A door guarded by bald, unsmiling men, the bouncers who stand forever as the bored sentinels of indifferent celebrity.
The horde followed the airport employee upstairs, with journalists running up downward escalators to get ahead, and the invitees were ushered through a service door guarded by police and into a hallway with a metal detector.
The Woodward Gallery (133 Eldridge Street; 212-966-3411; www.woodwardgallery.net) has a regal red door guarded by two Shar-Peis that go nicely with the Buddhist storefront temple next door.
Next door, guarded by uniformed police officers with machine guns, squats the immense embassy of Saudi Arabia, a country with which the controversial PR firm's even more controversial chairman, Tim Bell, has had decades of opaque, often defence-related dealings.
The horde followed the airport employee upstairs, with journalists running up downward escalators to get ahead, and the invitees were ushered through a service door guarded by policemen and into a hallway with a metal detector.
On Tuesday morning, a small, brown-handled pistol lay on the sidewalk against the grate of a beauty salon next door, guarded by the police as they waited for crime scene investigators.
To get there, you must take a skyscraper's elevator to the 23rd floor and get past a locked door guarded by a face-recognition security system.
What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into unlighted darkness had been completely ransacked.
