinton must brave the galloping herd of tequila fiends who frequent the decidedly rowdier Barramundi. Then, there are the periodical pop-ups: Simonez Wolf’s celebrated Madame Wong’s party has taken up semipermanent residence at Jobee and, now, Red Egg—anonymous Chinatown eateries by day, celeb-heavy hot spots at night.

Bathtub Gin, a recently opened 1920s-styled watering hole, is accessed through an innocuous-looking place called Stone Street Coffee Company. Walk past the line of French presses (they actually serve coffee!) and push the wall. A red glow spills through the cracks. There is actually a battub inside. “The whole point was people come to have coffee during the day not knowing what’s behind there, and you open the door to a whole new world,” Dave Oz, the manager and owner, told The Observer.

Not that these two-faced venues are anything new. The Prohibition-era speakeasy begat the gay bar back room, and in the disco days, clubgoers sought out small spaces in clubs in which do things in private. Bathrooms always work, of course, but there were other, more comfortable locales, namely dead area behind walls, and P.V.C.-laden industrial corners. Rather than policing every forgotten pocket, the thinking went, why not stick a few bottles of liquor and a bartender down there, sweep up the soot, throw out the warped two-by-fours, and make things official?

For example: the Strategic Tao Group at the Dream Downtown hired Nur Khan to take the storage space beneath the ground floor and whip up a super tiny, super exclusive spot. This became Electric Room, the toast of last month’s Fashion Week, despite the fact that guests have to brave a steep and entirely unglamorous truck ramp that tunnels beneath the building. On its first night serving booze, Adrien Grenier christened the walkway by being the first person to trip.

And deep under Don Hill’s, a now-closed west Soho rock joint Mr. Khan reopened with Paul Sevigny in September 2010, an even tinier place, unknown to most everybody dancing to the Misshapes upstairs. If you got past the security personnel standing conspicuously in a nook by the raised V.I.P. lounge, a rickety staircase would take you to a cement cavern lined occasionally with metal racks. It was a space reserved for bands pre- and postperformance, and also a super exclusive spot for those fed up with the body-on-body scrum of the dance floor.

Venturing beyond that, the truly adventurous enter what appeared to be a mix between a boiler room and Turkish bath—just a box, really, the size of a tiny Manhattan bedroom. The last time The Observer ventured in was just a few weeks before Don Hill’s shut its doors for good, and we chain-smoked as a young man who claimed to be a doctor described the intricacies of open heart surgery. Good times.

Two of the city’s most conventional secret rooms lie directly adjacent to each other at the juncture of Kenmare and Lafayette: Cafe Select and La Esquina. The former’s already small enough that an even more minuscule hidden space within would seem unnecessary, but have no doubt. Make a right at the boiler room, and there you are.

Then there’s the backroom at La Esquina, hidden beneath a taco joint that came to the block already dinged up, as if it had been there for years.

“It’s almost the hardest place to work,” said a former employee, “because people think they’ve already made it in, and then you have to turn them away.”