Life at the Top – Two Liberty Place – Cole Hamels

“You’d get used to it,” Ella assures me. Ella is the night lobby concierge, the one who makes sure people get good tables at restaurants, and cars and umbrellas so their rich heads don’t get touched by a drop of unexpected rain. She has worked for years as the assistant to Bernard Watson, the chairman of the Barnes, so she knows something about what rich people want. A preacher’s daughter, she’s also a former Marine, which makes her perfect for a post marrying precision, discipline and discretion, only with better clothes.

Like all the staff here, Ella knows everyone and about everyone, and that’s part of the job’s appeal: She gets to be one of the stage managers in the theater that is Two Liberty. Gregarious and motherly, she regales me with stories that illustrate, to borrow a phrase from Cole Porter, what a swell party this is. The first time she met one glamtastic resident, he walked through the front door with his children and said to her, “I’ve got the greatest kids! Let me show you how great they are!” He then proceeded to order them — they were eight and four at the time — to drop and do push-ups, right there on the marble lobby floor.

Ella and I have been watching a stream of doctors saunter in from work, all before five, when the mysterious Indian capitalist and his bodyguard with the brick-shithouse body enter the lobby. Following up on Dana’s gossip from book club, I pump Ella as to his identity. She says nothing, although I can tell she wants to. I press. “Why does he need a bodyguard?” I ask.

“He’s filthy rich!” she says in jest. “I don’t know.”

But really, she does know. They all do. Because when you live in a snow globe, Liberty Place becomes Melrose Place. (Just ask the Grillys.) Among the denizens of Two Liberty, there are benchmarks for your residency, like whether you’ve had a Cole-and-Heidi moment (given his legendary circumspection, a Cole is more highly valued) or been inside the Lenfest apartment, which is evidently something out of the pages of Architectural Digest.

Alas, I never did get in the Lenfest apartment, though I certainly tried. In the end, it was probably for the best. I wouldn’t want to feel too connected to a place like Two Liberty. I can sense how addictive it could become to live here, to begin to see your home as the place, not where you live, but where you hide, where an army of liveried doormen and prim, clipboard-carrying managers makes sure nothing happens to allow the real world to intrude. Me, I like a little life with my life.

As for the future of the building — whether it really cements itself as the place that bold-face-named Philadelphia calls home — it’s too soon to tell. It’s certainly buzzy, but buzz is a funny thing. By its very definition, it’s temporary, often vanishing as quickly as it arrives. (The current buzz is about an intriguing Brazilian businessman who may be buying the top two floors — 56 and 57 — to make one huge bi-level penthouse, an apartment that could fetch $30 million. Richard Oller, whose company manages the property, will only say, “I don’t know much about Brazilian businessmen.”)