Clad in boaty timbers and furnished with cast iron pillars, a stainless steel hover bar and a decked verandah, it is perfect for watching the world float by.
Betaworks occupies a handsome industrial space in the meatpacking district with 22-foot ceilings and cast iron pillars, surrounded by fashion labels like Alexander McQueen and Tory Burch; the building once belonged to the publisher of Collier's Encyclopedia.
And as The New York Times reported last week, factories that still produce garments for the corporations were found to remain in extremely hazardous conditions, with factories employing over 1,000 workers at times standing on nothing more than temporary cast iron pillars.
The two engineers discovered that the eight-story factory was partly propped up by temporary cast-iron pillars placed on the ground floor.
Rejuvenation's New York store, its eighth overall, is appropriately located in an 1895 building, with mosaic floors, a gilded coffered ceiling and cast-iron pillars.
The complex was a rare combination of utility and beauty with its monumental cast-iron pillars and walls of brick, granite and sandstone.
She watched transfixed as CNN for the first time was showing video from the port city in southern Haiti, long known for its New Orleans-style cast-iron pillars and balconies, its papier-mâché masks, rich art scene and craft galleries, and now a horrific jungle of rubble in the wake of the earthquake.
One synagogue has a rose window and some touching memorials ("in loving memory of Sonny Solomon, flying officer RAF, killed over France, 1944"), but it was the other that attracted me because it was lighter and whiter and supported by cast-iron pillars that are rumoured to have come from Glasgow.
By the middle of the 19th century, it was producing more than a fifth of the country's iron, supplying the cast-iron pillars for the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851, the US's first steam locomotive, and the anchors for such mighty vessels as the Titanic and Brunel's SS Great Britain.
On Thursday, a pipeline carrying oil to a refinery in Homs was blown up, casting a huge pillar of black smoke over the city.
