The interior of the hardest door in New York. All photos by Jeff Neumann.

​Today, the New York Post finally fully blows the lid off the long percolating Mike's Apartment story--touted in secrecy by Gawker, its location outed shortly afterwards, and the subject of many rumors since. Now: Meet Mike Herman, 32 years old, from Rumson, New Jersey. "He favors ripped jeans and a T instead of the leather, metal and fur worn by many night-life bigwigs. If you were a young single lady, he is the kind of guy you would bring home to meet the parents," writes the Post, but then again, we already sort of knew that. How? "What Mike didn't expect," reported Grub Street in a similar feature earlier this week, referring to the original Gawker post, "was for a commenter to discover a GPS watermark in Gawker's photo of his pickle cabinet -- which led to the Village Voice blogging the location of the apartment." And what happened then? "There were people asking if they can get in," Mike told Grub Street, "people asking people that know me if they could be brought; people buzzing my buzzer; people poking around about me in the restaurant downstairs." Our fault. So we reached out, and were invited to come around on Tuesday to make amends.

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​Not because we found it. At 9 Great Jones Street, right above ACME, corner of Lafayette. Big red door. And not because Axl Rose and the rest of the nightlife elite don't deserve some after-after-hours spot to hang out it, even if it's the apartment of a regular dude with Phish posters and a pickle fetish. It's New York; we all need to go somewhere. No. The reason Gawker--who followed up their original, insinuating "The Newest Hot Spot in NY" story with an update this morning featuring the humiliating boast that "everyone with any claim at all to downtown cred has been through"--needs to stop writing about Mike's Apartment is because it's marketing, not any kind of useful service to anyone but the people involved. The only demographic it serves are those invested in Mike's Apartment. And who are they, again?

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​Earlier this morning, Gawker introduced the world to "Mike's Apartment," the supposed newest addition to the NYC nightlife scene. In a "reasonable-sized studio/loft downtown somewhere," goes the joke, the city's fashionable elites are gathering, fleeing the depredations of the Box and the shuttered Beatrice for "a random apartment," owned by restaurant-industry refugee named Mike, whose "new nightclub project" has brought him into contact with "some fairly unorthodox nightlife friends." There, the city's youthful glitterati smoke cigarettes, drink top-shelf whiskey, and party until dawn. To wit:

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