Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost
The original Lorca poem states that there’s a forest of ‘dried pigeons’, which is ambiguous to say the least, but given the Cohen line one could assume this has something to do with being on consistent display, in a place you can be seen and see out of endlessly (900 windows), yet are always in a place of waiting (a lobby). 
 This notion of being watched is absolutely CENTRAL to human development and the first step forward from the innocence of the previous line. The relevance of this is truly expressed in the next line. 
 However, the notion of being self-conscious is the first major event in the Judeo-Christian creation myth. Adam/Eve eat from the tree of Good and Evil and the first thing they become is conscious that they are naked. 
 
 The narrative of this piece moves very quickly as we move from innocence to its opposite (death) in the first two lines, and in the third we have awakening to the harsh reality of being as expressed through being on view. 
 Finally the lobby serves as a place of no clear definition. You wait in a lobby. You do not sleep, eat or live in one. In the context of being between innocence and brutal death is where we find ourselves in life, and thus enter the realm of morality. 
 This morality stems from our self-consciousness of ourselves in the eyes of others, and of the actions we take in life that move us away from innocence.
Take This Waltz