Five places to puff in Manhattan: Tips for Smokers

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Yes, I know. Every time I write something for the smokers out there, the comments always fill up with an argument over smoking itself. For now, I’m just going to assume that there are some people out there who happen to smoke and travel. I have this sneaking suspicion that I’m not the only one. So, for those of you who enjoy a puff on the road, here are five places where you can smoke in Manhattan. At least one of them will surprise you.

1. Tobacco shops
Rather than single out one, I’d like to call your attention to several cigar shops in the city. Rules vary: some allow cigars only, while others also welcome pipe and cigarette smoker. Regardless of what you choose, do have the courtesy to buy something in the establishment before lighting up. In Midtown, you’ll find De La Concha on Sixth Ave at W. 56th Street and Davidoff stores at Columbus Circle and on Madison Ave (at E. 54th Street). There’s a Nat Sherman on 42nd and Fifth and a Barclay Rex across the street from Grand Central Station. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.2. Cigar bars
If you want to light a heater and enjoy a cocktail at the same time, there are a handful of establishments open to the public. On the Upper East Side you can hit Lexington Bar and Books or Club Macanudo. In Midtown, you’ll find the Carnegie Club. Be prepared to pay. Drinks and sticks are a bit pricey, and if you bring your own, you’ll be charged a cutting fee.

3. Private clubs
The best-known is the Grand Havana Room, which sits atop 666 Fifth Ave. It’s a beautiful space and has a fantastic restaurant. The only way you’ll get in, aside from becoming a member, is to convince one to invite you up.

4. Inter-block alleys
Yeah, this is the “when all else fails” alternative. There are alleys that cut through the middle of some blocks in Manhattan, and Midtown has more than a handful. My favorite goes from 5nd to 53rd and is between Sixth Ave and Seventh Ave. It’s covered. In the summer, Moda (the restaurant in Flatotel) runs a bar in there, so you’ll lose some space. This alley is covered, making it great for rainy day.

5. Jury duty
Okay, this one’s really for locals. If you get called for federal jury duty, here’s a good reason not to avoid it: there’s a smoking room just off the big room where the jury pool waits in the courthouse on 500 Pearl Street. Since you can’t leave the building (except for lunch) when you have federal jury duty, this room, I guess, is intended to make your experience more pleasant. The room is dark, sports old furniture and has no windows – it’s hardly a luxury space. After spending several hours waiting to be tapped for that product liability trial, however, it’s hard to complain about the digs.

Smoke if you got ’em: Washington DC to OK hotel smoking

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Non-smokers probably won’t be too excited by the news, but cigar smokers will rejoice. The Washington DC City Council passed a measure last week that eases smoking restrictions on hotels in our nation’s capital. The Special Event Exemption Emergency Act of 2010 carries an amendment that offers a way for hotels to be exempted from the city’s smoking ban. If you prefer your hotels sans puffing, there’s no cause for alarm – the rules are pretty narrow.

Hotels will be allowed to host special cigar-smoking events once a year, as long as at least 500 people are in attendance (which means the venue must be large enough to accommodate this number of guests). Also, the hotel will have to notify the Department of Health and pay a $250 fee. Quite simply, it has to be a pretty hefty occasion.

As with any “emergency” measure, you’d be correct to assume that this law was passed with something specific in mind. In this case, it was the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner, organized by the social organization the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Historically, the patron saint of Ireland is toasted with brandy and a cigar.

In Washington DC, most emergency legislation lasts for 90 days, but this measure stretches out for 270, as the council also wanted to protect a charity event called Friday Night Fight, which is held on November 11. Last year, it raised more than $2.8 million for Fight for Children.

Turkish smoking ban? Your survival plan

by Tom Johansmeyer on

I never thought I’d have to write about a smoking ban in Turkey. It just struck me as one of a handful of locations that would never extinguish the flame. But, on July 19, the impossible will come to pass.

In part, it exists already. Since May of last year, smoking has not been permitted in Turkish taxes, malls, offices and ferries. Of course, the prohibition does not seem to have been taken literally. Cabbies, for example, pass ashtrays back to passengers, so they can duck down, smoke … and not get caught.

The rules become much tougher this July. Lighting up will not be permitted in any enclosed establishment. Unless you’re sitting outside, you won’t be smoking in Istanbul. Fines of $2,800 suggest serious consequences.

This is expected to cause financial woes for roughly 15,000 teahouses in Istanbul, according to The Atlantic. Hundreds have shut down already, and the absence of smoking in these men’s havens, at a minimum, provides additional pressure.

Other signs of the apocalypse were not reported in the article, but you have to imagine they’re coming soon.

Smoking hurts on Saudi airline

by Tom Johansmeyer on

For a smoker, nothing is more miserable than staring down a long flight without being able to light up. As if air travel isn’t enough of a chore, various regulations and health nuts have taken away our preferred coping mechanism. A Sudanese man fought back … and paid dearly.

According to the Daily Mail, the passenger lit a cigarette on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Qurayyat to Jeddah. The cabin crew repeatedly asked that he put out the coffin nail, and he refused. So, when the plane touched down, he was arrested.

Saying sorry wasn’t enough.

Though he apologized in court and presented evidence that he was in a smoking cessation program, the perp was sentenced to 30 lashes. Hey, the judge wanted to prove a point. And, it could have been worse. Last April, another in-flight smoker was sentenced to 50.

Not only does smoking kill … it hurts like hell.

Though many human rights organizations condemn this form of punishment, it is quite common for a number of offenses, from adultery to being alone with a non-relative of the opposite sex. Some crimes can lead to thousands of lashes, but they are meted out in batches of 50 over a period of months.

What gets you 1,000 lashes? I don’t know, but I suspect a post-coital cig after joining the mile-high club would put you in the running.

[Via Daily Mail]

What strange things have been found on planes?


10 travel related things you just don’t see any more

by Scott Carmichael on

Feeling nostalgic? I’ve compiled ten travel related things that are no longer around, including a couple of things that really brought back some memories of trips from the past.

Read through the 10 things I could think of, and leave a comment with anything you no longer see when you travel.

Smoking or Non Smoking?

With the possible exception of a few smaller airlines, you won’t find an airline in the world that still asks whether you want a smoking or non smoking seat on your flight.

I’m not that old, but I can still remember sitting in the back of the plane with all the smokers so my dad could light up.

Smoking is banned on any flight in, or destined to the United States, and an overview of the rules on worldwide airlines can be found here. In 2006, a German entrepreneur announced he was starting an airline where anyone would be free to smoke, but the concept never took off.


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Travel agents

In ancient times, booking a flight involved making a trip to your local travel agent. You’d often pop in for a stack of brochures, then you’d head back in a couple of days to make the actual reservation.

The booking involved filling in forms, and an agent calling the airline to check for availability, or if they sold enough trips, they’d use their green screen computer to check for availability. You’d then pay, and 2 weeks later your travel documents would be ready to pick up. Usually neatly stacked in a nice vinyl pouch.

There are still some travel agents around, but most of them have disappeared. The local travel agent is just another victim of Internet booking sites and airline cost cutting measures. Those still around tend to cater towards specialty trips, package deals or cruise vacations, where they can still make a few bucks in commission.

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Color TV! Phones! Cable!

Sure, some less luxurious places may still have the old sign out front, but “color TV” is not the big selling point it used to be. Nowadays guests want 100 channels of HD, as well as a nice variety of pay per view flicks.

Access to your own in-room phone is also no longer a perk worth advertising, even though the phone has now become a major money maker for many hotels.

I haven’t been around long enough to know when “color TV” actually became something worth advertising, nor have I ever been to a hotel where the TV was not in color.

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Payphones

Let me admit right away that this one hasn’t completely vanished – but the payphone is most certainly not as common as it used to be, nor do that many people want to use them.

In a way, I kind of miss the hassle they offered, because they meant people had to stop and drop some coins into the slot in order to make a phone call. Nowadays it seems like everyone is on their phone, and the worst offenders seem to have their Bluetooth headset glued to their skulls 24/7.

The last time I made a call from a payphone was in 1998, when I arrived at Dulles with a dead phone battery. Nowadays I can use my cellular phone in almost any corner of the globe.

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Real room keys

We can put a computer inside your phone, and develop a car that runs off battery power – but for some reason we seem unable to make a magnetic room key that always works when you need it.

I remember when the room key hung on a big board behind the front desk, and you’d hand it in when you left the hotel for the day. The large weight on the key would usually remind you not to go out without leaving it behind.

The best part about the real key is that it always worked. You never arrived at your room at 2am to discover it was encoded incorrectly by a clueless night desk clerk, nor would you be able to receive a key for a room already occupied.

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Carbon copy ticket stock

This one is closely related to the travel agent – remember when airline tickets did not roll out of your home printer? You’d get them on airline ticket stock, in a cool red carbon print.

The carbon copy ticket still exists for a couple of airlines, or for trips too complicated for online ticketing (usually round the world tickets with over 10 segments).

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Affordable duty free shopping

To many, a trip to the airport never took place without first passing through the duty free shops. The stores themselves are still around, but they are not the deal heavens they used to be. In the past, the duty free shop was where you’d pick up a bottle of the “good stuff” for about 30% less than the liquor store in your town. You could always tell who traveled a lot, by the size and quality of the booze in their cabinet.

Nowadays duty free is just another overpriced way the airport tries to squeeze some more cash out of you before you fly. In Europe, duty free shopping between EU members was abolished in 1999, and most duty free stores in European airports sell only regular priced (luxury) items. Airports like Amsterdam Schiphol and London Heathrow have 100’s of stores, but only a handful of true “duty free” options.

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Film roll kiosks

It didn’t matter where you were – if it was something tourists enjoyed looking at, there would be some poor guy selling rolls of film in his little kiosk. If you were part of the new revolution, you’d buy your Kodak Disc cartridges from him. If you were really hardcore, you’d carry your Polaroid 600 with you, and get instant gratification!

Once you got back home, you’d have to drop all the film rolls off at the local photo store, and wait a week to get them back. That then changed to same day processing, then one hour processing, and nowadays we just stick a memory card in our computer and make our own prints.

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The VHS video camera

I still remember hauling a large bag with us on our trips. It contained a JVC video camera and VHS recorder.

By the time we had loaded the padded bag with batteries, a charger and a stack of tapes, the thing weighed about 60lbs, but at the time it was a marvel of technology.

It went everywhere we did – to the zoo, to the bar and even to the beach. After years of vacations, we ended up with 100’s of hours of video we never once watched again.

Nowadays the video camera inside many mobile phones is able to make better quality video than this thing did, which is probably why you don’t see anyone dragging one around any longer.

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Cheap plastic luggage

Nowadays, the big unknown by the baggage carousel is to see whether your baggage actually made it to your destination, but I still remember the days when the big surprise was whether your cheap luggage made it in one piece, and how many of the handles were still attached.

These crappy bags were often made of vinyl glued onto cardboard, and you were lucky if they survived the trip to the airport, let along a long haul flight abroad.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I suspect luggage quality has improved in recent years, and very few people actually still travel with the old fashioned suitcase.