The operation has some of the amenities of retail shopping - communal dressing area, coat-check room, speedy cashiers at the credit card and cash lines.

THIS is a time for circling the wagons in coat-check rooms around the city.

New York's big fall show of Chinese painting is installed in a very small space: two galleries at the China Institute, which together could fit in a coat-check room at the Met.

We didn't stay long enough to see the headliner, but cassettes are sold in the coat-check room.

At the coat-check room, he tapped Ms. Lee on the shoulder, introduced himself and invited her to lunch.

To make matters worse, we were put at a table directly under the stairway and right next to the coat-check room.

I was unprepared for the crowds teeming in the vast Main Hall, or for the long line outside the coat-check room, where visitors are required to leave anything larger than a disco purse.

But as the party ended, one thing reminded her son, David, of the Soviet Union - the long line snaking from the synagogue's catering room up the stairs to the coat-check room.

Funny, though, the only complaints I heard about being gouged were directed at the conference-center coat-check room in the Hilton New York, the towering Rockefeller Center hotel where the event took place.

Later on this Thursday night, a veteran employee working in the coat-check room would cry and say that she hoped to live to see the Plaza reopen.