Times Square as seen from R Lounge.

This is what Times Square looks like from a window table at R Lounge, the Renaissance New York’s second-floor restaurant and bar with the flashy address – Two Times Square. Talk about the thick of things.

It’s one of those wow-I’m-in-New York! views, up there with the dining room at Helmsley Park Lane (Central Park), the roof bars at the Kimberly (Chrysler Building), the Bentley (East River), the James (lower Manhattan) and the Gansevoort Meatpacking District (Hudson River) and the revolving roof restaurant at the Marriott Marquis (the entire city).

And miraculously, when we stopped by mid-afternoon this week we had the room all to outselves, save for a woman with a broken leg seated by a window.  “Sit anywhere you like,” said the greeter. (more…)