The indoor half pipe at Waterline Square in happier days. | Noë and Associates with The Boundary and @shawnax

Who?s up for a virtual mixology class" When Ryan Schaefer, a 38-year-old musician and set designer, decided to move into a studio at the Eugene, a 62-story glass high-rise on west 31st Street near Tenth Avenue, he was wooed by its 55,000 square feet of what the building?s website advertises as ?Lifestyle & Recreational Amenities.? Every need imaginable could be met. ?I?d bring guys over and we?d play air hockey,? which set the mood, he recalls, and soon he and his paramours would shuffle upstairs. (Straights, he noted, gravitated toward shuffleboard.) He threw a temporary gallery show in a conference room and used the rehearsal space for his band, L?Amour Bleu. And then there was the 16,000-square-foot La Palestra gym, complete with a regulation basketball court and a rock-climbing wall. ?They even have eucalyptus-scented towels,? Schaefer recalls. The smell still lingers in Schaefer?s sense memory even months after the Eugene?s lease-bait pleasure-domes were sealed up as a result of the pandemic and he was stuck inside his home. The great Amenities War of the 2010s led to all manner of in-house recreational facilities designed to attract the sort of resident who would, if at all possible, rather never venture out. First came the gyms ? next came the pools, and then the lounges, screening rooms, yoga studios, libraries, children?s rooms; every luxu...