The Closed City

There is no greenery, it is enough to make a stone sad - Nikita Kruschev, when visiting New York to attend the UN

She stands like a witch at the gateway to the continent - Not sure the source, about NY.

When I was a kid I read a book called "The Open City," which was about Washington. Essentially, it said that DC was remarkable in that you as an average citizen could enter into high government buildings, including the White House, basically for free.
If DC was the open city in the time before terrorism, New York has always been the closed one. To gain access to its monoliths, one usually needs a few things: money, some kind of card, a name that you are going to, an invitation to an apartment or event, a key or a key-card, or some kind of numerical code.
It is no coincidence that architects refer to Manhattan's "street wall." It is usually as closed off to you as the Mongols were by the Great Wall of China unless you have the proper qualifications.
Thus I always take any chance to penetrate the facade. This usually means parties, but can also mean receptions in places ordinarily off-limits to you. I still regret not going to see a speaker from Georgetown Prep at the Met Life Building a few years ago. Not because I wanted to see the speaker, but because it was in the businessmen's exclusive club at the top of the building that dominates the boulevard. I could have looked at the building from then on and said "I've been to the club on top" and would thus possess it rather than being forever an outsider.
This is also why I always took any excuse to go to the Ivy League clubs clustered in Midtown. I've been to the Penn Club (formerly the Yale Club), the Yale Club (the most impressive, across from Grand Central), and the Princeton club (a modern disappointment).
However, I still must penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of the Eastern Establishment, the Harvard Club, on 44th near Fifth.
This is no mean feat. There are two tailcoated doormen/goons at the door ready to escort you in, or out. It is a historic landmark/McKim, Mead, and White Georgian building, and imposing.
My father went to Harvard as a grad student, but most of the time you need a registered member to allow you passage. Most of my father's acquaintance members are now dead or inactive. Maybe there's a service entrance I could sneak in as a pastry chef.
The NYT ran a feature called "rooms" for awhile. It showed you the inside of these guarded fortresses of the elite. Still, the Metropolitan Club at 5th and 60th refused to allow them to photograph the dining room.
Park Avenue at one point was called "a democracy of millionaires." You cannot tell from the outside the tremendous wealth inside. Harder still is to get a glimpse of the penthouses and terraces usually set back on top.
Hunter College, through an accident of history, actually has one building on Park and 68th. There was one computer lab that was up high, which I used for spying on these hidden terraces with their desperate little gardens in the sky.
I guess the most impressive apartment I've seen is Leslie Stahl's duplex on top of a building that overlooks that strange little park that surrounds the Museum of Natural History (she's married to a rich guy). On the roof deck, if you looked sideways, you could see over Central Park to the east side.
But the best view I've ever gotten was from my Wisconsin roomates parent's rather small and drab place on Central Park West. The Eisenbergs. Ordinary upper-middle class New York Jews. How they got the place is one of those NY real estate mysteries that are better left untouched.
Rachel and I also got a chance to stay at a duplex on top of a building at 57th and Sixth. A rather small (12-14 stories) plain brick number situated on some of the highest-priced real estate in the world. It had a terrace, too, but was dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers.
The Times ran a story a few weeks ago about the great NY sport of trying to peer into your neighbors' interiors. The last time I did this, at the back of an ordinary upper east side apartment, I looked into a place that was paneled from top to bottom with Oak or Mahogany or some other expensive wood.
There are ten thousand rooms in the closed city, but I have yet to wrangle entrance to a Park or Fifth Ave duplex palace like in "Metropolitan." Maybe I'll do like that couple in the White House and just wander in. A beautiful woman would help. Contact me at Gatecrashers.com.