Vivienne wanted to screw with the outside world, mocking the way we obsess over hours, over endings, over time bleeding us dry.
Outside, the balconies look like black iron claws wrapped around stone.
The front doors stand too tall and heavy, brass handles warm from too many hands. Beside them, there’s a plaque that reads:Time waits outside. You don’t have to. 'Cause inside, there were no clocks. Not a damn one. The world could fall away the second someone stepped inside.
Vivienne wasn’t building a hotel. She was building a place to escape. A place to hold moments, not minutes.
People called it impractical. Morbid. Haunted on arrival.
She didn’t build it for them. She built it for the women who survived but got erased in the process. For the grief showing up like clockwork. For the lovers meeting in the wrong lifetime.
At The Astor Clockhouse, time stands still. There’s no chasing the New York minute, racing the hour, no running out of time. There’s no countdown, no last calls, no late goodbyes.
She built it for the pause—the in-between.
The moments that’re too good to let go.
The nights you never want to end.
The kiss you want to live in.
Stories stacked across the century. In the 50s, they say one of the clocks stopped once, only for a second, when someone jumped from their balcony. It restarted at the exact moment her body hit the ground. The lobby phone rings once around midnight. No one has the guts to answer it. And they say you can hear someone playing the piano one floor up, no matter which floor you’re on.
And guests who stayed at the Astor always left forgetting what day it was. What year it was. What hurt.
The lobby always smelled of old perfume and the faint smoke trail of someone sneaking a Marlboro outside the revolving door. But underneath it, the floor’s got a heartbeat. It made Andrew wanna kick off his sneakers, swearing he could feel the heartbeat better barefoot.
The staircase doesn’t only lead up. It tries to go back. Like it’s spiraling into something it misses, thinking it can catch it if it turns just one more time. And there’s this brass mail chute runnin’ through the whole damn building. Still works, too. People slip notes into it. No idea where they end up, but they always disappear. Andrew swore the building reads ‘em.
He knows all this because The Astor Clockhouse raised him.
His ma, Maria, worked the front desk. All lipstick, fast comebacks, and faster heels. She knew every guest by name and every lie they tried to sneak past her. Then there was Paola, she cleaned the rooms, sang while she scrubbed, kept Andes in her apron, and talked to the ghosts like they were coworkers.
They met on Floor 3, flirted by the laundry chute, fell in love over morning shifts and busted Coca-Cola machines. And Andrew was always there, sitting cross-legged under the desk while his moms patched up the tired, the ruined, the heartsick.
They met here, got married here, built a life out of tips and twin shifts.
Ma couldn’t afford a babysitter, so he grew up in this lobby, in these halls, on the roof, in the cracks between people comin’ and goin’. While other kids were watching cartoons, he was stealin’ out of the vending machines, was carving his initials into the stone at the top of the tower, was people-watching—drunks, widows, broken couples, artists who hadn’t made it yet. They never paid him mind, but he saw everything.
Ma made it fun for him at first. She’d lean over the desk and point out a guest walkin' in and she’d whisper to him,“What’s their story, Detective Andrew?”
“He’s on the run.”
“She got dumped.”
“She hasn’t slept in two days.”
Sometimes he guessed wrong.
Mostly, he didn’t.
It wasn’t long before he stopped guessing and started knowin’. And somewhere along the way, it stopped being a game and became a job.
Ma would joke and say,“Go make her laugh, Andrew. She looks like she lost her whole damn world.”So he did. He’d sing, dance, recite commercials, pretend to be a bellhop, a lounge singer, a magician.
He learned how to read people before he knew how to ride a bike, and he learned real fast some people like when you’re nice, and others only trust you if you’re an asshole first. Sarcasm is the only thing that doesn’t feel like bullshit.
He gave ‘em smiles without pity, help without the catch.
