An Evening at New York’s New Playboy Club
The Mansion Lounge at the Playboy Club [Photo:Steven Gomillion]
On a Wednesday evening a couple of weeks ago, I stood on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Ninth Avenue waiting for a friend. Two middle-age men halted before me, and looked me up and down appraisingly. “Working the corner?” one queried, and his friend let out a snigger. “Sure am,” I said, less assertively than I’d have liked, and then watched as they departed.
Soon after, my companion arrived, and we rushed toward Tenth, late for our dinner booking. We had reserved a spot at the Playboy Club, where, according to the OpenTable app, it was not essential for nonmembers to make reservations: walk-ins were permitted to sit at the bar, as long as they met venue dress codes. But the multistory, fourteen-thousand-square-foot space had opened a mere three weeks before, with its iconic namesake—the media and entertainment giant Playboy Enterprises—touting a triumphant return to the city. Its first club launched in Chicago fifty-eight years ago, spawned thirty now-shuttered American chapters, and the last Manhattan joint closed its doors in 1986. Despite mostly dubious media coverage—the Guardian lamented its comeback as “defying the #MeToo era” and several journalists noted its proximity to the route of January’s Women’s March—we suspected the retro joint might be bustling, though we weren’t sure exactly with whom.
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The club’s entrance was opposite a Travelodge Hotel. A long, street-facing window glowed
