Seeking to hook his readers early in his piece, "The Magic of New York Hotel Bars," Newsweek senior writer Alexander Nazaryan opened his July 15 feature by noting the genesis of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair was in one such bar.
But rather than simply relate that as a "how about that" sort of trivia factoid, Nazaryan cast it as a quintessential New York love story before fleshing out his love letter to the New York hotel bar (emphasis mine):
Given the immolation of Edwards’s political career after the affair was made public, you could credibly say his downfall began when he and Hunter locked eyes in The Library. To many, the tryst neatly captured the venality of power, as well as the ancient tension between new lust and trusted love, which has crushed men far more principled than John Edwards.
To me, the affair represented the magic of hotel bars. How romantic to meet someone in a hotel bar, to close the gap of anonymity that modern hotels engender, with their thousands of heads in hundreds of beds, the pervasive whoosh of air conditioners and elevators, the only yearning common to all occupants a decent Wi-Fi connection. I imagine Edwards and Hunter both burnished by the glow of auburn light, warm from the bartender’s generous pour, lost in the crowd’s happy buzz. You can blame them for a lot, but you shouldn’t blame them for that.
If an exculpation is in order, it is for the unimpeachable institution that is the hotel bar. At a good hotel bar, you can never quite be a regular, though you will never be anonymous, always wrapped in the catholic embrace of the hospitality business, perfectly sunny and comfortably impersonal. When left to my own devices, I might well find myself at the Waldorf Astoria’s lobby bar, sipping on a manhattan, waiting for Frank Sinatra to slide onto the stool next to mine. It’s not that I want to meet someone: In fact, I don’t want to meet anyone at all. I want to be neither in the sardine-can crush of a club nor amidst the workaday regulars of the local pub, feigning a Cheers bonhomie. I want the gentle obscurity of a great hotel bar, where I can be just another New Yorker in a sea of Omahans and Parisians.
