A sneak peek at Manhattan's fourth Apple Store, set to open Saturday Nov. 14

Photo: Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The Upper West Side, that bastion of liberal thinking and discretionary spending nestled between Central Park and the Hudson River on the island of Manhattan, is finally getting its own Apple Store.

The retail outlet — Apple's 279th and the city's fourth — is scheduled to open Saturday morning. On Thursday, the press got an early tour of the facility.

It's a striking edifice, all glass and grey marble. The exterior is dominated by a two-story glass facade, a big white apple logo and a curved glass roof — a first for an Apple Store.

The ground floor interior is classic Apple (AAPL) retail, with 16 stand-alone blond wood tables on roughly 8,500 square feet of retail space — the largest single-floor display of Apple products in the world, according to the company.

More photos and an update below the fold: More

Here are two postcards from the front lines of the smartphone wars.

The first, at right, shows three college students from Monclair, N.J. — Matt Dodd, 18, Sam Epstein,18, and Keith Hobin, 19 — huddled under borrowed umbrellas in front of Apple's (AAPL) flagship New York Fifth Avenue store to buy the latest in multitouch cellular technology.

They arrived at 7 a.m. EDT, 24 hours before Apple is scheduled to begin selling the new iPhone 3GS to the public. The heavy rain hadn't let up since they arrived and the forecast was calling for more rain into the night.

The second, below, appeared on the Japanese website +D Mobile (English translation). It shows the roughly 200 customers who queued up Thursday morning near the Softbank flagship store in Tokyo's Omotesando shopping district to reserve their new iPhones, which won't arrive in Japan until June 26.

According a second report, smaller lines had also formed at Softbank outlets throughout the city and at many of the electronics stores that line Tokyo's Akihabara Electric Town.

The guys from New Jersey, who were among the first 15 people in line at the Fifth Avenue cube last July when the iPhone 3G went on sale, say they're here for the new iPhone, yes, but mostly for the "fun."

"It's an experience," says Keith Hoban, a freshman at Drexel University. "This doesn't happen too often. It's nice to just hang out at the Apple store, see what happens and be among the first to get it."

Rumors — later proved false — that Apple's (AAPL) newest retail outlet in Manhattan was going to open at 6 a.m. and give free MacBooks to the first people in line drew a huge crowd on Friday. Early arrivals braved snow flurries and freezing temperatures for up to 14 hours.

By the time the store finally opened, as scheduled, at 6 p.m., the crowd had swelled to more than 1,600, as hand-counted by Gary Allen of ifoAppleStore. His blow-by-blow report describes the moment the doors swung open:

At 6 p.m. the security team motioned the crowd into the store with the admonition, “Slow…slow,” and we moved forward. I looked to my right at the huge crowd watching our entrance, and then went inside to a deafening roar–clapping and yelling and music–to grab our T-shirts and poster tubes. Three stories above, staffers crowded the rail and rimmed the staircase to provide applause and excitement. As we entered we were handed a white T-shirt box and a black cardboard tube with the limited-edition poster. The Apple employees tried to tell us, "Check the tube top…." but it was nearly impossible to hear because of the noise.

On the inside of one of the tube plastic endcaps was a sticker indicating your prize–or nothing. The crowd mostly made for the third floor where you had to redeem their prizes, or they hung out on the ground floor. And then everyone spotted Mary J. Blige on the second floor, hanging out with Whoopi Goldberg. They both signed autographs and Blige posed for photos. It seemed that most people were more interested in the prizes and celebrities than the rest of the store, and there seemed to be little buying.

You can read his full account here.

Hundreds of photographers and several videographers documented the event, but none captured the madness better than the hand-held 4 1/2 minute video shot by Sidney San Martín and Matt Dowd and posted on YouTube. I've pasted it below the fold.

See also Inside Apple's Meatpacking district store.

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With its third retail outlet in Manhattan set to open tomorrow, Apple (AAPL) gave the New York press a preview this morning of what it bills as the metropolitan area's largest Apple Store.

The renovated 1920's building sits at the corner of 14th Street and 9th Avenue, on the border of Chelsea and New York City's meatpacking district.

It's a lovely spot, across a little triangular park from the Old Homestead Steakhouse ("the king of beef"). Morning light floods in over the squat towers of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and there's a lightly trafficked Starbucks one block away.

The three story spiral staircase set in a sunny atrium is the retail space's most distinctive feature, but inside it's a classic Apple store.

The first floor is devoted to the Macintosh, with lots of machines to play with and plenty of room to park yourself under a sunlit window and soak in the free Wi-Fi. The second floor is filled with iPods, iPhones and accessories. The third floor is dominated by a 46 foot genius bar, low tables for kids, higher tables for adults, and two new Pro Lab tables for training the "creatives" who live in the area. (The store will stay open until midnight to accommodate their lifestyles.)

"We think of this as a really great neighborhood store," says Ron Johnson, senior VP for retail, who, given Manhattan's brutal real estate market, had to strain a bit to tick off superlatives. It's not the largest Apple store in the world (London's Regent Street outlet wins that prize). It's not even the biggest in the United States (Chicago has a larger one). And although Johnson described the genius bar as "essentially the biggest" in the world, he acknowledged that it's about four feet shy of the longest.

Still, none of that detracts from the appeal of the space or the likelihood of its success. Apple has had no trouble filling its two other Manhattan stores — in Soho (opened in 2002) and Fifth Avenue (2006) — especially with all the Europeans in town bargain hunting for Christmas gifts with devalued U.S. dollars.

And as George Slusher pointed out in The Mac Observer, Apple is nowhere near saturating the New York market. The Portland metropolitan area, with a population just north of 2 million, has three Apple stores. The five boroughs of New York alone, with four times as many people, could use a few more.

Doors to the meatpacking store open to the public Friday, Dec. 7 at 6 p.m. There are free black Apple T-shirts for the faithful who queue up early. Details and directions here.