(FORTUNE Magazine) – When I go to New York City on business--for a few days in the spring, for a week in the fall--I don't stay in hotels anymore. I take advantage of the city's rich underground hospitality by renting an apartment of my own.

Sometimes it'll be on the East Side, sometimes the West Side. But it's easy enough: You just call the agency and explain what you want. You say you want a one-bedroom with sunny windows in a doorman building, or a studio near midtown; a brownstone or a loft. I usually like to be near Central Park, where I can run in the mornings. Whatever the location, the goal is to find a place that provides those two things an outsider needs to perform well in New York: a sense of refuge and a sense of belonging.

By-the-night apartment rentals started springing up in the 1980s as Manhattan's answer to the bed-and-breakfast scene. The way the game has evolved here, you don't get the homemade muffins and breakfast-time chat with the lady of the house. You get a set of keys, a page or two of advice from the owner, and some genuine privacy, at last.

These apartments appeal to travelers who are fed up with hotel rooms--the haunting sameness, the absence of the human touch, the depressing rigmarole with the front desk. "Apartels" are at once more personable and less tedious. There are no check-ins, no checkouts, no bills to puzzle over, no inflated telephone charges (you dial direct and an itemized list of calls is sent to you later), and only a two- or three-night minimum. Even better, no service-industry intrusions: no bellmen waiting to be acknowledged or tipped, no maids lurking in your room watching TV, no agents sneaking in at night to hide chocolates in the bed.

Plus, they're a bargain. At a time of slenderized corporate travel budgets, a comfortable apartment in a good neighborhood is about half the price of a quality hotel.

The last time I went to New York (in order to promote myself, yet again, as the next Mark Twain), I tried two new apartments on for size.

One was on 31st Street between Park and Lexington--a 12th-floor penthouse studio with tall ceilings, lots of windows, hardwood floors, and a four-poster bed. The apartment's small wraparound terrace had a classic rooftop view of Manhattan: the wooden-staved water tanks, the jigsaw-puzzle skyline, the gleaming theocratic spire of the Metropolitan Life Tower. My wife, Holly, who had her own business dealings in town, appreciated the apartment's dressing room, the arrangements of dried flowers, the vase of fresh tulips.

It was plain that nobody lived here; the place was used exclusively for rentals. The location wasn't bad--just a short walk north to midtown or south to the happening bistros around Gramercy Park. It had a print shop right next door, a dry cleaner, a shoe-repair shop--the kind of services the rest of America needs a car to get to. When it rained one day, I bought an umbrella for three bucks from a guy selling them out of a van at the curb.

In the room's guest register a couple from Atlanta had penned, "We loved the place so much we left a miniature to add to your collection. New Yorkers are a lot nicer than everyone thinks. Thanks for a safe, cozy place to stay."

The second apartel (which cost $130 a night, $20 less than the penthouse) was a small studio on East 66th just off Fifth Avenue. The neighbors were respectable --the Polish Mission to the United Nations and the literary Lotos Club. We were half a block east of the greatest city park of our age, and half a block west of the hottest boutiques on Madison Avenue. If surrounding oneself with success was a strategy for taking New York, these were sidewalks paved with gold.

This apartment, unlike the last one, was somebody's home. She was a woman named Nancy who had another place to go--a friend's house, or a lover's--when renters moved in. Nancy had left one closet free for our clothes. She had thoughtfully included our names on her answering-machine message. She was one of those people, I noticed, who set her clocks ten minutes ahead.

Judging from her effects, Nancy was some kind of interior designer. I couldn't help examining the books on her shelves (from Donald Regan to Deepak Chopra), noting her choices in CDs and medicines, flipping through her faded Broadway playbills, looking at the family photos pinned over her desk. Always in these New Yorkers' photo galleries there seemed to be a subplot of separation and divorce, of longing. There was Nancy again with that hurt-looking man, Geoff. Here was a Valentine's card from Geoff that begged, "Please love me, even with all my faults."

Come on, guy!

But what I liked about the arrangement was that I'd never have to meet Nancy herself, and this understanding seemed crucial to maintaining that balance of invisibility and fleeting intimacy that is the essence of New York.

Mary McAulay of Urban Ventures (212-594-5650) has 600 short-term apartments for rent; rates range from $75 to $450 a night. The industry's pioneer, she started out in 1979 booking visitors into traditional hosted B&Bs. "But people weren't so keen on meeting a friendly New Yorker," she discovered. "I was shocked." Now 80% of her units are unhosted, and half of those aren't lived in by their owners. "If clients don't want to see other people's clothes or pictures of Mom," she says, "they should tell us."

Among her listings are a penthouse on Central Park West with a terrace offering "views of the world" ($150 a night); a 50th-floor studio in midtown with a deck that overlooks both rivers ($250); a two-bedroom in an 1810 townhouse in Greenwich Village, complete with original fireplace and luxurious backyard ($270). If you don't mind a hosted B&B, Mary can even set you up in a houseboat on the East River.

The landlords she represents are doctors, playwrights, authors (including a Pulitzer winner in the Village), a symphony conductor, a university dean--people who aren't so breathtakingly prosperous, however, that they don't need the extra money. A good proportion of them are underemployed actors and models. One woman rents out her place at 82nd and Park when she goes to India to work with Mother Teresa.

"People who go to hotels do not want this," McAulay recognizes--the touches of familiarity, of home. They want anonymity instead: no evidence that anyone has lived in a room before. Yet Mary, who used to be in criminology, has noticed one advantage she has over hotels. "We've never had a robbery," she says. "The perps need the anonymity of a hotel."

Shelli Leifer, who runs Abode Ltd. (212-472-2000), tells me she caters to business travelers more often than vacationers; rates range from $135 to $150. "It's for people who want to be on their own, in a neighborhood," she says. "For people who want to feel the neighborhood--eat there, shop there, go to museums there--not for people who want to push a button on the phone to have their bags carried down."

Abode has "an intimate collection" of 35 unlived-in units, many in small apartment buildings dedicated to nightly rental. The best of them is a landmark brownstone in the West 70s near Zabar's Deli that's owned by a couple of men: an architect and a writer. They remodeled the dwelling into an apartment for themselves and four beautifully decorated, thematic studios for guests--one is done in Country French, another is called the Ralph Lauren Room--which go for $150 a night. The room I stayed in once, perched on the top floor, had a pretty terrace with a gazebo that made me take up smoking again.

"I have businessmen who come back over and over," says Leifer. "The same people want the same places time after time. Once you find something you're happy with, why change?"

She's right. The trick is to have a home that you can return to whenever you want (as long as you reserve it far enough in advance). You could even bring along a picture or two to hang on the wall. Who'd stop you?

I had such a place, once, up on East 78th. But the guy who owned the building, Allan, got into a fight one day with his Japanese girlfriend, and she trashed the hallways and wrote angry things on the walls with lipstick. She ended up taking over the building in a property settlement, I think, leaving me out in the cold, to say nothing about Allan.

But I've got my eye on a better place now. It's just off Lexington--on the selfsame block I've always dreamed of calling home. We'll try the apartment out later this fall. If all goes well, I'll have some new business cards printed up. At last I'll be able to say to people, "Here's my New York address."

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Patty de Llosa