Sometimes You Just Needed a Break. (And Even Those Could Be Fraught.)

THE SMOKE BREAK

- James Camp

1966: An office New Year’s Eve party at a Madison Avenue advertising agency.

The Perks of a Bad Habit

One morning in 1989, the employees of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette arrived to discover that their ashtrays, overnight, had become decorative. A banner had been tacked to one wall: the nonsmokers have won. Until that point, “it was much more going outside to take a break from smoking than taking a break to smoke,” recalls Mark Manson, then an equity research analyst with the firm. But as the decade ended, this was starting to invert at offices across New York. To breathe fresh air, you would simply stay inside, and to smoke, you would have to go out. Down on the street, looking for a nook, you would face enemies: joggers, windchill. It was “a tragic day, an infamous day,” Manson says. It was the future. By 1994, the year the City Council introduced the first of the Smoke-Free Air Acts, the smoke breaks outside Manhattan office buildings had become, if not a tourist attraction, a thing tourists noticed. Dr. Alan Blum, a longtime anti-tobacco activist, likes to tell the story of a Japanese real-estate magnate who, on a drive through lower Manhattan, smiled at all the young women out smoking: “So many prostitutes in New York City.”