Ken Rosenburg’s Office

Ken Rosenburg, Tommy Vercetti's lawyer, works out of an office in the Hotel Harrison. This building is pretty dull and nondescript compared to a lot of Vice City's other locales. It doesn't have any neon lighting and it's painted, relatively, subdued colors (although they are still unique colors so that the place is easy for the player to remember and find). But then, Ken isn't exactly partial to 80's decor.

I think his office is interesting, not necessarily for its decor itself, but because Ken actually does express interest in interior decorating in the game. When you acquire the "Vercetti" Estate from Ricardo Diaz, he tells Tommy that they "gotta make this place look older".

If I had to guess, I would say that Ken's tastes are a result of his office's set design rather than the other way around. That is, his office looks like any lawyer's office in nearly any movie. It and Rosenburg himself, are in fact references to the movie Carlito’s Way. But his tastes are written as they are because they precisely don't fit with 80's aesthetic.

It's interesting to compare his decor to his personality as well. His office is, as one might imagine, the office of a competent, maybe even brilliant, laywer. But Ken is not a competent lawyer. In the opening cutscene, one of Sonny Forelli's men calls him a "shmuck of a lawyer" and upon meeting Kent Paul, he'll tell Tommy that Ken is a "bonkers ambulance chaser" and that he could "defend an innocent man all the way to death row". It’s suggested that his primary way of winning cases is through bribery.

That his office is full of towering bookshelves, wall-to-wall wood paneling, large Baroque-framed paintings, and stately leather furniture is a facade made to make him look at once reassuringly skilled to clients and wise, if not charismatic, enough to sway any court room. If it is intended to make Ken himself feel more empowered, though, it doesn't work. He will readily admit that he couldn't intimidate a child, much less a jury, and spends most of the beginning of the game panicking about the stolen money and drugs.

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for the WIP ask game... The Future Is Still Silver and Black? (original train fiction from you two sounds really interesting!)

So last year, I went up north to visit Ray. Ray lives in Chicago, which just so happens to have the largest railway museum in the United States, the Illinois Railway Museum.

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