Words: kitty corner, n.

HOTEL ELK on one-time naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty 42nd Street at 9th Avenue figures in no guide, but Sandy Edry of the New York Observer has visited this survivor of the nabe's makeover by Disney and urges its saving as a lively theme-park: the bullet-proof glass at the front desk, the ripped sheets and chipped furniture, even re-enactments of outraged wives who burst in with a gun to confront those renting by the hour.

The owner is, however, buying up property as a kitty corner. Neither cat sanctuary nor till, but a notional diagonal between adjacent sides of a block, a slurring of cater corner, gambling slang for four on a dice, askew. From quatre, it also meant a rhomboid layout in 16th-century English gardening.