"I grew up with the genre," Mr. Lee, 46, said on a visit in September to the mid-Manhattan offices of Sony Pictures Classics, the film's distributor.

Thus, on a late September morning, the unemployed banker gathered with two dozen laid-off executives in Drake Beam Morin's mid-Manhattan offices for a seminar on phone phobia.

"There's a potential conflict - I've always taken great care not to exploit it," said Mr. Soros, 68, gently tapping his eyeglasses against a conference table in his mid-Manhattan office.

But the dim lighting in his mid-Manhattan office illuminates a cache of mementoes from a multitude of leaden notions turned into gold through Mr. Schwartz's media alchemy.

And instead of MCI employees traveling to Fordham's Lincoln Center campus, Fordham professors come to MCI's mid-Manhattan offices.

"I had such a fear for myself and for my family," she said recently in her mid-Manhattan office.

Miss Brown worked briefly as a receptionist at the mid-Manhattan offices of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

This summer he has a job as an intern with Merrill Lynch, the investment firm, at a mid-Manhattan office.

This picture of corporate elegance sitting in a sleek mid-Manhattan office can't be a gumshoe, a shamus, a private eye.

Mr. Kuria was interviewed on Thursday in the mid-Manhattan office of Africa Watch, a private human-rights monitoring organization that has reported serious rights violations in Kenya.