VESTIBULE.(The Talk of the Town)

When an honest man accidentally corners the market in a product that he always describes to his customers as fairly ineffective and basically illegal to use, he is entitled to moments of puzzled reflection--such as the one that Lawrence LoIacono experienced on a recent afternoon as he sat in his parked car in SoHo, watching people pass in and out of a fancy bakery through the spring-loaded door of a temporary winter vestibule. LoIacono is the president of the Acme Awning Company, a Bronx-based firm that designed and built the vestibule: a box of taut red fabric pulled over a steel frame, bolted to the sidewalk in front of the bakery's door--a tent the size of a lavatory cubicle. "I don't know what it does," LoIacono said, finally. "The whole bakery is about five times the size of the vestibule. It's a hundred square feet in there! That's it. There's nobody sitting inside. They walk in, get a brioche, they walk out. Tell me who's getting cold in there."

To LoIacono's surprise and faint dismay, New York now has a vestibule season. There comes a point in the year--it has just arrived--when LoIacono answers his phone and expects to hear a restaurant owner ask him about a cold-weather vestibule. LoIacono typically advises the restaurant owner not to order a vestibule; and then the restaurant owner orders a vestibule. This has been going on for about ten years. It's an unusual business.

LoIacono is a solid man in his early fifties, with a hoarse, exasperated voice; he sounds as if he had just finished shouting. As he drove between appointments the other day, he described how Acme, which was founded by his father, had been built on the two traditional encroachments that the city's buildings make onto sidewalk space: awnings and canopies. (Awnings run along the side of buildings, shading windows, while canopies jut out from them as far as the curb, allowing small dogs to ride in taxis to playdates without getting wet.)

As he drove, LoIacono tied the evolution of vestibules both to the enclosed clear plastic awnings that shield the outdoor produce at delis and to the kind of long-established apartment-house canopies that are built with drapes flanking the entrance--providing extra protection for a person standing just outside the door. Now, if you were to end the canopy at the limit of those drapes, and put, at the open end, a door that snapped closed, you would have a rudimentary winter vestibule. (And in vestibules rudimentary is about as good as it gets.)

At some point in the mid-nineteen-nineties, an Upper East Side restaurant ordered a structure of this kind from Acme Awning. Although LoIacono does not say that he invented the form, he does wonder if this was the first one ever in the city and, perhaps, the country: he had certainly never seen one before in New York, and, as for other cities, he says, "Chicago, Boston--you're lucky if you even find awnings."