Shout down to the Marriott
I usually stay at a Kimpton Hotel, or at least I have been for the last decade when I travel to the east and west coast, but then I recently changed to the Bowery Hotel in NY and it was nice discovering a new area and it made it seems as if all those years midtown near Times Square had kept me from really exploring the real side of New York. This time we were all put up at the Renaissance Hotel (a Marriott brand) on Park Avenue. At dinner, a colleague said that last time she was there the fire alarm went off at 3:30am and we all laughed knowing how much we all need our sleep when we are on business travel.
At 3:30 this morning like clock work I was thrown out of the bed by the blaring fire alarm and a voice over from the security of the hotel saying they were investigating a fire, next thing fire trucks arrived with red lights the only think visible in the shadows of the night through the curtain. As I lay there waiting to see if we were going to have to plunge to our death a la Rault Center or World Trade Center, the fire trucks left. I crawled back in bed and my heart was beating like a Russian racehorse and then just when I was calming down the alarm went off again this time with the security saying, “It’s okay, there is no fire, it was a busted water pipe due to the weather, but all the elevators are locked.”
To them this must have meant we were all okay, but for me to know that in a room where the windows don’t open and the elevators now locked, I lay in bed thinking about everything from the guy whose leg was split open (a story told at dinner) to that image of the pregnant woman jumping out of the Rault Center in New Orleans – a hotel that I later went to work for to try to repair its image.
In the city that never sleeps, neither do I.