This is part of Airplane Mode, a series on the business—and pleasure—of travel right now.
Recently, I was finishing up dinner in Cincinnati when a local offered a suggestion: Stop into the lobby of the Hilton downtown. I took her advice, passed through the sliding doors, climbed the stairs, and found myself in one of the most sublime rooms I’d ever seen.
Inside the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza was an Art Deco fever dream of marble, dark wood, and brass. Ornate murals stretched across the double-height ceiling. To my right, a pair of golden lamps, each with five levels of sconces shaped like papyrus capitals, loomed over carved stone horse heads. Between them stood a marble fountain 20 feet high, topped with a sculpted bull’s head. Coming from the empty sidewalk, I found all this glitz instantly transporting, as if I had stepped straight into the Fourth of July Ball at the Overlook Hotel.
But the people around me weren’t figments of my imagination. They were real estate agents wearing conference lanyards and chattering over the music. I was simply enjoying an $11 old-fashioned at the hotel bar, albeit in a lobby so eye-catching Bing Crosby is said to have eschewed a more private exit route to deliberately stroll through it, adding: “When they stop recognizing me, I’m in trouble.”
The hotel lobby is a category of place I had once written off as the epitome of dull corporate life. Splendid decor aside, this one was as inoffensive in atmosphere, menu, and company as you could expect from a giant chain in the downtown of a midsize Midwestern city. That suited me just fine. It was bright enough to read in, quiet enough to talk on the phone, empty enough to find the perfect chair—but lively enough to keep the hotel room blues away.
This is the anodyne essence of the hotel lobby, whatever its architectural flourishes. It’s a place required to play so many roles at once—concierge and reception, conference on-ramp, family playpen, meeting place, café-bar, deal zone—that it can never stray too far in any one direction. Most public life is commercialized, and most commercial spaces are circumscribed by waitlists, high prices, esoteric specialization, and behavioral codes. But the hotel lobby is free ground. Have a seat, why don’t you?
The Netherland Plaza, when it was completed in 1931, was supposed to be a “city within a city” in the style of the old grand hotels. (There was even an ice-skating rink, in what is now a ballroom put to work for weddings and keynotes.) This aim of self-containment, back turned to the street outside, has long put big hotel lobbies out of favor with urbanists. The architect John Portman’s soaring atrium hotels, Karrie Jacobs wrote, were “antithetical to the idea of genuine urban vitality.” At a 1988 talk, the journalist Paul Goldberger asked Portman about the standoffish design of his Times Square Marriott Marquis. “Paul, there was nothing to relate to,” Portman retorted. “What am I going to relate to, Howard Johnson’s across the street?”
It is true that most hotels do not exactly invite you inside. But nor, in my experience, do they refuse you—even if you haven’t come to buy anything at all. I just slip right through the churn of suitcases and lanyards and hurried staff until I find my armchair. A smile and a nod at the concierge usually puts me at ease, or in a pinch, I use the three magic words: “I’m meeting someone.” These lobbies fill two big gaps in city life. First, they provide a comfy place to kill time on a cold, rainy day. Second, they form an archipelago of porcelain across some of our most toilet-challenged neighborhoods.
To be sure, this is no substitute for true public bathrooms. Hotel managers don’t need to keep the bathroom under lock and key, like Starbucks recently decided to do, because they won’t hesitate to block access for those who need a clean bathroom most. Like any corporate environment supervised by the snap judgments of staff, free access to the hotel lobby is a privilege of race and dress and subject to petty prejudice.
Yet a big hotel lobby is often a more diverse place than neighboring establishments that target a more refined clientele. Since Portman’s heyday, the rise of boutique hotels and Airbnbs has given these mega-lobbies a comparatively populist appeal. There’s a parallel here to malls, which were once critically shunned for offering a tightly controlled, consumerist facsimile of the civic sphere. Now, seen through the glare of the online shopping boom, their food courts and fountains look wonderfully social. Some of the contrast with public space has also diminished, since many urban parks and plazas are now managed by coalitions of local property owners, complete with concessionaires and private security forces. The boundaries of private and public have never been murkier.
There’s nothing novel about getting a drink in the hotel lobby. But the space has been invigorated since remote work launched thousands of laptop workers out of their desk chairs three years ago. Some hotels have explicitly embraced the change, offering remote workers low-cost passes that provide access to exotic amenities like a pool or a printer.
Searching for informal gathering places between home and work, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place”—a now-popular concept that has been applied to everything from the public library to McDonald’s. That diversity was possible because Oldenburg’s vision was about results, not innate characteristics. A third place was, at its core, not about whether you had to pay for coffee or not. It was about community—fostering connections, bringing together the old and the young, uniting neighbors around common interests.
Superficially, the hotel lobby contains the ingredients of a third place—it’s free, it’s temperate, you can stay as long as you want. But its true nature is the polar opposite. The hotel lobby is a transitory place. A useful place. It’s a place where you’re more likely to meet a stranger than a friend.
This spirit is epitomized by another superlative lobby I camped out in recently: the one in the TWA Hotel at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. Designed by Eero Saarinen in 1962, the “concrete bird” is far too small for a contemporary airport terminal—but its layered spaces are perfectly suited to a public-facing hotel lobby. You can bask for hours in the intermittent whirring of its decorative Solari board, let your guard down for a moment, and then be gone. Crosby had it backwards: It’s when they start recognizing you that you’re in trouble. Or at least, you might have to buy a cup of coffee.
