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The laws governing momentum dictate that an object will stay in motion until met with a resisting force. But when New Yorkers meet resistance, we keep moving forward; when faced with obstacles, we just make a new and better plan.
Stephan Rettenmaier, in car 23, pushing his 1954 Maserati 300S toward the finish line at Goodwood last year.
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Editor-in-Chief 14
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DOMINIC JAMES
f a single word could characterize New York City for all of its diverse inhabitants it is momentum: the strength gained by motion or a series of events. That forwardleaning ethos helps to explain why New Yorkers remain undeterred as they lead in creativity, innovation, and enterprise. A timely incarnation of this idea can be seen in the weeklong celebration of ingenuity and craftsmanship: the New York International Auto Show. For over a century it has crystalized our city’s mix of rich history and forward velocity, and you’ll find an article on it embedded within our international car calendar on page 73. We also feature the Yankee’s unchecked momentum this season with the newest man in pinstripes, Gerrit Cole, being no less than the most celebrated pitcher in baseball. We feature the Explorers Club, timed to the 116-year-old institution’s annual gala where, last year, Jeff Bezos personally committed most of his fortune to exploration, doing so to a room full of astronauts, mountaineers, scientists, billionaires, professors and unflagging innovators who also know something about the word momentum. It’s what drives their choices, their risks and, ultimately, their achievements. They represent the best of us, and reading about them helps us recalibrate our own internal compass to continue pointing forward—toward the new.
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Kristina Stewart Ward FEATURES DIRECTOR
Heather Hodson HARRIET MAYS POWELL (Bespoke Spoken Here, page 28.) Avenue’s new style director had her start in the fashion office of the New York Times before becoming Fashion Director at Tatler and New York magazine. For Avenue she focuses on a wide range of luxury categories, including fashion, interiors, watches, and jewelry. Being fluent in French served her well on her first Avenue article, while interviewing an international cast of creative directors. “LVMH acquired Moynat a few years ago,” says Powell. “It was fascinating to learn first hand the nuances of creating haute couture cases.”
MANAGING EDITOR
Angela M. H. Schuster STYLE DIRECTOR
Harriet Mays Powell PRODUCTION DIRECTOR
BOB KLAPISCH (Cashman’s Conundrum, page 86) is a veteran baseball writer who has covered the Yankees and Mets for the New York Post, New York Daily News, USA Today, ESPN and Bleacher Report. He is also a frequent contributor on MLB Network. Currently his work can be found in the New York Times. “Being embedded with the Yankees for a year while I wrote my book, Inside the Empire, allowed me to practice a different type of journalism; to really drill down to the story of this iconic franchise.”
Jessica Lee SENIOR EDITOR
Melissa Webb ART ASSISTANT
Shaoyang Chen FASHION EDITOR
Alecta Hill LONDON EDITOR
Catherine St Germans PARIS EDITOR
Clemence von Mueffling CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Alex Kuczynski, Liesl Schillinger, Katrina Brooker, Gigi Mortimer, Tracy Bross CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Anders Overgaard, John Huba, Mitchell Feinberg, Mark Seelen, Nick Mele, Billy Farrell, Scott Frances
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ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER (The Explorers Club, page 48, Cars, page 66) writes about art and science, as well as serving as editor-in-chief of The Explorers Journal, the adventure quarterly of The Explorers Club. “If there’s one thing you can say about the club, it’s that its members are never short of stories.” Luckily for us, neither is Angela, and she contributes several of them to this issue.
FELIX KUNZE (The Explorers Club, page 48). Earning his stripes with Annie Leibovitz when he first moved to New York, the portrait photographer later became drawn to the field of exploration. “As an environmentalist,” he says, “I enjoy elevating explorers to the status of celebrities so that they can be more impactful.” He has photographed Explorers Club members for six years, and took the landmark portrait of the members of the Apollo program who are still with us. 16
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BRIAN SELZNICK is a writer, illustrator, and puppeteer who is currently working on the lyrics for a musical based on his children’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Martin Scorsese directed the film incarnation of the book and Todd Haynes adapted another of Selznick’s works for film, Wonderstruck. In this issue he writes an essay on Stephen Sondheim. “I was nine years old when I first heard ‘Send in the Clowns’ by Sondheim, and about ten years later I discovered that he also wrote musicals. I’ve been in love with him ever since.”
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CONTENTS SPRING 202O VOL.43 NO.2
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TALES FROM THE EXPLORERS CLUB
Angela M.H. Schuster on the 116-yearold New York basecamp and its members. Plus, Sebastian Junger on the rich concept of tribe, and what draws nomadic adventurers back to theirs. Portraits by Felix Kunze. 66
LIFE IN THE FAST LANE Avenue’s international automotive calendar: the best races, auctions, and concours d’élégance, from the annual auto show in New York, to Goodwood’s trifecta of car events.
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CASHMAN’S CONUNDRUM
Baseball insider Bob Klapisch on the legendary Yankees GM, Bob Cashman, and the big bet on Gerrit Cole. 90
SOARING TO NEW HEIGHTS
Heather Hodson on the bucolic neighborhood, and the residents creating a village in the heart of the city.
Third-generation aquanaut Fabien Cousteau photographed at the Explorers Club by Felix Kunze. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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RESOURCES
A walker’s guide to New York City’s gardens and parks; the art and craft of bespoke luggage; a parents’ primer on our kids and their screens.
CULTURE
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HANDBAGS: SMALL IS BIG THIS SEASON
Harriet Mays Powell on why we should all be downsizing to the micro bag this spring.
Hermione kitten heel pumps by Tabitha Simmons.
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SPRING MOOD BOARD
Taking a page, literally, from Tabitha Simmons’ mood board, we go inside the world of the stylish shoe designer.
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INNOVATION
Hudson Yards raises the bar for creating a city within a city, Wendy Moonan reports.
NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS
Hetty Green: the making of a miser, and how she came to be sidelined and maligned by history. By Charles Slack
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SEEN ON SCENE
Pace Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, East Side House Settlement, and 35 Hudson Yards usher in 2020 with effervescent parties.
Left: Chanel Boy Bag. Right: Tabitha Simmons. AVENUE online: for our relaunched website, go to avenuemagazine.com. 20
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CHANEL AND OF TABITHA SIMMONS
Brian Selznick pays a personal tribute to the great composerlyricist, Stephen Sondheim; Christine Coulson on the interior life of the Met’s treasures; Catherine St Germans reveals the influence of Sandy Powell on the Costume Institute’s new exhibition; a guide to New York’s spring art fairs and auctions. Plus: the best of the Sondheim celebrations, memoir, fiction, and non-fiction.
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Misty Copeland and Cavin Royal III photographed by Peggy Sirota for our relaunch issue.
JESSIE KANELOS WEINER
R ES O U RC ES
A Walker’s Guide to NYC’s Gardens and Parks New York’s High Line
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A Walk in the Park 1. Museum of the City of New York 2. Conservatory Garden 3. Reservoir 4. Arthur Ross Pinetum 5. Hamilton Monument 6. Obelisk 7. Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre 8. Shakespeare Garden 9. The Ramble 10. Bow Bridge 11. Loeb Boathouse 12. Alice in Wonderland Sculpture 13. Kerbs Boathouse 14. Bethesda Fountain 15. Cherry Hill 16. Le Pain Quotidien 17. The Mall 18. The Carousel 19. Wollman Rink Central Park, illustrated by Jessie Kanelos Weiner.
A Walker’s Guide to NYC’s Gardens and Parks ILLUSTRATIONS BY JESSIE KANELOS WEINER
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WRITTEN BY JACOB LEHMAN
F
or a city so dense with skyscrapers and asphalt, New York also has a surprising number of parks, gardens, and leafy walkways among the concrete. It is, above all things, a walking city: best explored and most fully understood on foot. In Central Park, Manhattan boasts one of the most beautiful and renowned parks of any city in the world, but it is only one of the public green spaces that warrant rambling walks. Finding the most peaceful place to picnic, the perfect spot for viewing the skyline, or the secret garden that offers respite from the bustle of the city is something that comes through curiosity and experience. From midtown to deepest Brooklyn, there are bucolic spaces hidden everywhere—you just need to know where to look. In New York in Stride, illustrator Jessie Kanelos Weiner and I outlined walking itineraries that take you through some of the city’s most interesting and varied
neighborhoods. Dotted among the walks are sections on the parks and gardens that you can discover along the way; here are a just a few.
The boat pond and Kerbs Boathouse.
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CONSERVATORY GARDEN
The Conservatory Garden is the only formally landscaped garden in Central Park. It’s divided into three distinct sections—English, Italian, and French—each with its own features and planting style. The grandest of the three is the Italian garden, with colonnades of crabapple trees facing one another across a manicured lawn and a staircase rising to a pergola draped with climbing wisteria. The French garden is awash in references to the gardens of Versailles, including perfect parterres of flowers surrounding a fountain. But the greatest treasure is the English garden, where wilder flowers and perennials surround the Frances Hodgson Burnett Memorial Fountain, which honors the author of The Secret Garden. Enter at Fifth Avenue and 105th Street or the 106th Street gate inside Central Park.
Wildlife abounds in Central Park. CENTRAL PARK
Situated in the heart of Manhattan, Central Park absorbs and reflects something of the energy of the neighborhoods surrounding it. The south side of the park, bordering Midtown and the shopping of Fifth Avenue, is always the busiest, with locals navigating a sea of tourists, caricaturists, and horse-drawn carriages. The northern end of the park, bordering Harlem and farthest from the tourist hub of 59th Street, is the most relaxed, with domino tables and pickup sports among the monuments and plantings. The Fifth Avenue side, with the formal landscaping of the Conservatory Garden, matches the grandeur of Museum Mile. And Central Park West encapsulates the mix of the historic and the bohemia that
THE MALL
Wrought iron gates at the entrance to Conservatory Garden.
A WINDING ROUTE THROUGH CENTRAL PARK CAN REVEAL NOT ONLY THE BEAUTY OF VAUX AND OLMSTED’S LANDSCAPING, BUT THE CHARACTER OF THE CITY AROUND IT. defines the Upper West Side. A winding route through the whole of the park can reveal not only the variety and beauty of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscaping, but the character of the city around it. KERBS BOAT HOUSE
Conservatory Garden, Central Park’s only formally landscaped garden.
In the spirit of childlike wonder, the Kerbs Boathouse is a small café decorated with model boats that sits beside the pond known as Conservatory Water. The pond is famous for attracting model boat enthusiasts who bring their vessels on weekends and watch them negotiate the waters from the terrace around the edges. It’s a whimsical sight and a fun place to sit with a drink and watch the maritime miniatures. Enter at Fifth Avenue and 74th Street.
The grandest and most formal element of the park, the Mall is a long, elegant, tree-lined esplanade that runs all the way from the Olmsted Flower Garden at its southern end to the Bethesda Terrace and Fountain at its northern end. With benches lining either side beneath the trees, it’s also the most European-feeling part of Central Park, reminiscent of the oldest gardens in Paris or Florence and a beautiful walk from top to bottom. Enter at Fifth Avenue and 67th Street. RESERVOIR
The path around the reservoir frames some of the greatest vignettes of the city’s skyline, the wide expanse of water allowing for uninterrupted views across the park in any direction. It’s a popular place for locals to walk or jog and a picturesque route walking north or south through the park. On the northwestern side of the reservoir, the Gothic Bridge—the most charming of the three iron bridges designed by Vaux for the park— crosses the bridle path. Enter at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street.
The Gothic Bridge close to the reservoir. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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HIGH LINE (PART 3)
The upper section of the High Line differs in character from its southern counterparts, in large part because of the architecture surrounding it. As the walkway winds through Chelsea’s gallery district, walls and windows close in on either side, so pedestrians feel as if they’re walking right through the buildings of the neighborhood. The lawn at 23rd Street is a serene, surreal resting place, the green space floating between the brick walls of warehouses on either side; the Falcone Flyover, which runs from 25th to 27th Streets, focuses foot traffic into a narrower path overhung with extraordinary lush greenery from magnolias to sassafras. Look out for the 26th Street spur, where the path juts out over the street below and while sitting on wooden benches you can watch the city go by. The High Line concludes just a few blocks farther north, among the gleaming new residential towers, Thomas Heatherwick’s soaring Vessel sculpture, and the wide, public space of Hudson Yards. West 23rd to West 34th Streets.
The Barrow Street Garden has an English feel, with a flagstone path surrounded by leafy hedges and ivy-clad old trees, and the Rectory Garden is planted with roses and colorful flower beds that attract legions of butterflies. Benches are scattered throughout, and the garden is seldom busy, making it a beautifully peaceful place to step away from the noise of the Greenwich Village streets. 487 Hudson Street. SEWARD PARK
Seward Park has been at the heart of the Lower East Side’s community for more than a century—it was the first municipally funded playground in the country when it opened in 1902—and continues to reflect the eclectic mix of cultures that defines the area. The park is below the magnificent Forward Building, which has been conveted into apartments. Chinese neighbors practice tai chi around the fountain and in the playgrounds early in the morning, and the Hester Street Fair, which brings food and arts and crafts stalls to the park weekly from April through October, epitomizes the cooler and younger side of the neighborhood. Canal Street and Essex Street. THE NOGUCHI MUSEUM
Church of St. Luke in the Fields Garden. THE CHURCH OF ST. LUKE IN THE FIELDS GARDEN
Through an easily missed gate in the redbrick wall that runs along this block of Hudson Street lies one of the city’s prettiest gardens. Maintained by the Episcopal church, which was established here in 1821, the gardens have been developed through the centuries into a magical series of verdant spaces, linked to one another by charming paths that wind around the church and its adjoining school. 26
Just across the East River from Roosevelt Island in Queens, you’ll find tucked away one of New York’s most peaceful places to enjoy the spring weather and reflect: the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Open to the public since 1985, the museum was built by Noguchi himself, whose studio had been nearby since 1961. As well as housing a vast
Seward Park on the Lower East Side.
Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.
permanent collection of Noguchi’s sublime sculptures, the museum features a Japanese-style garden with pebbled paths as well as water fountains and sculptures hiding among pine trees and willows. With a small bookshop and a café inside, the Noguchi Museum is a serene end to a journey from Midtown —and a fitting tribute to the artist who paved the way. 9-01 33rd Road, Queens.
almost hidden up a path near the Grand Army Plaza entrance— or the woods that run around the lake, where small benches look out over the water beneath pagodas. Smorgasburg, the famed
PROSPECT PARK
The biggest park in Brooklyn, Prospect Park was landscaped by the same masterful designers as Central Park: Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. A little wilder and less obviously manicured than its Manhattan counterpart, Prospect Park can feel like a country oasis, with hills, lakes, waterfalls, woodlands, and acres of open fields. But it’s also varied enough that you can discover secluded spots, like the Vale of Cashmere—a series of circular clearings with fountains
food market that began on the Williamsburg waterfront, operates here on Sundays from April through October at Breeze Hill on the Lefferts side, so you can reward yourself after a hike through the park with a scenic picnic lunch. Prospect Park West at 9th Street and Flatbush Avenue at Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn.
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to picnic areas—there’s even a sandy beach and an outpost of the popular ice-cream chain Ample Hills for the warmer months. To the north, the pathways lead to the Empire Fulton Ferry Park and Main Street Park, with Jane’s Carousel, the River Café, and other DUMBO landmarks along the way. Entrances on Atlantic Avenue and Furman Street (Pier 5 and 6); Joralemon and Furman Streets (Pier 5); Furman and Old Fulton Street (Pier 1).
ELIZABETH STREET GARDEN
An unlikely sight amid the crowded shops and row houses of Nolita, this charming quasi-Italianate garden runs from Mott Street to Elizabeth Street, just below Prince Street. In 1990 the garden was leased by the adjacent Elizabeth Street Gallery, whose owner landscaped the garden as we know it today and installed the eccentric collection of furniture, sculptures, and decorative objects that sits among the trees and lawns. Open to the public (for now, at least, while the city debates tentative plans to construct affordable housing here), the garden is a beautiful place to sit—perhaps with a drink from nearby Gimme! Coffee—and enjoy the rare privilege of quiet green space downtown. Elizabeth Street between Prince and Spring Streets. FOUR FREEDOMS PARK
At the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is one of New York’s most perfectly conceived (and least-known) green spaces. Designed by the influential architect Louis I. Kahn in tribute to the former president, a monumental staircase and avenues of trees form a triangle thrusting into the East River, commanding
Columbus Park. COLUMBUS PARK Elizabeth Street Garden.
FOUR FREEDOMS PARK IS ONE OF NEW YORK’S MOST PERFECTLY CONCEIVED (AND LEAST-KNOWN) GREEN SPACES.
beautiful and unusual perspectives of the midtown skyline on one side and Long Island City in Queens on the other. Adjacent to the Cornell Tech campus, and frequented primarily by locals and adventurous walkers, the park is almost always quiet and, like many of Kahn’s projects, feels almost religious in its serenity. Roosevelt Island.
Brooklyn Bridge Park. BROOKLYN BRIDGE PARK
Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park.
Running alongside Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO, Brooklyn Bridge Park is an idyllic and varied waterfront oasis with clear views of lower Manhattan across the East River. The redeveloped piers beneath the Esplanade offer everything from sports fields
There may be no clearer emblem of New York City‘s capacity to evolve than Columbus Park. Once the site of the original Five Points—the stomping ground of the characters made famous in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and an area contested for more than a century by Dutch, Irish, and Italian immigrants—the park is, today, a serene hub of the local Chinese community and anyone else wise enough to find their way there. Surrounded by the taller buildings that border the Financial District and the curving row houses of Mulberry Street, the park is protected from the noise and bustle. Older neighbors practice tai chi here at dawn, and families gather to clean and prepare produce from the markets of Chinatown. The beautiful pavilion at the northern end of the park is unique and occupied most often by locals playing mahjong in the afternoons, and singing Cantonese opera in the evenings. Mulberry Street at Bayard Street. Adapted excerpt from Jessie Kanelos Weiner and Jacob Lehman’s book New York in Stride: An Insider’s Walking Guide (Rizzoli, New York, 2020) SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy, whilst Men’s Artistic Director Virgil Abloh is designing a capsule collection of luggage, clothing, and accessories that will drop this fall. MOYNAT 937 Madison Avenue 212.452.4696 moynat.com
LOUIS VUITTON 1 East 57th Street 212.758.8877 louisvuitton.com
A Louis Vuitton craftsman continues a tradition going back 165 years.
Bespoke Spoken Here The art and craft of custom trunks and luggage is alive and well within this community of luxury creators.
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BY HARRIET MAYS POWELL
he earliest consumers of luxury goods would likely never have even uttered the term “bespoke,” if only because mass manufacturing had yet to make this a necessary distinction when seeking trunks and travel cases. It appears that everything was made-to-order, until it wasn’t. At the beginning of the 20th century, the efficiency of scale and process made such fashionable items as luggage available to wider audiences, but customization remains in high demand, and many esteemed brands still offer the uniqueness of custom-made pieces. Most of them have a long history of doing so. 28
A Louis Vuitton case created for the NBA championship trophy.
It was more than 165 years ago when M. Louis Vuitton debuted his groundbreaking, flat-bottom trunk, a design that arguably became the template for modern luggage. Lightweight, airtight, and stackable, the trunks boomed in popularity following a commission from the Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, who appointed M. Vuitton her official “box-maker and packer.” Competitors were soon copying his design, so Vuitton introduced patterns to distinguish his work from the rest: a striped canvas called Rayée; a checkered pattern, Damier; and finally, the iconic LV monogram interspersed with Japanese-style flowers and quatrefoils. Today, custom orders are still made at the original workshop in Asnières, northwest of Paris, where a client adviser works with customers to choose their model and make specifications. This can range from a suitcase or trunk, to a specialty case for carrying a portable bar, watches, jewelry, and boardgames. Once the interior’s contents have been accommodated through exacting measurements, the exterior leather is selected, as well as the lining material and color. Production time required on bespoke items can take anywhere from two to 15 months. In addition to private clients, the Louis Vuitton also has a long history of collaborating with such sports organizations as FIFA and The America’s Cup, and in January Chairman/CEO Michael Burke announced the luxury house’s partnership with the NBA, its first with a North American sports team. A monogrammed case lined in NBA royal blue was crafted by six artisans to house and transport the
Moynat’s custom Champagne case for Krug.
gave her brand real lift, thanks to the creation of specially curved cases designed to fit the interior contours of cars. Fast forward to the present day and her creative legacy is alive and well with Nair, who works alongside a small team of artisans in Paris and Limoges. Their limited production suits the man who relishes the chance to focus on quality and craftsmanship over quantity. With no advertising, and limited output, the brand has acquired an aura of exclusivity, and there is no guarantee that a bespoke order will be granted. “So many of the requests we receive are mundane,” says Nair. “People today want to use trunks as coffee tables, not for travel, which doesn’t respect the brand’s history and so
PHOTOS COURTESY LOUIS VUITTON AND MOYNAT
A basketball shoe closet by Louis Vuitton.
Nine years ago, LVMH made another expansion into luxury craftsmanship when it acquired the important heritage brand Moynat, instilling Hermès alumnus Ramesh Nair as creative director. In a conversation last month, he acknowledged there are big shoes to fill. The brand was founded in 1849 by Pauline Moynat who patented several technological innovations in her breakthrough early designs and leather marquetry. Initially using transatlantic crossings as inspiration for her creations, it was the advent of automobiles that
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this isn’t of much interest to me.” Occasionally, Nair will accede to a request for a relatively simple commission like a bespoke watch case, but he prefers “to take on projects that push us creatively.” One example of this is the artist’s trunk he created, which is able to function as “a mobile art gallery, complete with a working easel.” These have also recently included a mobile cooking trunk complete with a gas cylinder that’s capable of making breakfast for two in any remote setting; it took 18 months to complete and ran well into the six figures. “Price can be a factor,” he concedes of the rareness of their work, because “bespoke is expensive and many potential customers back off once they learn the cost.” Among his other favorite projects is a case created for a meteorite collection, and a collaboration with Krug Champagne, for which Moynat made a case that mirrors the bottle’s shape. For a Parisian candy maker, the firm created a macaron case that mimics the opening and closing of a lady bug’s wings in order to accommodate the confections. A nine-month project, it includes speciallycolored enameled cups from the Limoges porcelain factory in which each macaron sits. Nair continues to push creative boundaries and at his latest media presentation, in late February, he showcased a collection of handbags made of stone; up next up is a suite of handbags made of glass. But, he says, that is still a work-in-progress as he “needs to figure out how not to break them all!”
PHOTOS COURTESY GLOBE-TROTTER, MOYNAT, AND GOYARD
GOYARD 20 East 63rd Street 212.813.0005 goyard.com
Founded in 1853 in Paris, Goyard is known for its custom-made trunks, covered in a hand-painted canvas, with a distinctive chevron pattern. Despite its rich history, the brand had something of an unremarkable beginning: it started as a crating storefront in Paris, called Maison Martin, where the French aristocracy would go to have their possessions packed and shipped overseas. François Goyard joined the firm as an apprentice, eventually rising through the ranks, taking it over and giving the company his name. Run as a family business for five generations, it was purchased in
requests are granted: an order for a custom trunk to accommodate a large screen television was recently declined by the 167-yearold company, whereas a bespoke trunk for gardening tools was happily manufactured. Goyard still maintains certain lifestyle standards, and apparently clients are advised to do likewise.
A colorful Globe-Trotter trolley case.
GLOBE-TROTTER 1000 Third Avenue 212.705.2000 globe-trotter.com
A Moynat craftsman customizing a case.
QUEEN ELIZABETH IS SAID TO STILL USE THE SET OF GLOBE-TROTTER SUITCASES SHE TOOK ON HER HONEYMOON IN 1947. 1998 by French businessman, JeanMichel Signoles. Today, Goyard still produces bespoke trunks, with each being the work of a single craftsman whose initials, along with a serial number, are inscribed on an ID tag in case of a need for repairs.
Goyard’s custom trunks for Cole Porter.
Remaining rare has been key to Goyard’s success, with commissions being coordinated only through their small network of boutiques. The brand eschews e-commerce and advertising, nor does it seek celebrity endorsements. It appears it doesn’t need to: among their clients over the years are Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Cole Porter, and Karl Lagerfeld, whose famous cat, Choupette, eats out of a bespoke Goyard bowl. Following an in-depth interview with a prospective customer, a Goyard artisan makes precise watercolor sketch of the future piece. Content details and measurements are made and a three-to-six month process commences. But not all bespoke
Globe-Trotter has been producing handcrafted luggage for over a century and counts members of the British Royal family among its most loyal customers. Queen Elizabeth is said to still use the set of suitcases she took on her honeymoon in 1947, and The Crown commissioned Globe-Trotter to manufacture the replica luggage used in their episode chronicling the royal honeymoon. Each item is made in GlobeTrotter’s factory north of London, and is crafted using many of the same methods and machines as when the brand was founded in 1897. There are three tiers of customization: made-to-order offers options for linings and metal fittings, plus different colors for the body, leather corners, and straps; bespoke is the next level up, where, in addition to the made-to-order options, customers can choose different colors of stitching. The design & build service creates a completely unique piece from beginning to end. Although the bespoke service is a small part of the company’s overall revenue, James Fisher, the director of brand development, explains that “the team finds it inspiring to work with clients and enjoys being challenged practically and creatively,” adding that this service is “more important than just the business it represents.” Fisher says that past commissions have included a one-off case for a fancy-dress party to match a man’s outfit. “It was a very specific SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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An Asprey artisan at work.
ASPREY 853 Madison Avenue 212.688.1811 asprey.com
Asprey has been crafting a wide swath of opulent fare since 1781 with an early specialty of the house being dressing cases. Made in wood and leather, these elaborate wardrobes were also equipped with silver-topped jars, pots, and brushes. It was several decades after the firm’s founding that bespoke travel trunks really came into vogue during
The interior of a T. Anthony case. T. ANTHONY 445 Park Avenue 212.750.9797 tanthony.com
When Jackie Kennedy used to walk down Park Avenue to visit her preferred luxury luggage maker, T. Anthony, she often took her children, John and Caroline, because they liked watching the crafting and monogramming taking place in the work room of the company established in 1946 by Theodore Anthony Froitzheim. It’s not known if her visits ever coincided with another regular, Marilyn Monroe, who was among the early bespoke customers of T. Anthony putting a personal imprint on luggage requests. She once asked for a suite of the signature canvas luggage to be made using bright red canvas instead of the more customary dark colors. The owner happily complied with Marilyn’s request, and the color became a fast favorite among clients such as Nancy and Ronald Reagan. While T. Anthony declined to name specific customers, past 30
IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, THE MAHARAJA OF PATIALA COMMISSIONED AN ASPREY TEAK TRAVELING TRUNK FOR EACH OF HIS TEN WIVES.
T. Anthony leather colors.
T. Anthony’s bright red canvas luggage was first commissioned for Marilyn Monroe.
the 19th-century golden age of travel, and glamorous heads of state led the way. Queen Victoria granted Asprey a Royal Warrant in 1862, the same year the firm was awarded a gold medal at the International Exhibition for its dressing cases. In the early 20th century, the Maharaja of Patiala commissioned a teak traveling trunk for each of his ten wives. Created using different color schemes, each case with fitted with solid silver washing and bathing utensils, and was lined with blue velvet. Recent requests to Asprey have included a case fitted to carry only hats, and a trunk to transport sunglasses. Asprey’s workshops are still housed in the company’s flagship store on London’s Bond Street and it is here that the design team and craftspeople continue to ply their renowned, bespoke service. The boast is that no request is impossible, in keeping with the brand’s motto “It can be done.” The process starts with a one-on-one consultation and the presentation of a range of exotic and nonexotic skins, finishes, and color options. Next comes a choice of details such as hardware, precious stone applications, engraving and embossing. Once the design process is complete, clients can then “follow the creation” of their purchase by meeting with the craftspeople along the way. The length of production time is case specific, due to the different skills needed to execute each commission, but an average period from commission to completion is three months.
PHOTOS COURTESY T.ANTHONY AND ASPREY
costume, so I doubt it was ever used again!” Globe-Trotter’s collaborations include work with Tiffany & Co, Gucci, the Rolling Stones, and, most recently, Berluti. The bespoke service is offered at the brand’s flagship store in Mayfair, London, as well as at their outlet in Ginza, Tokyo. Orders can be emailed or submitted by phone, and depending on the precise specifications, they are usually completed in around six weeks.
or present, they confirmed that bespoke commissions continue to this day, offering special leathers, trims, and hardware to personalize the luggage, along with the brand’s iconic, leather, monogramed tabs. Some clients (the serial marryers) have required multiple updates on these monograms several times over the years, and while we couldn’t get confirmation that Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman was a customer, nor Elizabeth Taylor, both of these matrimonially-inclined women would’ve been wise to have such a compliant luggage maker at their disposal. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were known customers, though it’s rumored that T. Anthony is among the many vendors whose bills were never paid by the over-dressed, underfunded couple. While fewer people are buying and traveling with hats these days, demand for T. Anthony hatboxes continues apace, typically being used to ferry other kinds of accessories within its glamorous confines. It’s understood that travelers can still appreciate the retro chic of sweeping into a hotel lobby with one of these round stunners sitting atop their stack of luggage.
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Sotheby’s International Realty® and the Sotheby’s International Realty logo are registered service marks used with permission. Each office is independently owned and operated. Equal Housing Opportunity. Property information herein is derived from various sources including, but not limited to, county records and multiple listing services, and may include approximations. All information is deemed accurate.
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TECH TEMPER TANTRUMS
Tech Matters and Manners Our children, their screens, and how we all get out of this alive.
Most of us have succumbed to offering our children a smartphone or tablet to distract them while ferrying them around on errands, and while sitting in traffic or in waiting rooms. In doing so we’ve helped create the expectation that tech is their go-to entertainment during pockets of downtime, and when their “big-kid pacifier” is removed they can become (unsurprisingly) upset. After all, our kids’ capacity for giving up electronic devices isn’t so different from earlier stages in their lives when they had to give up a pacifier, and the rules of engagement aren’t so dissimilar now. When children have tantrums, our best tactic is still to remain calm, compassionate, and consistent, guiding them with logic once they have regained control of their emotions. Our kids may first need to sit quietly with themselves before they’re ready to talk through something, but high emotions don’t last forever, and learning to control them is an important part of our kids’ overall development. Once the tantrum subsides, first ensure that you, yourself, are composed and then have a mindful conversation with your kids, acknowledging their feelings and explaining why they can’t have unlimited use of their screens. Convey why their reaction to those limits has to improve in order to regain privileges with their devices going forward. Temper tantrums are often intended to shape our behavior— don’t give in. We teach our children self-mastery by exhibiting it.
BY PRINCESS MARIE-CHANTAL OF GREECE
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echnology is evolving at such a rapid pace that the etiquette surrounding it is, to a certain extent, a work in progress. But even as the landscape evolves, the goal remains the same: teaching our children to harness the benefits of their devices while not allowing screens to degrade the quality of their lives—or ours. After all, we’re navigating our own relationship with technology alongside our digitally-native progeny, and they’re far more likely to watch our behavior than to listen to our advice. 32
So we work on our own digital etiquette, and demonstrate how to focus more on human engagement than on the smartphones, computers, tablets, and gaming consoles that are increasingly vying for our attention. There are few among us who don’t worry about the impact screen time has on our kids’ emotional and social development, and since they’re going to be using their devices when they’re off on their own, it seems important to establish house rules at an early age to help them balance technology consumption even when we’re not around.
and at a previously agreed-upon hour, I actually take away their devices for charging. We also offer our kids a compelling substitute: a good book. Encouraging them to read before bed began years earlier when I read to them at night as often as I could. We chose books that would take a good six months to a year to read together—the Harry Potter series, for example, the Roald Dahl books, and the complete Chronicles of Narnia. Reading to children creates lifelong habits that can enrich their vocabulary, boost memory, build their curiosity, and help them settle down happily for bed. And if you’re able to make this a regular routine, it also allows you to spend quality time together.
NO SCREENS AT THE TABLE
Whether you have a four-yearold watching videos on a tablet or a tween texting on their smartphone, electronics have no place at the table during mealtime—plain and simple. This is your time to shape family culture and to learn about your children’s day—and for them to learn about yours. Many families use a device basket that’s positioned near the dining table so that everyone can deposit their screens before the meal begins. Children benefit from understanding that they will encounter more structured, formal situations throughout their life, and your home is where they prepare for the larger expectations that ultimately await them. So before dining with the grandparents, or making reservations at that formal restaurant, get into the habit of reiterating your family’s rules of behavior at the dinner table and watch them model that behavior when they’re out in the world.
NO SCREENS BEFORE BED
A surfeit of scientific studies concludes that too much screen time before bed can prevent us from having a good night’s sleep. We’ve seen this first-hand in our own family, so we shut off electronics an hour before bed,
EYE CONTACT
We’re raising our children at a time when their peers are more comfortable staring at a screen than engaging in face-to-face conversations, and without purposeful structure in our
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homes—shaped and modeled by us—we’re essentially outsourcing that role to the outside world. When children are on their screens and are being addressed by an adult or another child, it’s important that they know to look up and make eye contact when they respond. (There’s nothing worse than being greeted with a monosyllabic reply and indiscernible head movement.) Eye contact plays a crucial role in a baby’s development and is an important social skill that children will carry with them later into life. Eye contact demonstrates engagement and respect, and it is the groundwork for meaningful human interaction. The ideal way to instill behavior in our children is to first model it ourselves. In essence, we need to ensure that we look at our children, not our screens, when they are speaking to us. This ends up being harder than it sounds, since many of us receive workrelated emails around the clock. As we often check emails first thing in the morning, managing the no-phone rule at breakfast quickly becomes complicated. If you have to respond to a work email or text, first excuse yourself from the table, let your child know that the message is for work, and that, once it’s done, you will be back at the table with your full attention. They deserve that from you, and you deserve children who value your effort to do so.
would do well to check the example we ourselves are setting for them. On family vacations, are we paying more attention to curating our experiences for social media than we are immersing ourselves in the moment? If so, then there are likely little people taking notice. Teach them by example to live engaged lives in the present before even considering how it will look on your/their Instagram feed.
“EVEN THOUGH I AM INTRIGUED BY THE DIGITAL WORLD, I ALSO UNDERSTAND THAT WE NEED TO SET LIMITS.” and I insist they create avatars and never use their real names. Another rule I have set—which can be hard to enforce when your child is working with a squad on a real-time video game—is limiting gaming to an hour a day. In addition, this hour isn’t a given, as they’re not allowed to play unless their homework is first completed and any chores or required reading is done. You’ll surely hear groans, as do I, but after completing these tasks our kids end up being more appreciative of their gaming downtime because they have “earned” it.
GAMING
SHARING
As a mother of five, I know more about gaming than I ever imagined I would—from creepers in Minecraft to the array of Fortnite battles. What both of these have in common, however, is that they can be played as multiplayer games, which means that children can interact with strangers on public servers. Accordingly, I only allow my children to use a private server,
Having multiple children in our homes doesn’t mean we have multiple gaming systems, tablets, and computers: learning to share is a valuable part of growing up, and it is a life skill our kids will eventually thank us for. (Just not any time soon.) As adults we have a difficult enough time waiting our turn, but we all did learn to do it during our own childhoods. Do
you remember having to share that one landline in the house? In order to help our kids share an electronic device without friction, we can ideally set up a schedule together with our children. Sit down and create a calendar that the kids can refer to, even when you’re not there to enforce the rules that they, themselves, helped create. SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media can be addictive at any age, so before we focus on our children’s consumption of it, we
FOMO AND FINSTA
The research is in, and it’s sobering: spending too much time on social media contributes to childhood/ teen anxiety and depression. A primary responsibility as parents is to monitor how social media impacts our children’s mood and their sense of well-being. While social media can be a wonderful tool for expanding and reinforcing friendships, it also has the potential to considerably damage to our kids’ self-esteem. Setting boundaries is a good start—as is knowing our children well enough to recognize changes in them. Fear of missing out (FOMO) and cyberbullying pose some of the greatest risks, and while our children may initially bristle at our involvement, they ultimately appreciate knowing that we care about them. Keeping a watchful eye on our children’s social media accounts includes the insight that children can be very creative when it comes to carving out their privacy in this new world. If you don’t yet know the difference between a finsta and a rinsta (fake and regular Instagram accounts), then you and your kids may need to have a talk, because kids learn early on how to hide their “real” social media presence from their parents. Talk to them about what is, and isn’t, appropriate to post on social media, and don’t wait until the tween or teen years to start these discussions. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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TAKING THE PLUNGE, TOGETHER
Most platforms cite 13 as the age when people can create accounts, but it’s up to parents to decide what age we actually consider appropriate. (I suggest putting it off for as long as possible!) If your child is pressuring you to open an account or to get a smartphone, it’s a good idea to raise the topic with the parents of your child’s classmates and collectively make a decision. If all the parents adopt the same policy, you’ll avoid the otherwise inevitable situation— and ensuing argument—when your child comes home from school demanding a social media account or a phone at age eight because soand-so has one. As my kids became older, I did let them join some controlled social media sites, but I always ensured that the viewing settings were on “private.” These days, preparing our children for the real world begins by preparing them for the world online. Teach them about cyberbullying, emphasizing mindfulness in the way they communicate with others, and help them avoid hurting someone else’s feelings. I always tell my children to imagine what their grandmother would think before they post a message or picture. If your child is the one whose feelings have been hurt, prepare yourself to be an active listener, and remember that kids aren’t always looking for a remedy; sometimes they just want a sympathetic ear. POST HASTE
If you’ve been embarrassed by something posted by your child, you are not alone. Children’s brains are, of course, still developing, and at times they won’t make the best decisions. Help them understand that anything they 34
share may one day be viewed by a school admissions director, future in-laws, or potential employers. Everything we share on the internet can be made permanent, even if it’s within a private account (hello screenshots!) So if it’s something they wouldn’t be happy for anyone, and everyone, to see, advise your kids not to post it. It’s also important for children to be careful about who is following them. Many of them let friends of friends follow their accounts, and some ascribe to the “more the merrier method” when it comes to boosting followers, often considering it a kind of popularity contest. So review your children’s social media contacts with them and have open discussions about why they’re allowing certain people into their private world; it’s a good way to open bigger discussions about their school and social life, their friends and themselves. Social media is, in many ways, a mirror. Do you—do they—like what they see reflected in it? TEXTING
If you have a tween or a teen, your child is probably already texting on a tablet, smartphone, or social media app. And even if this tech didn’t exist, they’d be on your house phone doing essentially the same thing that they’re doing on their devices: expanding their circle to people beyond your immediate family. So many of the things
we face on this front as parents have nothing to do with tech, and everything to do with sharing our children with a group of people we may not yet know. Stick to your instincts on this, because you yourself made it through your own version of this stage. And of course, devices add their own layer of obstacles to navigate. By the age of ten, your children may be participating in grouptext conversations, sometimes including a dozen kids or more. Groupthink sometimes sets in, and it rarely inspires kids to be their best selves. I advise my children not to text anything they’re afraid to say in person. I also make sure they are aware that texts, direct messages, and emails can be made into screenshots and passed along to others. Often this is done out of context, and it can be used to hurt another child’s feelings. This is a good opportunity to teach children about a no-bullying house rule: in your family, no one is allowed to be mean to other people. No matter what their age, children should shut down communications on devices within an hour or so of bedtime. And it should be a given that children don’t text at the movies, the theater, school events, family gatherings, religious services, or any place where they should be focusing their attention on something, or someone, else. Distracted driving, or even distracted walking,
should be an important point of discussion and, as ever, we should lead by our own example. Don’t use a crosswalk while looking at your phone, and use your phone’s settings to silence all incoming calls and texts while you’re driving. Our children take their cues from us. TECH IS NOT THE ENEMY; BAD HABITS ARE
Technology has the capacity to be the hub of our family’s wheel if we put it to good use, and making a family plan to do just that is your first step. If you have older kids, you’ve likely already found that text messages are a great way to keep a conversation open with them as they spend more time away from home; grandparents love video calls with our kids, and family group chats keep everyone connected no matter how far away they live. While every family has their own set of circumstances and eventual solutions, we can all benefit from developing a consistent structure to follow as we calibrate such bedrock rules as appropriate time and circumstances for screen usage. Routine and boundaries have a way of defusing battles before they even begin, and with computer dependency only growing, we would do well to create an atmosphere of reasonable expectations within our home— rules our kids can understand and then commit to following. Adapted excerpt from Manners Begin at Breakfast: Modern Etiquette for Families by Princess MarieChantal of Greece. Illustrations by Lydia Starkey. Copyright 2020 by the author and reprinted by permission of Vendome.
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A suite of gaming options from Jonathan Adler, including a lacquer backgammon set, $395, in several colors options. jonathanadler.com
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Travel poker set, $2,750, by Tiffany & Co. tiffany.com
Sterling silver and walnut yo-yo, $310, by Tiffany & Co. tiffany.com
Fun + Games Up the stakes on your family game night with these whimsical, luxury offerings. Hand-blown crystal sand timer hourglass (90 minute), $75, by Bey-Berk. neimanmarcus.com
Shagreen JengaÂŽ set, $1,100, by Aerin. aerin.com
Horsecut chess game, small model, $6,100, by Hermès. hermes.com
Shagreen mahjong set, $1,250, by Aerin. aerin.com
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P U RV E YO R S O F T H E F I N E ST ANTIQUE AND REPRODUCTION LIGHTING AND COUTURE SHADES
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C U LT U R E
LOREM...00 IPSUMETS...00 DOLOR...00 SITAMETI...00
Celebrating Sondheim at 90 The writer, illustrator, and lyricist Brian Selznick pays a personal tribute.
YOUSUF KARSH
LOREM IPSUM Ebis aut facersperio blant esciis volorate eatur, temnit, voluptm fuga. Nequia, ut modit alia int volore omnit, volupta corpostrum autest, utet ut fugitini mus, occus aut.
Stephen Sondheim, photographed at home in Manhattan in 1986. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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CULTURE
It All Began With “La.”
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eople love musical theater or hate musical theater for the exact same reason: in the middle of conversations, everyone suddenly starts singing. The haters say, “Why the hell is everyone singing?” (a not unreasonable response to the idea that everyone in New York City might just happen to know all the same lyrics and dance steps). But the lovers say, “Finally! I see it’s possible to break out of the mundane necessity of talking to express what is deep and true and hidden inside me, and inside all of us!” In 1984, when I was a college freshman, there was a lot hidden inside me. I had already loved musical theater for many years when a new friend placed the needle down on a record she wanted me to hear. First there was the sound of crackling, then the music began. A few piano notes, then a lone voice boldly sang: “La.” The voice sang more “La’s.” Other voices, male and female, started singing “La’s.” More and more voices joined in. They built and built, like a cathedral of “La’s.” Other than the single word “remember” heard once or twice, it was all “La’s.” And somehow, if you can imagine it from this unpromising description, this changed my life forever. The album was a cast recording of A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim, and that was the first time I’d ever heard of him. He is arguably the greatest lyricist of all time, and he hooked me with “La.” Eight years earlier I had appeared in my first musical: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. I was a fifth grader, at school in East Brunswick, New Jersey (I’ve since found that many musical theater lovers made their debuts in this show during their childhoods). In our production, the part of the Narrator was replaced by a giant chorus, which is where I was stationed. At the time this was great fun, and we had a lot to sing, 40
Above: Brian Selznick photographed at Grand Central Station. Right: Stephen Sondheim backstage at the Plymouth Theater in New York City.
“Sondheim’s music spoke to my entire being. My intellect, my emotions, my curiosity, my dreams, and also, since there was still plenty of room, my soul as well.”
though I later figured out I may have been placed there to, um, hide my voice. But it didn’t matter. I fell in love with musical theater. I quickly learned there were so many things you could sing about in musical theater! Jesus was an especially popular topic at the time, and I found my way to both Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell while studying for my bar mitzvah. I learned you could sing about dictators’ wives and rollerskating trains and most especially you could sing about cats. God, I loved Cats. As the entire world recently discovered, the plot of Cats is sort of like A Chorus Line, but instead of dancers auditioning for a part in a show, it’s cats auditioning to die. I know it’s almost impossible to imagine what the world was like before the release of the movie in 2019, but in 1984 I thought the tunes were catchy, fun, and mysterious, and most of all, I loved the song “Memory.” There I was, a lonely gay teenager, listening alone in my bedroom. When Betty Buckley hit the high E-flat toward the end of the song with a majestic existential torment that exactly matched my own unnameable pain I felt understood for the first time in my life. The song forever became a key to my soul, impossible to dislodge no matter how much of a joke it might eventually become in the popular culture. So what happened when my friend played A Little Night Music for me in college? What changed? I sat through the rest of the score in a
kind of stunned reverie. While “Memory” spoke to my soul, Sondheim’s music spoke to my entire being. My intellect, my emotions, my curiosity, my dreams, and also, since there was still plenty of room, my soul as well. Now as the sweet imbecilities tumble so lavishly onto her lap. Now there are two possibilities A) I could ravish her, B) I could nap. Those are the first lyrics in the first song after the overture. Having fallen for the “La La La’s,” I was perhaps unprepared for this level of conceptual, structural, and rhyming brilliance. Reread those lyrics. In those two lines there are 12 words (and two letters), six words of which rhyme: “Imbecilities/possibilities,” “lavish(ly)/ravish(her),” “lap/nap.” It was like staring into the sun, or falling in love with a diamond. And yet, for all his technical prowess, Sondheim’s lyrics stay true to the character singing them while simultaneously resonating with us, as if each twist and turn of a character’s mind were a part of our own broken psyches, no matter how extreme: whether it’s the theatrical language that illuminates the tortured mind of Mama Rose in Gypsy, or the operatic depravity of the title character in Sweeney Todd, or the desperate joy of Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Somehow, these characters are us. For nearly six decades, Stephen Sondheim has offered generations of audiences indelible charac-
BRIAN SELZNICK: CAROLYN COLE/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES; STEPHEN SONDHEIM: FRED R. CONRAD/NEW YORK TIMES CO./GETTY IMAGES)
BY BRIAN SELZNICK
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ters and stories like these, people who, once met are never forgotten. But for this New Jersey boy, raised to fear and loathe New York City, Sondheim also offered a passport across the river. His New York, whether in West Side Story, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, or Company, is as dangerous as my parents warned me, yet it’s dangerous in a way that made me want to be a part of it. It’s a city where people deal with real problems, and real tragedies, where the trauma of a bad marriage can inflict as much damage as a street gang. It’s a city where Sondheim makes you believe that all pain would be manageable if it was as beautiful as his. Stephen Sondheim was born in New York City, though he lived for a while in Pennsylvania after his parents’ divorce. It was there, when he was around ten years old, that he met Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist of Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, and The King and I, among other landmark musicals. He became Sondheim’s mentor and pointed the way forward for him. Hammerstein, himself came from a theatrical family. His father was an impresario who wrote operettas and built theaters around Manhattan. In 1959 Sondheim moved into a townhouse on East 49th Street, and from there he has, in turn, pointed the way forward for the people he’s mentored, like Jason Robert Brown and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Birthday Presence This spring America’s greatest living composer-lyricist continues to delight with . . .
Patty LuPone in the Broadway revival of Company.
luminaries as Sir John Gielgud, Fred Astaire, and Marlene Dietrich) has been renovated by its owner Cameron Mackintosh to the tune of $18 million, and just in time for its christening as the Sondheim Theatre. “I am chuffed, as you say in British English, to a degree I wouldn’t have imagined,” Sondheim said in reaction to the news. “Or as we say in American English, it’s awesome.” Meanwhile, in June, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sunday in the Park with George opens in London’s West End with Jake Gyllenhaal reprising his role as painter Georges Seurat from the 2017 Broadway staging, a role the actor-singer has described as “one of the highlights of my professional career.” Savoy Theatre, London WC2 (June 11–September 5).
COMPANY
Fresh to Broadway after an acclaimed run in London is Company, the gender-flipping revival of Sondheim’s 1970s classic now reimagined by Tony Award winner Marianne Elliott and starring Katrina Lenk and Patti LuPone. The British director (War Horse, The Curious Incident . . .) turns the central character, the commitment-phobic Robert, into a chronically single, about-to-turn-35 woman named Bobbie, while one of the signature songs, “Getting Married Today,” is now sung by the character of a gay man. Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 West 45th Street (until September 27).
PATTY LUPONE: BRINKHOFF/MOEGENBURG; WEST SIDE STORY: © 2019 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
WALL-TO-WALL STEPHEN SONDHEIM
I like knowing this history and imagining the golden line that stretches from the first Oscar Hammerstein in the nineteenth century, through his own son, into Sondheim, and then out into the future. But none of that really matters to us when we’re alone in our bedrooms, waiting to be seen and heard and understood. What’s important is the lightning strike, the revelation, the memory. The rest we can learn. Brian Selznick is currently writing the lyrics to a musical based on his award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press).
An array of performers and collaborators pay tribute to this lyricist and composer’s genius in Wall to Wall Stephen Sondheim, a marathon eight-hour celebration of his work and life from Symphony Space, a performing arts center on the Upper West Side. “It will be an expansive and immersive exploration of Sondheim’s artistic partnerships, greatest works, lesserknown gems, influences, inspirations, and everything in between,” says Kathy Landau, executive director of Symphony Space. It’s also free, so arrive early (for his 80th, Sondheim fans camped out overnight). Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, 2537 Broadway (May 16 at 3:00pm). BACK IN LONDON
For his 80th birthday present, Sondheim got a Broadway theater, the Henry Miller on West 43rd Street, named in his honor. For his 90th, he gets London’s heralded Queen’s Theatre, making him the only living artist to have theaters in his name both in London’s West End and on Broadway. The legendary theater (it was bombed during WWII and has hosted such
Sharks and Jets in Steven Spielberg’s anticipated remake of West Side Story.
WEST SIDE STORY
In 1957, a 27-year-old Sondheim gave us the lyrics to West Side Story, thus establishing himself as one of the greatest innovators in the history of musical theater. Now comes Stephen Spielberg’s eagerly anticipated film remake, opening on December 18, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, with the cherished Jerome Robbins' choreography updated by New York City Ballet’s Justin Peck. For a more ambitious reimagining of the immortal American musical, however, don’t miss Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove’s West Side Story. Van Hove hails from the tradition of experimental theater, and Sondheim has embraced his reinterpretation, which involves mesmerizing video and lighting and edgy choreography, with elements of krumping, break dancing, and hip-hop, from the modern dance doyenne Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Six decades on, the shock value of West Side Story enthralls us again. Broadway Theatre, 1681 Broadway (until September 6). SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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Susanna Moore photographed in Honolulu, aged 18, wearing a Pucci dress.
Hawaii to Hollywood A revelatory new memoir from Susanna Moore.
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BY ROBERT BECKER
iss Aluminum (FSG), an unvarnished new memoir by Susanna Moore, confirms many intimations from her acclaimed novels—My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones, In the Cut— that hers is, and has been, an unconventional existence guided by the stars. Writing with unflinching candor, Moore, now in her 70s, tells stories both harrowing and heartening of the circumstances and serendipitous rendezvous in her teens and 20s that would shape her adult life. Bouts of abuse and neglect by her parents plagued her upbringing in Hawaii; she was severely beaten by her first husband and encountered the tawdriest of Hollywood’s narcissists. Yet she also speaks of the extraordinary gifts that arrived along the way, of people, especially older women, who helped,
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taught, or enchanted her, random characters she met and befriended, the acquaintances and family members who later would serve as a rich resource for her novels when she began writing in her 30s. Coming of age on Oahu in the 1950s, when the prevailing culture there lingered somewhere between the Garden of Eden and the postbellum South, Moore’s childhood was indelibly stamped by her mother’s mental illness as well as her sudden death, which Moore assumed for many years was from suicide. Both the place, and her family circumstances—she and her four siblings were left to their own devices by their newly remarried father, a doctor—molder from the isolation. She found solace in reading, becoming a kind of island version of Franny from the J. D. Salinger novel, with plenty of book learning but no understanding. The key to her actual escape to the East Coast at the age of 17, however, arrived through her
guileless impulse (and desperation) to follow every opportunity, good or bad, the intervention of a few powerful women who took her under their wings, and the rich men who fell in love with her and paid her rent. “I was in truth a kept woman,” she writes. People found her beauty and wayward charm irresistible. As recounted in Miss Aluminum, the first of the angels was Alyce Kaiser, a neighbor in Hawaii and the wife of the aluminum magnate and property developer Henry Kaiser, who gave Moore a taste of the world beyond Diamond Head, and found her a position as a salesgirl at Bergdorf Goodman in New York and a few early modeling jobs. Mrs. Kaiser also donated smart clothes to the cause, a costume of slim dresses and fur wraps belying young Moore’s measly $44 weekly paycheck. The wardrobe became part of her invented self, the Sue who became Susanna. The second, Connie Wald, the widow of movie producer Jerry Wald and a consummate Hollywood hostess, kept a seat for Moore at her table for a number of years after Moore met her son while bodysurfing at Topanga. At Wald’s dinners she met a who’s who of old Hollywood and figured out, through some hilarious faux pas, how to make conversation in the company of Ray Milland, Natalie Wood, Audrey Hepburn, Christopher Isherwood, and many others. (I had no idea that Jimmy Stewart wore a toupee.) Kaiser and Wald became, for a time, surrogate mothers, though Moore drops in Miss Aluminum that she loved Kaiser but was “in love” with the 50-something Wald. Another enormous influence was Joan Didion, with whom Moore lived for a time at the Franklin Avenue house in Los Angeles that she shared with husband John Gregory Dunne. Presumably—it’s never quite said—Didion’s example, that of an original thinker and disciplined workaday reporter, inspired Moore to write when her time came. She reminisces wryly about Warren Beatty, for whom she read scripts; Roman Polanski, with whom she shared a house briefly; Jack Nicholson and John Philips, with whom she had affairs; and a second marriage to the Oscar-winning production designer Dick Sylbert, writing with a dry, detached prose that lets a story speak for itself. Throughout the book, these vignettes, celebratory and devastating, are intermingled with late-life revelations about her upbringing and especially her mother. (No spoilers here.) By the end it’s quite clear she’s far more fierce, even as a young girl, than she gives herself credit for. As a second volume in a significant author’s autobiography—the first was Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawaii (2007) —the parallels between Moore’s fiction and her life prove both tantalizing and a little frustrating. The book left me hankering for more details about how she started writing the novels that still haunt the imagination. If one hasn’t read Moore’s books, Miss Aluminum also triumphs as a fascinating insider’s sketch of ’60s and ’70s New York and Hollywood—from film stars’ trailers to dinners at Elaine’s—and how a lost child of Hawaii made her way by shrewd observation, self-invention, and serendipity into a very exclusive world. Her honesty is both timely and courageous.
FROM HER OWN COLLECTION
CULTURE
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Cabinets of Curiosities Longtime veteran at the Met Christine Coulson draws out the souls of the institution's rare and wonderful objects.
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e” are the art, the evidence, the beauty that these walls are built around and that these lights proclaim important. Objects made of everything, anything: yes, paint and marble, bronze and gold, glass, silver, paper, clay, but also steel and ribbons,
mud and hair, wood, wire, and bones. We come from everywhere: tombs and closets, palaces and studios, floors and ceilings, fortresses and temples, sometimes with parts of those places still clinging to us. Because so often we were removed by someone, somewhere, when that someone couldn’t wait, or we couldn’t stay. “They” are our minders, men and women with a mothering, smothering kind of love for us. They fret over our every inch, every scratch, every wound, every questionable repair. They polish us like it’s the school play, every day. Our big moment for the world to see what beaming, glossy children we are. Every piece of us is testimony: Whose eye chose that shape, whose hand made that line, whose mallet carved that bump? Show us what happened, they beg, so we’ll know. Well, mamas, there’s been some mileage since we were made, some action, in slow drips and big splashes. Glory, war, revolution, the tilts of taste and the swags of renaissance. Some dark, dark ages, too. Empire to dirt in the course of a millennium. Slices cut into our sides to fit us into a new room. A century in a cardboard
box, woodworms drilling like some unscratchable itch. The goddamn vacuum cleaner banging into our legs. Light bulbs! . . . Survival is a funny business, too. A losing game. Literally. They love us, and we lose them all. The ones who made us, the ones who gave us, the ones who sat down and played with us, the ones who held us, or just laid eyes on us. The ones who bought, traded and sold us. Cleaned us, redeemed us, brought back the sheen on us. Loved us. Learned everything there is to know about us. Imagine how many reflections that ancient mirror has seen? Now imagine, imagine: Every one of them. Dead. Gone. But we live on. We are the proof, sticky but silent, hanging on that wall, standing on that pedestal. The proof that anyone was ever there at all.
reckonings that hits the bull’s eye like an arrow from a longbow. —Heather Hodson
attempts “to unmake, to unrecognize.” —Aranya Jain
from Metropolitan Stories by Excerpt fr Christine Coulson. Recently published by Other Press. Coulson worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 25 of its 150 years, which are being celebrated this spring by the Costume Institute with the retrospective About Time: Fashion and Duration. See page 44.
HANS HOLBEIN (1497/98-1543) THOMAS CROMWELL, 1532-33, OIL ON OAK PANEL, THE FRICK COLLECTION, NEW YORK; PHOTO: MICHAEL BODYCOMB
Books
THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT By Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt)
In an era of unmitigated drama for the British royals, the vicious intrigue and shifting alliances at the heart of Henry VIII’s court remains sui generis. Central to it all was the widely hated Thomas Cromwell, an intellectually gifted son of a blacksmith who rose to become Henry’s chief minister and most trusted agent, until he wasn’t. With Wolf Hall (2009) and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), Mantel gave us an astonishingly layered reimagining
of Cromwell as he maneuvers through the break with Rome and Henry’s violent changes of heart— literary blockbusters that brought two Man Booker Prizes, an award-winning BBC adaptation, and enormous pressure to deliver a worthy denouement to the Wolf trilogy. “The greatest challenge of my writing life” is how she describes the dazzling, unexpectedly funny The Mirror and the Light, a triumph of narrative voice and sinister, final
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger.
THE NIGHT WATCHMAN By Louise Erdrich (Harper Collins)
The National Book Award-winning author returns to themes of Native American heritage in her latest novel about the 1950s “emancipation” bill, which ended government recognition of sovereign tribes. The novel features an ensemble cast on a North Dakota reservation, centering on Thomas Wazhashk, a night
watchman at a factory based on Erdrich’s own grandfather, who fought against Native dispossession. Short prose poems of chapters weave together multiple narratives. Magical occurrences are treated nonchalantly on the reservation: Thomas regularly speaks to a ghost, spirits fly in search of missing women, and dying dogs can speak. As the story progresses, however, we come to see that the truly surreal element of this narrative is Washington, D.C., and its falsely generous legislation. Alternately dreamlike and heartbreakingly immediate, this is a haunting, visceral story about dispossession, legacy, and the symbol of a watchman standing guard against
CHILD OF LIGHT By Madison Smartt Bell (Doubleday)
As one of America’s most prominent postwar novelists, Robert Stone captured the “shadows cast by the rising American star” in works such as his Vietnam War classic Dog Soldiers, and A Flag for Sunrise, his devastating critique of U.S. power in Central America. And yet, Stone’s own story is no less enthralling than his dark-humored fiction. He was raised on the streets of New York
and Chicago by an unstable mother, fell prey to addiction, held a deeply loving but nonchalantly open marriage, and traveled the world from Antarctica to Havana. “Whatever Bob did, he did on a grand, Lear-like scale,” writes Madison Smartt Bell in his compelling biography, Child of Light. A fellow writer and close friend of Stone, Bell traces the origins and contexts of each of his subject’s eight novels, seamlessly navigating fiction, intimate narrative, historical context, literary analysis, and his own role as a character in Stone’s life. Child of Light not only provides vital insight into Stone’s work, it will also fascinate anyone interested in how personal experience can shape artistic style and intention. —Aranya Jain
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Tilda Swinton wears a Sandy Powell costume inspired by 18th-century French portraits in Sally Potter’s Orlando.
A Journey Through Time Costume designer Sandy Powell on her creations for Orlando, a sartorial vision at the heart of the Met’s Virginia Woolf moment this spring. BY CATHERINE ST GERMANS
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ho’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Certainly not the Met, if the Costume Institute’s forthcoming exhibition, About Time: Fashion and Duration, is any measure. Woolf’s concept of time, and her centuries-spanning novel Orlando, is a great influence on the show, as is the sartorial vision of the costume designer Sandy Powell, who created the clothes for the eponymous central character in Sally Potter’s masterful film adaptation. As Orlando moves through genders and travels through history, Powell’s realization of the power of dress to evoke leaps of time and place is unrivaled, Catherine St Germans writes. Travel back in time to the winter of 1992, when Sandy Powell, then an underground costume designer for art house films, set up shop for her latest project in the studio apartment of the actress Julie Christie in a converted Victorian warehouse in the East End of London. Furniture was moved to the side of the room and two cutting tables were brought in for the ambitious undertaking; Powell would be designing and making the costumes for film director Sally Potter’s dreamlike and extraordinarily beautiful masterpiece Orlan-
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do, starring Tilda Swinton and based on the 1928 novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf. Sitting at a tiny desk of Christie’s, who lived next door to Potter and happily lent her home for the project, Powell sketched the costumes, running out to the nearby markets for more fabric and then sewing into the night with her team. Anybody who could squeeze into the tight space was there, mucking in, including Michael Howells, the legendary production designer and art director who first met and worked with Powell on Orlando, while Keith Collins, the boyfriend of Powell’s close friend Derek Jarman, would drop by with pizza. The main character, Orlando, a young and bored poet who travels through the centuries from the 1500s to the 1920s and changes sex along the way, is based on Woolf’s lover, the gardener and novelist Vita Sackville-West, an English aristocrat with whom she had been having a passionate liaison. In Orlando, considered the longest love letter in literature, she created a unique and compelling feminist who could switch gender at will, and it was a role made for Swinton. Powell was 32 when she worked on Orlando, and like Swinton, was until then part of London’s underground art house film world. With Orlando she was to go on to earn her first Oscar nomination and gain the attention of Hollywood, which has to this day never left her. Powell has won three Academy Awards for costume design (The Aviator, The Young Victoria, and Shakespeare in Love) and has been nominated a further 12 times. On the telephone from LA, where she had just attended the luncheon following her latest nomination for an Academy Award for her work on Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Powell recalled working on Orlando, and emitted her usual matter-of-fact modesty. “Dressing Tilda as Orlando—I mean! What more could you want?” she said, laughing. “Dressing Tilda in anything is really easy, but as a male, and then a female going through the centuries—it’s a costume designer’s dream. Tilda just knows how to wear clothes, like Cate Blanchett. They are very similar, you can put anything on them and they will make it look great.” Now travel from London in 1992 and Powell sewing late into the night to New York in 2020 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition. One of the most famous scenes in Orlando has been cited by the curator of the show, Andrew Bolton, as his inspiration for the exhibition in the Met’s 150th anniversary year. “There’s a wonderful scene,” Bolton said recently, “in which Tilda Swinton enters the maze in an 18th-century woman’s robe à la française, and as she runs through it, her clothes change to mid-19th-century dress, and she reemerges in 1850s England. That’s where the original idea came from.” (The scene, which also features powdered wigs, skirts underpinned with wide panniers, and corsetry will surely give guests at the Met Ball a rich seam to mine.) Taking Orlando’s concept of time and the manner in which she/he moves seamlessly through the centuries, the exhibition will trace more than a century and a half of fashion, illustrating how garments of the past influence the present. Virginia Woolf will serve as the “ghost narrator”
TILDA SWINTON: PHOTO 12 / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
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SANDY POWELL: KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES; VIRGINIA WOOLF: IANDAGNALL COMPUTING/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; VITA SACKVILLE-WEST: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
of the exhibition, with extracts of her writing appearing on the walls throughout the exhibition. Accompanying the exhibition will be a new short story by Michael Cunningham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Hours, an homage to Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. Inspired by that novel and Orlando, Cunningham's story will recount a single day in the life of a woman while evoking a span of 150 years, a duration the reader understands through changes of clothes and circumstance. The pivotal maze scene in Orlando that Bolton has lighted upon for the basis of his exhibition is a master class in the brilliance of Sandy Powell as a costume designer. “Spinster!” fumes Tilda Swinton to camera. “Alone!” she cries, livid, before stamping her foot and disappearing behind a yew hedge in the maze. Swinton runs ahead of the camera, her dress billowing behind her, and in the blink of an eye Powell takes us from Georgian London to Victorian England. How? “Scale,” Powell says. “And volume. Both the periods had full skirts with underpinnings. The 18th-century dress has the wide panniers, which were great for Tilda to flounce in, she does quite a bit of flouncing in that dress, and the Victorian dress has the crinoline, so both the periods had the same volume in the skirts. For the 18th-century dress I used a lot of silk dupion, which nowadays I am a real snob about: it is like a cheap bridesmaid’s fabric! But we were on such a tight budget then and it was the color I wanted, a pale pistachio green, a bit like the color of a Ladurée macaron box. I then used a darker emerald green for the Victorian look and a Black Watch tartan in the jacket; the pastel colour turns into a much darker saturated color. I would not have gone from, say, blue to red. It had to be in the same world.” As in all of Powell’s work there is an air of stylization throughout the film. None of it is 100 percent historically accurate. “When we first see Tilda as the boy in the Elizabethan costume she is wearing those shiny Wolford tights we all wore in the early ’90s,” Powell explains. “They were not remotely right for the Elizabethan period but it works on her. It dates it a bit, but it still holds up. I like to take the key elements from each of the periods and highlight them.” It is not only at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Virginia Woolf’s exploration of time and gender is having something of a moment, with the author acting momentarily as a fashion muse. In her recent couture collection for Givenchy, Clare Waight Keller also took Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville-West and her garden at Monk’s House in East Sussex as her inspiration, while Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons turned to Orlando for both a menswear and then a womenswear collection, using them as a testing ground for the costumes she went on to create for the first operatic production of Orlando, at the Vienna State Opera last December. For Powell, Sackville-West’s androgynous look is rather more to her taste. “If I can get a bit of masculinity into a female character, I will. If I can, I put a female lead in trousers, it just gives it that edge and makes them more interesting. It immediately says something about their char-
Below: The English writer Virginia Woolf; bottom, Woolf's lover, and inspiration for her character Orlando, Vita Sackville-West.
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Sandy Powell at this year’s Academy Awards, for which she was nominated for her work on The Irishman. Her suit bears the signatures of more than 100 Hollywood actors and will be auctioned to help preserve Prospect Cottage, the former home of her friend and collaborator, the late filmmaker Derek Jarman.
“Dressing Tilda in anything is really easy, but as a male, and then a female going through the centuries— it’s a costume designer’s dream.” acter. Whether it is Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, or Emily Mortimer in Mary Poppins Returns, I have put loads of women in trousers.” I mention Rachel Weisz in The Favourite in those fabulous leather riding breeches. Very Vita. “Oh yes!” she says, laughing, “they were pleather! I had no budget and got it from a market in Brixton near my house!” The Met exhibition will conclude with a section on the future of fashion, linking the concept of duration to current debates about longevity and sustainability. Where does Powell position herself in this moment of crisis? “I realized last year I
have got a shitload of clothes in my wardrobe and so I haven’t bought any new clothes this year and for all of last year. I am going into the depths of my wardrobe and reworking and rewearing things I have not worn in ages, and I love it. I wear a lot of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Comme des Garçons going right back to the 1980s. It is timeless.” Time in fashion, as it is in Orlando, is all effect. And like gender, a costume can be changed at will. About Time: Fashion and Duration is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue (May 7–September 7) SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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Spring Snapshot A fair season indeed. BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER
Art Fairs
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ith The Armory Show and Asia Week ushering in a busy season for the New York art world earlier this month, there is plenty more on the spring calendar with must-see exhibitions at the New York Botanical Garden, at the Brooklyn Museum, and on the High Line, as well as the inaugural edition of Paris Photo New York in April. In May, Frieze pops up on Randall’s Island, TEFAF New York Spring returns to the Park Avenue Armory, and the citywide shelter fest NYC×Design takes over the five boroughs. Karina Skvirsky’s Ingapirca: Piedra #5 (2019), an archival inkjet print with collage, will be presented by the Madrid-based gallery Ponce + Robles.
Frieze New York May 7–10 Randall’s Island Park
The ninth edition of Frieze New York brings together more than 200 galleries offering blue-chip works as well as those by emerging artists. This year will also see a return of “Diálogos,” a fair sector dedicated to the work of Latin American, Latino, and LatinX artists and curated by Rodrigo Moura, Patrick Charpenel, and Susanna V. Temkin of the Museo del Barrio. frieze.com Paris Photo New York For its New York debut Paris Photo, the premier international fair dedicated to fine art photography, has teamed up with the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) to welcome more than 100 galleries to Pier 94, overlooking the Hudson River. When asked “Why New York?” and “Why now?” Paris Photo director Florence Bourgeois explains, “New York is full of movement right now, and this is an important time for photography.” She references MoMA’s expansion and its rehanging of notable exhibitions; the reopening of ICP; and the emergence of such critical new voices as Antwaun Sargent, who is guest-curating the fair’s emerging artist section. The fair runs April 2–5. parisphoto.com In concert with Paris Photo New York, the major auction houses—Phillips, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s—will be holding their spring photography sales. Among the notable lots hitting the block is a handsomely scaled gelatin silver print of Ansel Adams’ Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine California (1944), tendered by Phillips on April 2 and tagged at $300,000 to $500,000. Christie’s is offering a 1952 gelatin silver print of Emerging Man, Harlem, New York (from Invisible Man) by Gordon Parks in its March 31 sale. The latter image, described by Darius Himes, international head of photographs for the house, as “iconic and classic,” carries an estimate of $10,000 to $15,000. phillips.com, christies.com 46
Future Fair May 7–9 Canoe Studios
Top: Mar de Ternura/Sea of Tenderness (1945), a silver print by Lola Alvarez Bravo, is being tendered by gallerists Charles Isaacs and Grégory Leroy at the inaugural edition of Paris Photo New York. Bottom: A 1952 gelatin silver print by Gordon Parks, Emerging Man, Harlem, New York (from Invisible Man), will be offered by Christie’s on March 31. It is tagged at $10,000 to $15,000.
The soon-to-be-launched Future Fair aims to shake up the art fair business model by having smaller, independent galleries c ollaborate on the event presentation and participate on both sides of the ledger— sharing expenses and splitting receipts, rather than merely renting booths, which is the norm. Some 36 international galleries will set up shop in the 31,000-squarefoot Canoe Studios in Chelsea. futurefairs.com 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair May 8–10 The Caldwell Factory
For its sixth New York edition, the 1-54 Contem-
porary African Art Fair will welcome 26 galleries to the Caldwell Factory, former site of Annie Leibovitz’s studio on West 26th Street. Curated by Dexter Wimberly and Larry Ossei-Mensah, the fair will present the work of 78 artists from Africa and its diaspora. 1-54.com TEFAF New York Spring May 8–11 Park Avenue Armory
The fourth run of TEFAF New York Spring—with its emphasis on modern and contemporary art—will host a roster of 91 international galleries, 11 of which are participating in the fair for the first time. Among them is Galleria Continua, which is presenting Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, a solo show of work by the late Chinese contemporary artist Chen Zhen. tefaf.com NYC×Design May 12–20
Held in concert with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center, the eighth edition of the citywide design festival will offer multi-platform programming that brings together architects, designers, manufacturers, and cultural institutions, and a suite of “activations” in public spaces throughout the five boroughs. nycxdesign.com
MAR DE TERNURA/SEA OF TENDERNESS: © CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY; EMERGING MAN, HARLEM, NEW YORK: © GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION; FRIEZE: KARINA SKVIRSKY AND PONCE + ROBLES, MADRID.
CULTURE
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F The Bard Hits the Block To buy, or not to buy, that is the question.
or fans of the Bard seeking the ultimate library holding, a rare 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies is going under the gavel at Christie’s in New York on April 24. Tagged at $4 million to $6 million, this “First Folio” was published in London by the playwright’s close friends and fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who began collaborating on a definitive edition of his work shortly after his death in 1616. The First Folio contains 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, 18 of which would have otherwise been lost—among them Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Julius Caesar. “This volume is especially exciting as it is one of only six complete copies in private hands,” says Margaret Ford, international head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s. “Knowing that this particular copy passed through the hands of the esteemed Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone, who himself affirmed its completeness two centuries ago, makes it all the more important.” —Angela M.H. Schuster
SHAKESPEARE: CHRISTIE’S; YAYOI KUSAMA: NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN AND THE ARTIS; HIGH LINE ART
Exhibitions
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. ART IN FULL BLOOM
“Given that nature is not merely a source of inspiration for Yayoi Kusama, but also integral to processing the effects of her artistic language, it’s all the more relevant to present her work in a garden setting,” says Mika Yoshitake, New York Botanical
Garden’s guest curator of Kusama: Cosmic Nature. The immersive exhibition of works by the celebrated Japanese contemporary artist opens on May 9 and will be installed in and around the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, across the garden’s 250
acres, and in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Building. “Collectively,” says Yoshitake, “the works trace the 91-year-old Kusama’s lifelong fascination with the natural world that began during her childhood, which she spent playing in the greenhouses and fields of her family’s plant nursery in Nakatsutaya.” On view are the artist’s signature mirrored environments, early archival pieces that have never before been exhibited, and a quartet of new works executed earlier this year. Among the latter is Flower Obsession, an interactive installation in which visitors will blanket the interior of a greenhouse in coral flower stickers. Kusama: Cosmic Nature runs through November 1. nybg.org STUDIO 54: NIGHT MAGIC
“Incredible creativity proliferated within the walls of Studio 54,” says Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion
and material culture at Brooklyn Museum, which is celebrating the storied club in a memorabilia-rich exhibition at the museum, Studio 54: Night Magic. “Despite a life span of less than three years,” he adds,” it remains a lasting influence on film and fashion.” Evidence of this is as recent as Tom Ford’s fashion show in February, where the disco-inspired clothes and setting included mirrored floors and a massive disco ball. From the moment it opened its doors in April 1977, Studio 54 was in a nightlife league of its own, with its edgy décor, and an even edgier patronage of artists, fashion designers, musicians, and celebrities who danced till dawn on the stage of a onetime Manhattan opera house. Today, perhaps more than ever, the subject of liberation remains urgent, explains Yokobosky. “Night Magic considers how
the nightclub became a model for creative exploration, social revolution, gender fluidity, and sexual freedom.” Studio 54: Night Magic, which is sure to ensure that Studio 54’s influence lingers a little longer, is on view March 13 to July 5. brooklynmuseum.org MUSIC ON THE MIND
With a theme inspired by Argentine writer César Aira’s short story of the same name, The Musical Brain is the latest group exhibition on the High Line and will explore all the ways in which music helps us to better understand
and interpret the world. Nearly a dozen works by eight artists, including Michoacánborn, Brooklyn-based Raúl de Nieves, will be placed throughout the 7.5-acre elevated park. “In creating their installations and soundscapes, the artists will be looking at music through many different lenses— historical, political, performative, and playful,” says High Line chief art curator Cecilia Alemani, who was recently named curator of next year’s Venice Biennale. The Musical Brain runs April 23 to March 31, 2021. thehighline.org
An installation by Raúl de Nieves on the High Line. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY THE STORIED SOCIET Y HAS SERVED AS BASE CAMP FOR A TRIBE OF NOMADS. BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER
Explorers Club members Sateesh Venkatesh, Kenneth Kamler, Fabien Cousteau, Garrett Bowden, and Grace Cordsen relax beneath a portrait of Danish polar great Peter Freuchen by Robert Brackman. 48
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ark Siddall, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, is having a cocktail at the Explorers Club and holding forth about leeches. “The interesting thing about terrestrial leeches,” explains the parasite specialist, who is days away from being back in the field in Madagascar, trolling the last remaining stands of old-growth forest, “is that we can extract the DNA of their last four hosts— which makes them a great information source for assessing elusive forest-animal populations.” It’s a crisp winter evening on the Upper East Side, and it is clear that the rakish crew in the oak-paneled members lounge is equally comfortable in the Amazon jungle or at the North Pole. And not so unlike Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg, who decamped for his Around the World in Eighty Days journey direct from his club in London, Siddall is actually en route to the airport, his Patagonia pack parked in a corner, stuffed to capacity for the upcoming 17-day mission. On hand for his send-off are the club’s “Friday Frolic” regulars, an ad hoc tribe of adventurers, adrenaline junkies, and the intellectually insatiable who report here weekly to exchange tales of derring-do, commiserate about expedition mishaps, and drum up interest in projects still in the planning stages.
Left: members gather in the Explorers Club Bar. Clockwise from top: portrait of Teddy Roosevelt by James W. Quistgaard above the mantel in the boardroom. Albert Operti’s canvas The Rescue of Greely hangs above the fireplace in the library, its ceiling from a 15th-century Italian monastery. Eye to eye with a walrus. 50
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From left: A polar bear graces the secondfloor landing along with a bell from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bear, which rescued Adolphus Greely and members of his ill-fated 1884 Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. The Explorers Club’s Research Collections contain thousands of volumes and images chronicling the adventures of its members, including Theodore Roosevelt.
“Where else can you find friends who know the risk of losing toes to frostbite,” muses Ken Kamler, a mountaineer, hand surgeon, and expedition medic who gained the moniker “Doctor on Everest” after forfeiting his own May 1996 summit bid to care for climbers caught in a whiteout on the world’s highest peak. The disaster spotlighted the risk incurred by the burgeoning business of “commercial climbing,” a euphemism for escorting inexperienced, deep-pocketed clients into Everest’s “death zone” for a handsomely paid-for peak experience. The 1996 fiasco was the subject of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book, Into Thin Air, in which Kamler selflessly pivoted from his own priorities to those of others as he tended to the injured and dying, only personally acquainted with a few of the ten people he saved that fateful day. While risk is inherent to exploration, it is by no means the principal driver for those who continue to push the proverbial dragons off the map. Unflagging curiosity is more like it. “Sure, there is a thrill to blasting off into space and seeing the Earth from such a rarefied vantage point,” says renowned game developer and second-generation astronaut Richard Garriott de Cayeux. “But the question remains: What did you discover once you got there?” The father of two traveled to the International Space Station in October 2008 (one of only seven private citizens ever to do so), with his 12day Soyuz mission launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. While there, he carried out a suite of scientific experiments and educational programs with Explorers Club Flag Nº 189 in tow. Next up for “Lord British” (as he’s known in his Ultima game series) is a trip to Nicaragua, where he’s planning to rappel deep into the caldera of an active volcano, likely returning with new data on extremophile life in the process. Garriott de Cayeux’s plans were, of course, shared and fine-tuned at the members bar on the club’s first floor. “What began some years back as a casual get-together among a few like-minded friends now attracts more than 50 on any given evening,” says Carl Schuster, a principal player behind the weekly gathering when he’s not enjoying life as a bush pilot, sailor, and diver determined to reconcile the cartographic history of Hudson Bay with its geophysical evolution in the wake of the last glaciation. “More important, our Friday Frolics have become an incubator for all manner of expeditions,” he says smugly, citing a few such plans that were hatched here, including a multiyear project to map Scythian burial mounds in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, an endeavor being carried out by two of the club’s younger members, Swiss archaeologist Gino Caspari and documentary filmmaker Trevor Wallace. “For me it is all about the future of exploration,” explains marine biologist and polymath David Gruber. “Having the ability to not only study marine life, but to actually engage with it on an interspecies level.” Gruber’s recent projects have included the development of “shark vision” camera lenses and robots with “fingers” so soft that they can stroke a jellyfish without causing harm. At the moment, he is also obsessed with the potential of harnessing advanced AI to decipher the language of sperm whales. (He is, of course, expecting to hear at least a few complaints from them about the current state of our oceans.) Tonight Gruber has found a kindred spirit in the house: Fabien Cousteau, grandson of famed aquanaut Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who is busy raising capital for a state-of–the-art underwater research station he’s building off the coast of Curaçao. While the particulars of its design remain under wraps until later this year, the facility will far surpass the capabilities of the 400-square-foot research station Aquarius, built in 1986 for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and anchored on a coral reef several miles off Key Largo. It is here that Cousteau spent 31 days in the summer of 2014, besting his grandfather’s previous record in the process. (Intergenerational one-upmanship is kind of a thing here at the club.) Since its founding in 1904, the Explorers Club has gained a reputation as a social club for the intrepid and the (somewhat) antisocial. These highly focused and motivated men and women are, in many ways, loners. They’re prone to charting their own course— be it crossing an ocean or an ice cap, or (Continued on page 56) SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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Ornithologist James P. Chapin displays Explorers Club Flag Nº 4 on a 1925 expedition to the Ruwenzori Mountains. 54
MCNY/GOTTSCHO-SCHLEISNER / CONTRIBUTOR
Orange Ecab imi, omnihicae plis enimo qui te mos doloreh enemquiae in pa ni quas siti blanihi liquid mos et posae atur consenit ra seque dolupid quas am consequam et as sit.
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Finding Home at the Ends of the Earth SEBASTIAN JUNGER ON THE IMPORTANCE OF FINDING YOUR TRIBE
THE SWASHBUCKLERS’ SOCIAL REGISTER LEAKEYS: Louis & Mary, Richard & Meave, Louise
MCNY/GOTTSCHO-SCHLEISNER / CONTRIBUTOR
COUSTEAUS: Jacques-Yves, Jean-Michel, Fabien & Celine; Philippe, Philippe-Pierre, Alexandra PICCARDS: August, Jacques, Bertrand HILLARYS: Sir Edmund, Peter NORGAY: Tenzing, Jamling GARRIOTT: Owen, Richard
Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people you’re willing to both defend and feed. A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t really a society—in any tribal sense of the word. Lacking common enemies, these loose associations are far more likely to just fall apart. Belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs. That sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human. If there are phrases that characterize the life of our early ancestors, “community of sufferers” and “brotherhood of pain” surely must come close. The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it has largely eliminated many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. We find ourselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone. The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. A person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society—but a trade it is. Self-determination theory holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss. What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question we can ask ourselves, and most of us are never actually required to answer it. This seems both a blessing and a loss. Life now is far less traumatic than it was even a century ago, but our forebears, in facing that question for tens of millennia, have used it in important ways to define themselves as human. Adapted excerpt from Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger, reprinted by Twelve (May, 2020). SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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FELIX KUNZE, CHRISTOPH BAUMER.
OUT IN THE FIELD: Clockwise from top left: Victor Vescovo with the DSV Limiting Factor during his recent Five Deeps Expedition, on which he became the fourth person to visit deepest place on Earth. Christoph Baumer and his camel caravan traverse the Taklamakan Desert with Flag Nº 60 in tow. Adventure photographer Felix Kunze on assignment in Mongolia. Underwater photographer Amos Nachoum catches a closeup of a great white. James Cameron and Don Walsh with Flag Nº 161 after the film director reached the bottom of Challenger Deep in March 2012. (Walsh was the first to reach the Deep in 1960.) Egyptologists Colleen and John Darnell record hieroglyphs in the El Kab region of Upper Egypt.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: VICTOR VESCOVO, TAMARA STUBBS; CARAVAN IMAGE, CHRISTOPH BAUMER; FELIX KUNZE, RYAN MIKAIL; AMOS NACHOUM, JEB CORLISS; JAMES CAMERON AND DON WALSH, MARK THIESSEN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY; COLLEEN AND JOHN DARNELL, FELIX KUNZE
summiting Everest unsupported and without oxygen. And yet they manage to find common ground within this community of restless iconoclasts. In the process of doing so, club members have notched a long list of notable firsts—first to the North and South Poles; the first to the top of Everest and to the bottom of Challenger Deep, some seven miles down in the Mariana Trench; and the first to set foot on the Moon. Among the more recent firsts is the first round-the-world flight in a solar-powered airplane, undertaken by Swiss visionaries Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, and the detection of gravitational waves, set off by the collision of two black holes. The latter discovery, made by Nobel laureate Rai Weiss and his team, has opened a window on to the origin of such heavy elements in our universe as gold and platinum, and demonstrated for the fist time that black holes tend to cozy up in pairs. Members are also the prime instigators of several important commercial spaceflight ventures, including Blue Origin, a pet project of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In 2013, Bezos invited a few of his fellow club members on an ocean voyage to find and retrieve remains of the Saturn V’s first-stage F1 engines, which had powered Apollo 11 and 12. Jettisoned once their fuel was spent, the F1s landed in more than 13,000 feet of water off the Florida coast. Bezos carried Explorers Club Flag Nº 132 on that mission. On a previous search for the engines in 2011, Bezos and expedition buddy David Concannon took along a rare unnumbered flag that Robert D. Ballard had with him when he discovered the RMS Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985. (There are 202 Explorers Club flags, each with its own storied, and ongoing, expedition history.) In the 116 years since its founding, the society of explorers has made camp at six Manhattan addresses before it found a permanent home in 1965: a neo-Jacobean townhouse on East 70th Street named for broadcast journalist Lowell Thomas, who ponied up a significant portion of its purchase price. In his day, Thomas was best known for shining a spotlight on the exploits of T.E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia,” filming him at breakneck pace across the Sinai Desert. Commissioned in 1910 as a family home for Singer Sewing Machine magnate and art collector Stephen C. Clark, the five-story townhouse exudes an Old-World grandeur, appointed with stained glass windows and stone statues and columns plucked from medieval monasteries throughout the Low Countries and France. Among the latter is a formidable statue of Joan of Arc on horseback, which graces a massive mantel in the second-floor lecture hall. Many of the club’s members find it ironic that St. Joan had presided over decades’ worth of club meetings before women were admitted in 1981. That first class of women included the late primatologist Dian Fossey, oceanographer Sylvia “Her Deepness” Earle, and astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, who now serves as the club’s honorary chairman. The Lowell Thomas building houses more than 20,000 volumes chronicling major triumphs in all areas of exploration and a vast collection of artifacts: a sledge taken to the North Pole by Robert Peary and Matthew Henson in 1909; a miniature Explorers Club flag that accompanied Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on Apollo 11; and a pair of ice axes used by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their historic first summiting of Everest in May of 1953. Among the other notable curiosities are a stuffed cheetah from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1909 Smithsonian expedition; a globe upon which Thor Heyerdahl plotted the route for his 1947 voyage aboard Kon-Tiki; and the cartilage of a whale’s penis, its size serving to keep a certain amount of club members’ braggadocio in check. Lining the walls of the club’s central staircase are William R. Leigh’s plein air studies for the African dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. But not all elements in the club have such heady provenance, explains Schuster, noting that the bar itself has been a work in progress that began more than three decades ago, when Captain John Flint, a veteran of the Military Sealift Command Atlantic, spied its carved oak mass being loaded into a dumpster during the gutting of an Irish pub in Greenwich Village. He negotiated for its liberation on the spot and had it delivered to the club the same day. Over the course of a weekAVENUE MAGAZINE | SPRING 2020
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Explorers Club end, it was installed in what had previously been a service kitchen just off the members’ lounge. Since then, the bar has taken on a timeless quality with the addition of paneling on the walls and glass display cases filled with scientific instruments. Most recently, what had been a warren of offices beyond the bar area has been converted into the Apollo Room, with its oak paneling (a perfect match for that of the bar) acquired from the Horace Mann School when sections of it were being removed to make way for an impressive new science center. The Apollo Room project was spearheaded by the club’s current president, Richard Wiese, the far-wandering host of the Emmy Award-winning program Born to Explore. A rather intimate space with a ceiling studded with stars, the Apollo Room will serve as a backdrop for still more expedition planning and related programming. (The president’s latest project has been the negotiating of a lucrative—albeit controversial—sponsorship deal for the club with the Discovery Channel, the details of which will not be finalized until this summer.) On any given night during the academic year, members and invited guests trade resources and stories over exotic cocktails and such bar food as dried, seasoned crickets. Club membership rolls stand at 3,500 worldwide, with 600 members based in the New York area, and the rest belonging to some 33 chapters, including the most recent addition, an outpost in Bhutan. Over the past decade, the club has seen a demographic shift downward in terms of the age of its members, with a number of young scientists and adventurers joining the fold—some of whom experienced the club for the first time as a Friday Frolic guest of a fellow researcher. “Initially, our members were laser-focused on filling in the blank spaces on the map,” says past president Ted Janulis. “And while that remains a core mission, these days many of them are engaged in projects aimed at studying and preserving those very spaces—from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the Amazon to the Everest massif—many of which are now under threat as humanity’s footprint continues to expand across the globe.” A case in point is Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, some 200 miles southwest of Guam. Known as the deepest place on Earth, the geographical feature was first identified by the crew of the RMS Challenger in 1875, yet it would be more than a century before we had the technology to visit it first hand. On January 23, 1960, Navy lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard did just that: submerging 35,814 feet in the Trieste, a bathyscaphe designed by Piccard and his physicist father, Auguste Piccard. After a five-hour descent, Walsh and Piccard had clocked just 20 minutes on the seafloor when they noticed tiny cracks beginning to develop in the portholes. The disturbing observation prompted a return to the surface, which they made without incident in three hours and 15 minutes. It would be more than a half-century before explorers returned to the Deep, despite a number of efforts by other expeditions. In March 2012, Explorers Club fellow and film director James Cameron of Titanic and Avatar fame became the third person to reach the Deep, piloting his Kawasaki green single-person submersible Deepsea Challenger to a depth of 35,756 feet. Cameron, who codesigned the craft, had planned to spend five or six hours on the bottom but wound up spending just three and a half—the dive cut short by a series of technical glitches, including the loss of three of the vehicle’s 12 control thrusters. “Unfortunately,” he laments, “the failed thrusters were all on one side, making the sub difficult to maneuver.” Nine months ago, Victor Vescovo (with encouragement and advice from fellow club member Don Walsh) bested Cameron’s record dive by successfully reaching the Deep three times during a week’s venture. He did so in his DSV Limiting Factor, a game-changing collaboration between Vescovo and Triton submarines; collectively, 58
Each March more than 1,200 members gather in New York for the Explorers Club Annual Dinner. Among the attendees (from left, top to bottom) Jeff Bezos, Explorers Club president Richard Wiese, Edie Widder, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Trevor Wallace and Gino Caspari, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Justin Fornal, “Her Deepness” Sylvia Earle, David Gruber, exotic hors d’oeuvres chef Gene Rurka, Bertrand Piccard, and Mike Massimino.
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The 2019 Explorers Club Annual Dinner celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Apollo astronauts on hand for the occasion included, from left: Charles Duke (Apollo 16), Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), Walter Cunningham (Apollo 7), Al Worden (Apollo 15), Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9), Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17), Michael Collins (Apollo 11), and Fred Haise (Apollo 13).
COTLOW: THE EXPLORERS CLUB; SHACKLETON AND PEARY: THE EXPLORERS CLUB; HILLARY AND NORGAY: THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.
Below, left to right: Lewis Cotlow, R.C. Currie, and Inuit guide Ningju with Flag Nº 116 on Ellesmere Island in 1963; “Farthest North and Farthest South,” Commander Robert E. Peary and Sir Ernest Shackleton at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner in 1912; Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary enjoy a cup of tea on Everest in May 1953.
Tales from the
Explorers Club these dives now evince the robust two-person craft’s capacity as a formidable research platform. But Vescovo also notes that technology cuts both ways: “It is clear we are having an impact on even the most inaccessible places on Earth,” he says, referring to bits of human-generated trash that he found while collecting samples from the ocean floor. Elsewhere on the globe, club members are engaged in a range of projects aimed at mitigating human and wildlife conflict—from dealing with elephant populations in Burma and gorilla troops in Uganda, to unraveling several million years’ worth of the Earth’s climate history preserved in ice cores, the latter being extracted from polar regions first reached by fellow members a century ago. They are also pioneering more efficient methods for mapping places still unseen by human eyes: from the vast ocean depths to the topography of distant objects on the outer reaches of our solar system. Meanwhile, several members are developing technologies that will one day pave the way for a future on Mars. On March 21, more than 1,200 members will gather in New York for the 116th Explorers Club Annual Dinner (ECAD), where chimpanzee whisperer Jane Goodall, a member since 1993, is giving the keynote address. Vescovo, in turn, will be receiving The Explorers Club Medal, the organization’s highest honor. Like those being honored on the dais, the exotic hors d’oeuvres are legendary for pushing boundaries and have included roast python and tarantula tempura. Last year, the club marked the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing by bringing eight of the surviving Apollo astronauts to the dinner, including Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins of Apollo 11, a rare reunion memorialized in a stunning image taken by this article’s photographer, Felix Kunze. Recounting the thrilling launch of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, Aldrin told the assembled fellow explorers, “Our Saturn V rocket rose with the force of 100,000 locomotives, burning 5 million pounds of fuel in the first 150 seconds, getting a full five inches to the gallon.” Yet liftoff was relatively easy. “The most dangerous part of our Moon landing, the descent to the lunar surface,” he said, “was accomplished amid onboard computer failures, faltering telemetry, a field of boulders, and only seconds of remaining fuel—the latter of which prompted flight director Gene Kranz to quip at the time, “‘You better remind them there ain’t no damn gas stations on the Moon.’” In the half-century since that historic Moon mission, Aldrin has very publicly set his sights on the future, wearing a T-shirt of his own design bearing the slogan “Get Your Ass to Mars.” Now 90, Aldrin has profound insights into why explorers do what they do. Shortly after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere on February 1, 2003, The Explorers Journal reached out to the second man on the Moon for comment. He didn’t even have to think about it: “Those who risk their lives to accomplish great ends, who have a vision of something larger than themselves, lift all of our lives to a higher level. All too often we forget that there can be no meaningful success without the opportunity to fail.” Accepting one last drink at the bar before his departure for Madagascar, Mark Siddall is pondering risk (and failure) in view of his upcoming mission. Designed especially for his bon voyage party by club bartender Sixto Acosta, the pisco-based drink being poured is called a “Vibrator.” Its key ingredient is Acmella oleracea, a Madagascan plant whose distilled buds create a numbing, buzzing sensation on the lips. Mixed incorrectly, the drink could be as toxic as half the invertebrates Siddall stands to encounter in his coming trek. But it is assumed the evening’s mixologist knows what he’s doing, the Friday Night Frolickers accepting that there’s no journey without a modicum of risk. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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William Medcalf competes for the Goodwood Trophy in a 1936 Bentley “Pacey Hassan Special” during the 2019 Goodwood Revival.
GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;
LIFE IN THE FAST LANE
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GUTTER CREDITS TKTKTKTKTKTKTKTK;
AVENUE’S INTERNATIONAL AUTOMOTIVE CALENDAR STRETCHES FROM THIS MONTH’S NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL AUTO SHOW TO EVERY TIME ZONE AND MONTH OF THE YEAR BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER
Photograph by Jayson Fong
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s auto-racing legend Mario Andretti once said, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” For those with an appetite for speed and the determination to find the perfect marriage of man and machine, the offerings can seem virtually limitless, not to mention demanding a sizable share of your wallet. Yet, contends Michael Caimano, a specialist in collector motorcars at Bonhams, the reward of finding the right ride far outweighs the expense. “Take your favorite painting, think of the joy that it brings you as you sit and admire it. Now imagine transporting yourself inside that painting and actually experiencing it with all of your senses—sound, smell, touch. . . For me, there is nothing that evokes that kind of emotion like a beautiful car.” Caimano has presided over the sale of a number of classics commanding top dollar at auction in recent years, including a fire-engine red 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO with a winning past that notched a record $38.1 million on the block during Monterey Car Week in 2014. Caimano’s personal dream machine: a Lamborghini Miura SV from 1971-72. “I find this to be the ultimate crossroad of style and engineering.” Whether you are in the market for a mint-condition Ferrari from the 60s; looking for a limited-edition Lotus; hoping to stage your own Bond-style chase scene in the latest Land Rover Defender; or simply wanting to relish the thrill of witnessing Lewis Hamilton and Team Mercedes attempt a repeat victory on the adrenaline-charged Formula 1 circuit, we’ve got you covered. To help you navigate the road ahead, Avenue has put together a where-to-see-it and where-to-buy-it guide to this year’s best automotive events: races, auctions, and a host of concours d’élégances on both sides of the Pond. These include the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como and America’s oldest, the Concours d’Elegance in Pebble Beach. (Ladies and) Gentlemen—Start your engines. . . . 68
“RACING IS A GREAT MANIA TO WHICH ONE MUST SACRIFICE EVERYTHING, WITHOUT RETICENCE, WITHOUT HESITATION.”
—ENZO FERRARI
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SA LO N P R I V É
Ferrari 250GT SWBs aplenty are lined up on the lawn of Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill, during the 2019 Salon Privé Concours d’Élégance, which celebrated 60 years of the make and model. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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AMELIA ISLAND CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE March 5-8, 2020, Amelia Island, Florida
The 25-year-old Amelia Island Concours
d’Elegance brings together more than 300 classic cars from vaunted collections around the globe. Staged at the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island and the Golf Club of Amelia Island at Summer Beach, the event bestows some of the most coveted “Best in Show” awards in the classic car arena— last year’s winners being a 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahn-Kurier and a 1957 Ferrari 335 S. RM Sotheby’s will be holding one of its signature auctions during the four-day event.
ameliaconcours.org
GOODWOOD MEMBERS’ MEETING March 28-29, 2020, Goodwood Estate, West Sussex, UK
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he first out of the gate in the annual trifecta of top-drawer automotive events takes place at the 12,000-acre Goodwood Estate, seat of the Dukes of Richmond since 1697. The Members’ Meeting is all about historic racing—particularly cars designed during the dawn of the sport. Bonhams is holding an auction on March 29. goodwood.com GRAND PRIX DE MONACO HISTORIQUE May 8-10, 2020 , Monte-Carlo, Monaco
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nlike its better-known sibling the annual Grand Prix de Monaco this motorsport spectacular, organized by the Automobile Club of Monaco takes place every two years. For this 12th edition, the event will feature seven races for cars representing seven eras in auto racing history, each contest named in honor of a noted driver of the day such as Jackie Stewart, whose namesake race is for Formula 1 cars made between 1966 and 1972. acm.mc
GRAND PRIX DE MONACO May 21-24, 2020, Monte Carlo, Monaco
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ew events on the Formula 1 calendar top the glamour and challenge of the Grand Prix de Monaco, with its notorious hairpin turn and a circuit so narrow that there are few opportunities for drivers to overtake one another as they race through the streets of Monte Carlo. It is the first race of the “Triple Crown of Motorsport,” followed in quick succession by the Indy 500 and 24 Hours of Le Mans. monaco-grand-prix.com CONCORSO D’ELEGANZA VILLA D’ESTE May 22-24, 2020, Grand Hotel Villa d’Este, Cernobbio, Italy here are few venues offering as stunning a backdrop for top-of-the-line race cars than the Grand Hotel Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como. The event features some 50 classics built between the 1920s and 1980s, each judged on its merits— excellence of its design, originality, and condition— by legendary car designer Lorenzo Ramaciotti and his panel of experts. concorsodeleganzavilladeste.com
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Bruce McLaren waves to the crowds from his Ford GT40 after winning 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. That race is the subject of the 2019 Oscarnominated film Ford v Ferrari.
24 HOURS OF LE MANS
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“LIFE IS MEASURED IN ACHIEVEMENT, NOT IN YEARS ALONE.” —BRUCE MCLAREN SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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INDIANAPOLIS 500 May 24, 2020, Indianapolis Motor Speedway Indianapolis, IN
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ailed as the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” the Indy 500 is the second Formula 1 race in the so-called Triple Crown of Motorsport and the only one in North America. With 33 drivers slated for its 104th running, the race has been the most eagerly anticipated event of an action-packed Memorial Day Weekend program at the speedway since it was first held in 1911. It was here that racing legends such as Mario Andretti, “Rocket Rick” Mears, and Al Unser drove to greatness—finding fame, fortune, and a place in automotive history.
indianapolismotorspeedway.com/events/indy500
24 HOURS OF LE MANS June 13-14, 2020, Circuit de la Sarthe, Le Mans, France
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his year marks the 88th running of this oldest of automotive endurance races, the third in the Triple Crown of Motorsport. Unlike the Indy 500 and the Grand Prix de Monaco, both of which are fixed distance races, the winner of this contest is the one who covers the greatest distance over a 24-hour period. And chances are that driver will be behind the wheel of a Porsche. lemans.org LE MANS CLASSIC July 2-5, 2020, Circuit de la Sarthe, Le Mans, France
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or fans of 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Le Mans Classic, held every two years, offers a trip down memory lane, as it is only open to models that have competed in the endurance race from its inaugural run in 1923 through 1981. www.lemansclassic.com GOODWOOD FESTIVAL OF SPEED July 9-12, 2020, Goodwood Estate, West Sussex, UK
AUTO ROYALE July 17-19, 2020, Althorp, Northamptonshire, UK
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eld under the patronage of Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer and brother of the late Princess Diana, the inaugural edition of Auto Royal will bring together 150 of the finest classic cars in Europe designed and built between the 1920s and 1980s. Touted as a blend between a classic concours and the ultimate British garden party, the new entrant on the classic car circuit is held on the manicured lawns of the Althorp Estate, the seat of the Spencer family for more than five centuries. autoroyale.org
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aunched in 1993 by Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond and a self-confessed “petrol head,” the Festival of Speed—the second of three annual automotive events held on his family’s West Sussex estate—is all about the latest in engineering, with highly anticipated hypercar launches and big reveals in automotive innovation. Yet the event also pays tribute to legendary marques of the past— with no shortage of Aston Martins, Bentleys, and Porsches on hand. Bonhams will also be holding an auction on July 10. goodwood.com
From top: a 1937 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Touring Berlinetta owned by David Sydorick wins best in show at the 2019 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este. Trophies await their winners at the Salon Privé’s Concours d’Élégance.
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THE CHANGING FACE OF THE NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL AUTO SHOW BY LAURA BURSTEIN
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ince 1900, New Yorkers have flocked to North America’s oldest automotive exhibition to peruse some of the world’s most iconic cars. It was here that the Duesenberg Model J—dubbed by some as the greatest car of the 1920s—made its first appearance, and where Mercedes-Benz debuted the archetypal 300 SL Gullwing, first built in 1954 at the behest of New York’s famed car importer Max Hoffman. Today, the New York International Auto Show (NYIAS) is undergoing something of a sea change as a number of luxury automakers are forgoing the event while other are coming aboard for the first time, seeing an opening in their lane. Last year, BMW, announced it would no longer be exhibiting here, and German rivals Audi and Mercedes-Benz have since followed suit. Auto shows can be astronomically expensive and some luxury companies are opting to redirect their marketing budgets toward smaller events where they feel they can more directly engage their customers. That gap in the roster, however, creates more opportunities for challenger brands such as Lincoln, which has made the NYIAS ground zero for several new concept and production cars, including the resurrection of the Continental flagship sedan and the Navigator SUV. The company is in the midst of a massive product offensive, with a beautifully redesigned lineup and a recent announcement that it would partner with startup Rivian to build a new electric utility vehicle. “As Lincoln’s brand transformation continues, New York is a very special place for us as one of the top luxury markets in the country,” says Joy Falotico, president of Lincoln Motor Company. This year, Lincoln will show the new Corsair Grand Touring, a plug-in hybrid version of its compact SUV. Other luxury carmakers that will stand strong in New York this year include Jaguar, which will show its gorgeous new F-Type sports car, and Land Rover, which will feature the recently revived Defender, also costarring in the forthcoming James Bond film No Time to Die. As the automotive industry inches toward electrification and alternative fuels, new companies are using the New York International Auto Show as a platform to gain attention. Lucid Motors, a Silicon Valley-based startup, will debut the production version of its all-electric luxury sedan at this year’s show, more than two years after the company first trotted out a prototype of its would-be Tesla competitor. “This market is key to Lucid, as New York is one of the biggest US markets for EVs, and consumers in New York are very interested in this technology,” says a spokesperson for Lucid. Hyperion Motors, a California-based hydrogen technology company, recently made a cryptic announcement that it will debut a “high performance” fuel cell vehicle at the NYIAS, which some are guessing could look like a sleek supercar. The NYIAS also retains its philanthropic element and will again be host this year to the Gala Preview night on the eve of the show’s public opening, with proceeds benefitting the East Side House Settlement. The New York International Auto Show takes place April 10–19 at Jacob Javits Convention Center. autoshowny.com
New cars on the road include, from top: the Jaguar F-Type, the Lucid Air, Lincoln’s Corsair Grand Touring hybrid, and the Land Rover Defender. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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SILVERSTONE CLASSIC July 31-August 2, 2020, Silverstone Circuit, Northamptonshire, UK
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illed as the world’s largest festival dedicated to classic motor racing, the Silverstone Classic, now in its 30th year, celebrates automotive competition in all its forms, with Formula 1, sports cars, GTs, and touring cars filling its grids and running in more than 20 races. Aside from its sheer size, another hallmark of the event is that ticket holders have “paddock access,” so they are able to get up close and personal with the cars and drivers, as well as the mechanics who keep them on track.
silverstoneclassic.com
MONTEREY CAR WEEK August 7-16 2020, Monterey/Pebble Beach/Carmel, CA
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he undisputed nexus of the American collector-car universe, Monterey Car Week offers an action-packed calendar of shows, rallies, concours, and car auctions that culminate in the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on Sunday. It is also during this week that the most coveted classic cars in the world come on the auction block—offered by Bonhams, RM Sotheby’s, Gooding & Company, and Russo and Steele. It also provides a chance to rub shoulders with such racing legends as Formula 1 superstar Jackie Stewart. whatsupmonterey.com/events/monterey-car-week
BONNEVILLE SPEED WEEK August 8-14, 2020, Bonneville Salt Flats, Tooele County, UT
SALON PRIVÉ September 3-6, 2020, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK
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ince its inaugural edition in 2006, Salon Privé has made its mark as one of the most important classic car shows in the UK—its focus decidedly on the prestige sector. The event offers a heady mix of rare and exquisite cars, connoisseurship, fine champagne, and the hard-to-beat surroundings of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. It also provides a chance to test drive some of the most expensive cars on the market. salonpriveconcours.com 74
JAYSON FONG, GOODWOOD MOTORSPORT.
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or more than a century, the Bonneville Salt Flats (aka the “Bonneville Speedway”) in northwest Utah have served as a backdrop for those on a quest to “shoot the salt”—their vast 40-square-mile smooth surface being a proving ground for the fastest land vehicles in the world. Because of the wide variety of land speed record (LSR) classes at Bonneville, it is possible for even those new to racing to set a record of their own. Although the races themselves take place a quarter mile from the viewing stands, spectators are allowed to walk around the pits, view the vehicles up close, and strike up a conversation with the drivers and pit crews. scta-bni.org/bonneville.html
Katarina Kyvalova, driving a 1954 Cooper-Jaguar T33, leads the field at the start of the Freddie March Memorial Trophy at the Goodwood Revival in 2017.
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A LIMITED EDITION LOTUS “Every element of the Evija has been meticulously analyzed
and validated,” says Matt Windle, executive director of sports car engineering for Lotus Cars, in speaking of the first fully electric British hypercar. The Evija, which debuted in July, can do 0 to 62 mph in less than three seconds, and reach a top speed more than 200 mph. Its production run will be limited to 130 as a tribute to its Lotus type number. The car is priced at £1.7million; prospective buyers must plunk down a deposit of £250,000 to secure a production slot. lotuscars.com.
“ANY CAR THAT HOLDS TOGETHER FOR A WHOLE RACE IS TOO HEAVY.”
—COLIN CHAPMAN, FOUNDER OF LOTUS SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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GOODWOOD REVIVAL September 11-13, 2020, Goodwood Estate, West Sussex, UK
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he Goodwood Revival is unmatched in terms of ambiance, with attendees as sartorially fine-tuned as the classic cars on view. In addition to watching the races, you can enjoy a some retail therapy at a suite of pop-up shops and plenty of places to sip craft cocktails and champagne. Bonhams is hosting an auction on September 12. goodwood.com ZOUTE GRAND PRIX October 8-11, 2020, Knokke-Heist, Belgium
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he seaside Belgian town of Knokke-Heist delivers style and sportsmanship during a charming four-day event, with a rally , a GT tour, amd a showing of more than 70 classic cars. Here gems from the prewar period preen alongside the latest models from prestigious marques. For this 11th edition, Bonhams will hold an auction on October 9. zoutegrandprix.be
ROLEX 24 AT DAYTONA January 25-26, 2021, Daytona International Speedway Daytona Beach, FL
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ounded in 1962, the Rolex 24 at Daytona is considered the granddaddy of American endurance races and over the years has enjoyed a cultlike following. This all-day, all-night spectacular brings together IMSA regulars and drivers representing NASCAR, Indy Car, and Formula 1 racing. The cars on the course range from Daytona Prototype International (DPi) purpose-built race cars to production-model-based GT Daytona (GTD) cars. daytonainternationalspeedway.com
RÉTROMOBILE February 3-7 2021, Parc des expositions de la Porte de Versailles, Paris, France
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ach February, more than 650 exhibitors from all over the world gather in the City of Light to present their prized rides. Along with opportunities to acquire your dream machine, the event offers workshops on maintaining historic vehicles. The three top auction houses specializing in classic cars will hold sales—RM Sotheby’s, Bonhams, and Paris-based Artcurial. retromobile.com
DAYTONA 500 February 21, 2021, Daytona International Speedway, Daytona Beach, FL ith a purse size exceeding $1.5 million, the Daytona 500, aka the “Super Bowl of Stock Car Racing,” is hands down the most important race on the NASCAR calendar. Since its first run in 1959, the 500-mile-race has been a place where history is made—the proving ground for such racing legends as Richard Petty, Jeff Gordon, and most recently Denny Hamlin. daytonainternationalspeedway.com
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“FORMULA ONE APPLIES STRESSES TO THE MIND AND BODY THAT ARE VERY EXTREME.” —ROBERT KUBICA
NIGEL HARNIMAN
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THE FORMULA 1 CALENDAR
There are 22 races on the 2020 Formula 1
calendar, including a new Grand Prix in Vietnam and a return to the famed Zandvoort circuit in the Netherlands. MARCH
15 Melbourne, Australia 22 Sakhir, Bahrain APRIL
5 Hanoi, Vietnam 19 Shanghai, China MAY
3 Zandvoort, the Netherlands 10 Barcelona, Spain 24 Monte Carlo, Monaco JUNE
7 Baku, Azerbaijan 14 Montreal, Canada 28 Le Castellet, France JULY
5 Spielberg, Austria 19 Silverstone, Great Britain AUGUST
2 Budapest, Hungary 30 Spa-Francorchamps, Belgium SEPTEMBER
6 Monza, Italy 20 Singapore 27 Sochi, Russia OCTOBER
11 Suzuka, Japan 25 Austin, United States Roland Asch speeds down the track in his 1934 Mercedes-Benz W25 at the 2017 Goodwood Festival of Speed.
NOVEMBER
1 Mexico City, Mexico 15 São Paulo, Brazil 29 Yas Island, Abu Dhabi SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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CHIC COBBLER TABITHA SIMMONS HELPS AVENUE LAUNCH A SERIES ON MAKERS AND THEIR MOOD BOARDS.
Four times a year, the fashionable shoe designer delivers her signature, vertiginous footwear collections, and an important part of her creative process is pulling together source images. “I’m such a magpie, I find inspiration everywhere,” she told us while curating the photos here, images which inspire far more than just a single collection. Tabitha’s stylish life in springtime has to be seen to be believed: From Alta Moda—the couture fashion show she helps style for Dolce & Gabbana—to the Save Venice party in April, to the Met’s Costume Institute gala in May, you’ll find her kicking up her heels.
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PHOTOS FROM BFA.COM AND COURTESY OF TABITHA SIMMONS
In Her Shoes
The CDFA Accessories Designer of the Year award-winner in front of one of her mood boards at her downtown studio. Lower left: a Kali metallic ankle heel sandal from her Spring collection.
IF IT’S SPRING, THIS MUST BE ITALY “Save Venice is one of my favorite parties of the year, and my work with Dolce & Gabbana means I always have amazing gowns at the ready. I’m wearing one of them in this photo along with a headdress made by their team from a collection of my old Italian postcards. Upper left: I love the ceilings of Italian museums—so if you see me at the Uffizi you’ll most likely find me looking up. Upper right: An Evangeline shoe from my winter collection. Lower right: Advice we could all take to heart.”
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LIFE SKETCHES “I find inspiration everywhere: museums, books, furniture, the library—and then I try to pull it all together into an overarching theme. This season I was inspired by Bianca Jagger—she emulates such strength and is a woman with so many sides, both boyish and really feminine. If I’ve done my job right, you’ll find some of this baked into my Patton platforms with block heels, and the strappy sandals—all done up in metallics, Nappa leather and in iridescent colors. This collection was trying to show that women don’t have to embody just one identity: that you can wear towering high heels one moment, and then be in comfortable shoes racing around doing errands in the next.
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF PUMA AND TABITHA SIMMONS
FLOWERBOMBING FOR PUMA “When Puma asked me to collaborate on a capsule collection, I jumped at the chance: I have two teenage boys after all. A friend of mine introduced me to their team, and we all decided this would be a perfect mashup of their athletic aesthetics and my signature florals. (I do love an English garden.) And then I saw the work of floral designer Lewis Miller, who is known for “flower-flashing” city streets. We decided to commission one from him, and that’s what you see here: staging for our ad campaign. After we finished our shoot it was all disassembled and taken home by neighbors—that was my favorite part.”
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LA DOLCE ALTA MODA Tabitha styles the runway shows for Dolce & Gabbana, designers she considers to be among her chief inspirations. “Domenico [Dolce] is so talented, and they were both so encouraging when I launched my first collection.” From top: Tabitha walking the runway at Dolce & Gabbana; two scenes from backstage, where Tabitha has been styling for years; D&G buttons and finishings; the dramatic staging for one of their Milan-based shows, set in the warehouse where La Scala opera sets are created. “The Alta Moda shows are so special,” says Tabitha. “They’re so intimate and focused on engaging their top clients and collectors. There’s no press, no red carpet, just gorgeous clothes.”
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THE LIFE OF AN ALTA MODA DRESS
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BFA.COM AND TABITHA SIMMONS
“I love seeing where these dresses end up,” says Tabitha of Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda couture. “I mean they go on to lead such incredible lives. One minute they’re being stitched by brilliant hands in an atelier, and the next they’re at the Met Costume Institute gala sitting next to a famous actress. I’ve been lucky enough to wear a few of them myself over the years at the Met, and in this case I’m sitting with Annabelle Wallis. Just look at these dresses and headpieces and cloaks—they’re works of art in their own right, with every reason to be seen next to the Met’s fine art.”
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KITTEN HEELS AND PUPPYDOGS’ TAILS “I love rescue pets. And because I often passed by Animal Haven, which was near my office, I came up with an idea to help their adoption efforts and increase awareness about rescues. So we photographed a dozen of their adorable dogs and cats and posted them on Instagram. And it really worked—so many of them were adopted through the initiative. Clockwise from lower right: two of the campaign photos with Animal Haven rescue pets; my son Dylan with our dog Paddington; Jeff Koons’ topiary sculpture “Puppy” at Guggenheim Bilbao; one of my favorite English gardens.”
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PUTTING UP YOUR FEET ONCE IN A WHILE “Looking at these pages it would be easy to think of my life as just being very busy, but in truth, I work hard to balance all of that with what really matters to me—which is my family. It’s a juggling act, and it’s hard-won, but I’m so proud of my sons’ work ethic, and I try to be a role model for them. They now have a two-year-old sister (who thinks she’s the boss of all of us) and I want her to grow up with that same sense of earning her way in life. Oh, and remembering to make time to put up her feet every once in a while and actually enjoy that life.” SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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Brian Cashman giving a post-mortem last October on the Yankees’ 2019 season. 86
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CASHMAN’S CONUNDRUM
It was one of those dead quiet February afternoons last month, the kind that are typically a gift to baseball executives: the flat spot between the holidays and spring training. Time to exhale and prepare for another season just around the corner. There’s no such thing as a general manager’s vacation—not a real one, anyway— but if there’s ever a chance to go off the grid for, say, 24 to 48 hours, this is it. Except Brian Cashman isn’t your typical GM, and the Yankees operate on a business cycle unlike any team in Major League Baseball—especially this past winter. By every measure, the Yankees have now emerged from their underdog status, thanks to a breathtaking few months during which a) they lured free agent Gerrit Cole away from the Houston Astros to pitch in New York, and b) watched those same Astros, blood rivals, go down in flames in a sign-stealing scandal that placed them among the most egregious cheaters in the sport’s history. You’d think Cashman would take a moment to realize the road to October had already been paved. Who’d blame him for thinking: We got this. Instead, the GM rejected the idea on its face. “Come on, man,” Cashman says of the coming season. “We’re not favorites, we’re just contenders. If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that anything can go wrong. You can’t just be great, you have to be healthy, your timing has to be right, everything has to break your way.”
THE YANKEES’ GM IS BANKING ON THE STARS ALIGNING THIS SEASON.
© NEW YORK YANKEES
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BY BOB KLAPISCH
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“GERRIT BASICALLY SAID, ‘I’M GOING TO BET ON MYSELF FOR THE FUTURE.’” IT TAKES A SPECIAL KIND OF PERSON TO BE THAT SURE.
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Turns out Cashman’s premonition was eerily dead-on. The Yankees suffered a series of staggering injuries before spring training was even three weeks old. Slugger Aaron Judge missed the first Grapefruit League games with a sore right shoulder, and this has been the least of the setbacks. Giancarlo Stanton, Judge’s brother-in-muscle, suffered a Grade-1 strain of his right calf, likely shelving him into April. And right-hander Luis Severino, who pitched only three games in 2019 due to lat and shoulder problems, was diagnosed with a partially torn ligament in his elbow. He underwent reconstructive surgery that will require 12-18 months to rehabilitate. While the Yankees still have the major league’s deepest reservoir of talent, the bad news threatened to extend what’s already been a lengthy championship drought: 11 summers, to be exact, since they won their last title. In a city as fast-paced as the Big Apple that’s an eternity, long enough to get most execs run out of town. Not for Cashman, though: he’s outlasted the Mount Rushmore of Yankees icons. Joe Torre was fired in 2007, Alex Rodriguez left in disgrace in 2016 after admitting to using performance enhancing drugs, and even Derek Jeter, the Captain, does business these days as the co-owner of the Miami Marlins. So why wouldn’t Cashman give himself a well-earned breather? Only because he has the corporate metabolism of a hummingbird—he’s just too busy to navel gaze. Cashman’s ego is more comfortable at the back of the press box than in the front. He’ll leave it to others to point out the synchronicity of the Yankees’ journey: that all the moving parts are finally coming together at the right time. The story centers around Gerrit Cole, undeniably baseball’s best pitcher at the moment, and a free agent as of last November. At 29, Cole is in the sweet spot of his career, not just able to dial up his fastball to almost 100 mph, but sufficiently evolved to use his four other pitches—curveball, slider, and change-up and cutter—to destroy opposing hitters’ timing, if not their self-esteem. Cole led the American League in 2019 with a 2.50 ERA and 326 strikeouts, and did so with an old-school, John Wayne—like swagger. It’s not enough to say the Yankees love the guy—they started targeting him as a high school senior back in 2008. That year, Cole was the Bombers’ first-round draft pick—only to lose out to UCLA, where he’d already committed, and he wasn’t about to renege. As disappointed as the Yankees were at the time, they nevertheless had their first glimpse of Cole’s nofear mentality. “You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself to say no to the money he could’ve made as a first-rounder,” Cashman said. “Gerrit basically said, “I’m going to bet on myself for the future.” It takes a special kind of person to be that sure. Cole insisted there was nothing personal in the snub, “I’d always been a Yankees fan growing up,” he says, but the fates weren’t ready to put him in pinstripes. Not yet: he had to do
his time with the Pittsburgh Pirates, who drafted Cole after three years at UCLA. He spent five seasons there, then another two with Houston, leading the Astros to a controversial championship in 2019. All that did was further whet the Yankees’ appetite. Fast forward to December 18 of last year, and it became clear just how much the Yankees had been clamoring for everything Cole represented. They needed more than just an ace, they needed someone to take them to the next level after coming up short three years in a row in the postseason. Cole was asked to be a latter-day Reggie Jackson—the original Mr. October, who arrived in 1977 as a free agent and promptly brought the Yankees back-to-back world championships over the next two years. Do you think it hadn’t occurred to owner Hal Steinbrenner, the buttoned-down, perfectly-coiffed offspring of his mercurial father, that Cole had to be a Yankee not matter what it cost? The answer was the nine-year, $324 million payday, which proved that the ghost of the late George Steinbrenner, the Boss himself, was still hovering somewhere over River Avenue, whispering in his kid’s ear. If Cole is to become the new Reggie, then Hal is the new Boss—or rather, the old Boss, throwing so much cash at Cole that no one else bothered to even make an offer, not even the ultrarich Los Angeles Dodgers, who were ready to throw the So-Cal-born Cole a homecoming party. That changed everything for the Yankees, who are starting the 2020 season not just locked and loaded with talent, but as the honest alternative to those black-hearted Astros. Houston’s sign-stealing scheme, which allowed hitters to know what pitch was coming, mushroomed over a three-year period, netting a world championship in 2017 and an American League pennant in 2019. In both instances, the Yankees were convinced they’d been robbed. “I knew those m-----f------ didn’t beat us fair and square,” growled lefthander CC Sabathia late last fall. “I knew we were better than them.” He might have been right. The Yankees had won 103 games in the regular season, running away from the rest of the American League East practically from opening day. They suffered one injury after another, but instead of folding they coined a Next Man Up ethos that turned the second- and third-tier players into bona fide stars. And that augured well for an October run. And so it was—at least in the American League Division Series, when the Yankees out-everything’d the overmatched Minnesota Twins and tooled up for Armageddon 2.0. As Aaron Judge himself said weeks earlier, “Us versus the Astros is going to be the real World Series.” At that stage, no one but the Dodgers would’ve squawked. Any dissenters in Washington, DC, were too far from the mike to be heard. The wild card Nationals would ultimately shock the baseball world by winning it all, but no one foresaw that wave forming from the shoreline of midsummer.
BRIAN CASHMAN: © NEW YORK YANKEES. GERRIT COLE: © NEW YORK YANKEES.
Not your typical GM: Brian Cashman watches the New York Yankees win against the Minnesota Twins in the American League Division Series in 2019. Right: baseball’s golden boy Gerrit Cole
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But the Astros’ eventual takedown of the Yankees? Now that, to quote the great Gabriel García Márquez, was “a death foretold.” Cashman took nearly a week after season’s end to hold a postmortem at the stadium. Perhaps he spent those six days chanting in an ashram—or drinking himself blotto to salve the sting. When he finally appeared before a roomful of reporters at the press conference on October 24, he took their questions with a mortician’s calm, breaking down the loss to the Astros in rigidly clinical terms. Though he admitted that the Yankees had failed—again—he insisted that 2019 “wasn’t a failed season.” In both message and demeanor, this didn’t wear well with the 50 or so writers who’d shown up. For one thing, there wasn’t even a hint of anguish in his droning dissection of the facts. No catch in his throat, no long breaths sighed out: you would have thought you were hearing from a harbormaster who’d just closed the marina for the winter. For beat guys who’d watched legendary closer Mariano Rivera go locker to locker, apologizing to teammates after blowing Game 7 of the 2001 World Series to the Diamondbacks, Cashman’s sangfroid was not acceptable. Not this time, and certainly not against this rival. For the third year in four, the Astros had owned the Yankees and the fans wanted tears—if not blood. But Cashman proved that he doesn’t do public offerings of suffering. Grief, however muted, is an admission of something: failure, regret, the main chance missed. Cashman, per his custom, admitted to nothing; he was too stubborn to concede the obvious. Here was a team that, for the first time since its birth, had failed to win a championship in the course of a calendar decade. And here was a team he had pushed all in on, unlike the group in 2017 and ’18. Cashman had assembled the most expensive bullpen in the history of the game, and built a roster so deeply provisioned that it weathered plague-level injuries to win its division. Here, if ever there was one, was a Cashman-made squad with the stuff for a World Series berth: a mix of stars and resourceful bench guys, of playoff-tested veterans and precocious kids, of mercenaries and homegrown talent. But in its six-game stall-out in the League Championship Series, his crew was sunk again by its most glaring flaws–the absence of a No. 1 starter. That led to a surprisingly contentious press conference, highlighted by a back-and-forth with WFAN’s Sweeny Murti. He openly questioned the Yankees’ decision to pass on a number of stud pitchers—Cole being one of them—who could’ve elevated the Yankees from also-rans into champs. But Cashman didn’t take the jab lying down, instead returning fire with facts. The Yankees, after all, had posted their best win-loss record in five years and captured the first division title in seven years despite a record number of stints on the injured list. Then Cashman reached for his go-to mantra. “You don’t get everything you want all the time,” he said. “But I can sleep at night with the process we have in place. It’s served us well.” That was the company line for the next two months, long enough for the ticket buyers to filibuster Twitter and talk radio with charges that the Yankees were no longer all-in. That was followed by an even nastier zinger: Hal, unlike his old man, was running the franchise on the cheap. Maybe that was the final straw for the younger Steinbrenner. Because soon after, Yankees fans were treated to the best-possible Christmas present: Gerrit Cole and the now inevitable return of that October ritual: a parade down the Canyon of Heroes. It’s about time. The Yankees aren’t accustomed to underdog status, and by all measures it appears they’ve shaken off the collar. Veteran baseball writer Bob Klapisch has covered the Yankees and Mets for the New York Post, New York Daily News, USA Today, ESPN and Bleacher Report. He is a frequent contributor on MLB Network and his most current work can be found in the New York Times. In March Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish a paperback edition of his book, Inside The Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees. Written in collaboration with Paul Solotaroff, portions of the book were excerpted as part of this article.
THE ASTROS’ UNDOING: A PRIMER
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utrage towards the Astros wasn’t confined just to the Yankees’ clubhouse. It quickly spread throughout the industry as details of the Astros’ scheme continued to emerge during the off-season and into spring training. Former pitcher-turned-whistleblower Mike Fiers is the one who revealed the scam, explaining how Astros’ personnel spied on opposing catchers while signs were being flashed to the pitcher via a high-definition camera in center field. The intel was relayed to another staffer near the Astros’ dugout, who then communicated to the batter what pitch was coming by thumping loudly on a garbage can. The effect was devastating to the victims around the league: in 2017, the first year of the Astros’ crime wave, their strikeout total plunged by 365, by far the most in any single season since 1920. The illegal intel helped Houston to its first world championship in the club’s 56-year history. By 2019, the scheme had allegedly become so sophisticated that the thumping cans were replaced by wireless buzzers worn beneath the players’ jerseys. Although the Commissioner’s office was unable to prove the Astros had gone digital, the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. It only further inflamed the Yankees’ indignation. In a showdown between the two clubs in the League Championship Series, the deciding Game Six came down to the last at-bat in the tenth inning. José Altuve squared up on lefthander Aroldis Chapman’s final pitch, blasting a monstrous home run over the wall in Minute Maid Park. Chapman stood frozen in disbelief for several seconds as the Astros rushed to out of the dugout to celebrate their take-down of the Yankees and another trip to the World Series. It’s a not unfamiliar scene in baseball–a dramatic walk-off home run and make-shift toga party thrown at home plate. But as he rounded third base Altuve was worried about something else. Conspicuously he pointed to his jersey as he shouted at the Astros not to tear his shirt off. He claimed to be acting out of modesty–saying he didn’t want to embarrass his wife by parading half-naked in front of millions of viewers on TV. But while the Astros were busy with hugs and head-slaps, Altuve rushed off the field and went straight to the clubhouse. He emerged moments later wearing a different shirt. That was a red flag to many that not only had Altuve been wearing a buzzer, he’d been tipped off about Chapman’s last offering–a hanging slider–to end the Yankees’ season. One major league executive interviewed by the Washington Post asked incredulously, “You’re covering up and holding your shirt closed when you hit a homer to win the pennant? Whoever hit a home run to win the pennant and goes to the clubhouse and 20 seconds later comes out in a different shirt? No. You celebrate with your teammates.” Yankees catcher Gary Sánchez’ response was even more direct: “I can tell you, if I hit a home run to get my team to the World Series, they can rip off my pants.” Altuve later amended his story, insisting he was merely hiding an ugly tattoo on his shoulder. He subsequently revealed the ink to reporters in spring training. Nevertheless, fallout in Houston ultimately cost manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow their jobs. Both were suspended by Major League Baseball before being fired outright by Astros owner Jim Crane. The second wave claimed Alex Cora, who’d served as Hinch’s bench coach in 2017 before being hired to manage the Boston Red Sox in 2018–winning a World Series in his first season. Cora was summarily fired, as was Carlos Beltran, allegedly the scheme’s clubhouse mastermind who’d been hired last November to manage the Mets in 2020. He was let go in January. The purge vindicated the Yankees, but only to a degree. The Astros’ three-year run was invalidated by virtually the entire baseball community, but commissioner Rob Manfred refused to vacate Houston’s championship in 2017 and its American League pennant in 2019. This season, from all evidence, the Yankees will regain the championship the old fashioned way. SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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RESIDENTS OF THE BUCOLIC NEIGHBORHOOD OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS HAVE CREATED A VILL AGE IN THE HEART OF THE CIT Y.
BY HEATHER HODSON
Soaring to New
Heights “I LIVED IN MANHATTAN in the ’70s, and Brooklyn was another planet,” says Dirk Wittenborn, the novelist, screenwriter, and downtown habitué turned Brooklyn Heights resident. But even back then, Wittenborn caught a glimpse of the future. “I remember driving to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1976 with David Hockney and the art czar Henry Geldzahler. David said, ‘If this was Paris, everyone would live here.’ It stayed in my head.” Two decades later, Wittenborn made the migration across the river, moving into a brownstone in the Heights at the suggestion of his German-born
through the eyes of a European. “It reminded her of Holland, with the water and some of the architecture.” They arrived in 2002, some thirteen months after their daughter Lila was born. “I remember walking down Remsen Street and seeing the river and the ferry and thinking, this is magical.” 90
LEFT: SIMON WATSON; RIGHT: JOE THOMAS
wife, Kirsten, who, like Hockney, saw the neighborhood
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For Laura Trevelyan, the BBC anchor and correspondent, it was an English, pastoral quality that made her fall in love with the Heights when she arrived 16 years ago. “Living here is like being in a village in the middle of the city,” says Trevelyan, who lives with her husband, a television executive, and their three sons on a leafy block of brownstones. “I see at least ten people I know when I’m doing my groceries. I’ve got my church, the boys’ school, my local restaurant. I know everybody’s name— Sammy at the pet shop, Jimmy at the cobbler’s. It has that same feel of the Wiltshire village where my grandparents lived.” In aspect and design, Brooklyn Heights is the opposite of high-rise New York in that it is human in scale. The writer Thomas Wolfe, who, in the ’30s, lived at 111 Columbia Heights, when the area was a haven for beatniks and writers, called it “a fine town . . . a long way from New York.” The Heights evokes a sense of a bucolic past rubbing up against the present with its 19th-century mansions and shingle-wood Colonials, streets with names like Garden Place, Grae Court, and Willow Place, and a profusion of cherry trees that burst into riotous blossom every spring. As Truman Capote said of this time-bending quality in A House on the Heights, written when living in the basement apartment of his friend Oliver Smith’s Greek Revival townhouse on Willow Street, the homes here “invoke specters of bearded seafaring fathers and bonneted stay-at-home wives . . . For a century or so that is how it must have been: a time of tree-shrouded streets, lanes limp with willow, August gardens brimming with bumblebees and herbaceous scent, of ship horns on the river. . .” One of the great boons for successive generations of families living in Brooklyn Heights has been the ability of
their children to walk to a range of impressive schools in the neighborhood. The choice includes the über progressive Saint Ann’s, founded in 1965 by Stanley Bosworth and whose alumni include Stella Schnabel and Lena Dunham; Packer Collegiate, established in 1845 as a girls’ school and coed since 1972; PS8 in the North Heights; Mary McDowell Friends School on Sidney Place; Brooklyn Friends School just a few blocks outside the neighborhood; and the oldest preschool in Brooklyn, Grace Church School. “There are six children on our street who walk to school —that’s the charm of it,” Wittenborn says. The emerging problem here is a familiar one to storied neighborhoods: it is becoming increasingly difficult for residents to get their children into these schools, given the rash of residential buildings going up just beyond its borders. As Wittenborn tells it, they were the lucky ones: “We arrived just before midnight, in what then happened to Brooklyn.” “Midnight” in Brooklyn is a subject of much discussion among longtime Heights residents, who recall that back in the 70s and 80s, New Yorkers considered the neighborhood to be a cultural hinterland inhabited by old ladies, law professors, and anyone who couldn’t afford Manhattan rents. People didn’t visit unless by mistake, at which point they hightailed it right back to Manhattan. Near its perimeter—this was the era of the citywide crack epidemic—it was a no-go zone. “I remember threats from my parents that I would be spanked if I crossed Atlantic Avenue,” recalls Elizabeth Ruggie, a real estate agent for Compass who grew up in the Heights and is now raising her children there. “We lived on Willow Place, and at night drunken sailors walking up from the waterfront would throw beer bottles at the side of our house.” Another resident, Donald Brennan, owner of
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ZIHAO LING; MICHAEL DEL ROSSI; K. LIEBOWITZ; OPPOSITE PAGE: CHESTER HIGGINS JNR/NY TIMES
Clockwise, from above: The Packer Collegiate Institute, a K-12 school established in 1845 and now a magnet for Manhattan as well as Brooklyn families; the Brooklyn Women’s Exchange, a beloved neighborhood institution selling artisanal gifts and staffed by local volunteers; the Brooklyn Historical Society, founded in 1863, houses a vast trove of manuscripts and other rare items. RIGHT: seven years ago during renovation work on the faux bois ceiling of Grace Church, a Gothic Revival painting scheme, hidden since the early 20th century, was revealed.
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“LIVING HERE IS LIKE BEING IN A VILL AGE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CIT Y.”
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John Krasinski and Emily Blunt
Josh Groves and Julie Carlson of Remodelista.com
Elizabeth Ruggie Jewelry designer Marissa Alperin
Dirk and Kirsten Wittenborn W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, at 31 Grace Court, 1938.
Lena Dunham
Journalist James Grant
Stephanie Ingrassia, Vice Chair of the Brooklyn Museum’s Board of Trustees
Amelia Wilson (left), and Amerika Williamson, Vice President of the Brooklyn Kindergarten Society’s Board
Writer Monte Burke
Matt Damon and Luciana Barroso
Michelle Williams
Laura Trevelyan
Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden in New York, 1938.
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Dan Horan, founder of Five Acre Farms
Gypsy Rose Lee
Tommy Kail
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Leonard Bernstein
Carson McCullers
Truman Capote in 1958 at 70 Willow Street, where he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A House on the Heights.
Lara Birnback, Executive Director of BHA Writer Nina Lorez Collins
Compass real estate agent Barbara Wilding
Fashion editor Alex White Martha Bakos Deitz, President of the BHA
Thomas Wolfe
Designer Jennifer Eisenstadt
Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
Benjamin Britten (left) and Peter Pears
Arthur Miller and his wife Mary Slattery in 1952 ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY BFA.COM EXCEPT: AMERIKA AND AMELIA WILSON BY SUSYE GREENWOOD, BARBARA WILDING BY JONATHAN GRASSI, CARSON MCCULLERS BY LEONARD MCCOMBE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES, DAN HOUSER BY PATRICK MCMULLAN/PATRICK MCMULLAN VIA GETTY IMAGES, DAN HORAN BY SARI GOODFRIEND, DIRK WITTENBORN AND KIRSTEN WITTENBORN BY STEPHEN LOVEKIN/FILMMAGIC, DONALD AND JESSICA BRENNAN BY REGINA FLEMING PHOTOGRAPHY, GYPSY ROSE LEE BY STROUD/EXPRESS/GETTY IMAGES, HENRY WARD BEECHER, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE BY GLASSHOUSE IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, JAMES GRANT BY RODERICK AICHINGER, LAURA TREVELYAN BY BY DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY IMAGES), LARA BIRNBACK BY CLASSIC KIDS PHOTOGRAPHY, LEONARD BERNSTEIN BY MPI/GETTY IMAGES, MARISSA ALPERIN BY MARISSA ALPERIN STUDIO, MARTHA BAKOS DIETZ BY BARBARA ZIMMERMAN, MICHELLE WILLIAMS BY RICH FURY/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES, NINA-LOREZ-COLLINS BY MALOTT, PLAYWRIGHT ARTHUR MILLER AND HIS WIFE MARY BY FPG/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGE, TENOR PETER PEARS AND COMPOSER BENJAMIN BRITTEN BY CECIL BEATON/ CONDÉ NAST VIA GETTY IMAGES, TOMMY KAIL BY DESIREE NAVARRO/WIREIMAGE, TRUMAN CAPOTE BY DAVID ATTIE/GETTY IMAGES, THOMAS WOLFE PHOTO BY CARL VAN VECHTEN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES, W. E. B. DU BOIS BY DAVID ATTIE/GETTY IMAGES, W. H. AUDEN AND CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD BY TOPFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO.
Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly
Paul Giamatti
Jessica and Donald Brennan
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the real estate brokerage Engel & Völkers Brownstone Brooklyn, says: “In the ’80s the neighborhood’s Brooklyn Heights Association [BHA] was still driving a volunteer-manned security car and doing night surveillance of the neighborhood looking out for burglary and vandalism.” But then, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, Brooklyn Heights was ‘discovered.’ What started out in the ’90s and early aughts as a trickle of young professionals arriving from Manhattan with dreams of brownstone living turned into a stream and then a tidal wave. Property prices doubled, and tripled. A benchmark of sorts was reached in 2012, when 70 Willow Street—Truman Capote’s old haunt—was bought by Dan Houser, the co-founder of Rockstar Games, for $12.5 million, setting a record for the neighborhood. Then, once their children had won coveted spots at neighborhood schools, the entertainment set moved in. Jennifer Connelly—herself a Saint Ann’s alumna— and Paul Bettany bought a five-story Greek Revival mansion on the neighborhood’s premier block, Columbia Heights, for $15.5 million. Matt Damon and his wife purchased the penthouse in The Standish, the newly converted Watchtower on Columbia Heights, for $16.6 million (their new neighbors include Emily Blunt and John Krasinski). Just three months ago, another townhouse in the Heights was sold for five digits, this time to Michelle Williams and her fiancé, Hamilton director Tommy Kail. “It all happened so fast,” says Wittenborn. “When I first moved here an artist friend said, ‘For me to go to Brooklyn, it would be like moving to Philadelphia.’ He’s out by Gowanus now.” Perhaps the question isn’t why it happened so fast, but what took it so long? Brooklyn Heights has always benefited from its
natural topography. Thomas J. Campanella details much of it within the pages of Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, the best historical book written about the borough. Campanella spent ten years researching and writing the opus and observed that Brooklyn was once, in geological parlance, a terminal moraine, a souvenir left by the miles-deep Laurentide ice sheet in the wake of the last Ice Age. “The backbone of the heap . . . is Walt Whitman’s ‘Brooklyn of ample hills,’ a line of elevated ground which included . . . Brooklyn Heights . . . Hence its name.” From the 1630s, Brooklyn was open farmland, but as New York grew and became urbanized, so did its nextdoor neighbor. By the 1820s, investors were buying lots in the Heights, drawn by the proximity to downtown Manhattan by ferry. Row houses were built here, as were such churches as the famed Congregational Plymouth Church, the seat of the Underground Railroad while under the ministry of the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher and his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. An elegant neighborhood of 19th-century architecture sprang up along Hicks and Henry and the Fruit Streets (Orange, Pineapple, Cranberry), from gray-shingled cottages to red-brick carriage houses. A later wave of building brought the 25-footwide brownstone mansions, with gracious stoops, Greek Revival columns, and 12-foot high ceilings. In the early 20th century, the neighborhood experienced an extended decline, and many of the four- and five-story mansions once owned by individual families were converted into boarding houses or apartments. The era of cheap rent had arrived, and with it came the bohemians: artists, writers, and exiles largely from Europe. Henry Miller lived at 91 Remsen
RIGHT TOP: MARIA MIDÕES; RIGHT BOTTOM: LUIS PAEZ; OPPOSITE PAGE: ZIHAO LING
Clockwise, from above: Seaport Flowers and Home, owned by Amy Gardella, is the go-to florist for the neighborhood; River Deli, a cozy Sardinian restaurant on the corner of the formerly insalubrious Columbia Place; Clover Hill, recently opened by Clay Castillo and Gabriel Merino, with a team that hails from Eleven Madision Park and Estella, is already a brunch and dinner favorite. RIGHT: the feline denizens of the non-profit Brooklyn Cat Cafe are all available for adoption.
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THE FACT THAT THE BQE DIDN’T DEMOLISH MORE HISTORIC BUILDINGS COMES DOWN TO THE UNIQUE EFFORTS OF GENER ATIONS OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS RESIDENTS.
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, as did Auden before he left for Montague Terrace. Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, were among the inhabitants and guests, as were Benjamin Britten and his lover, the tenor Peter Pears. The writer James Stern dropped by one day to discover, as he described it to the biographer of Auden, “George [Davis] naked at the piano with a cigarette in his mouth, Carson on the floor with a half a gallon of sherry, and Wystan [W.H. Auden] bursting in like a headmaster, announcing: ‘Now then, dinner!’” And so it continued, until 1945, when the house was razed to the ground to make way for the great scar of a highway that was Robert Moses’s Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). The fact that the BQE didn’t demolish more historic buildings comes down to the unique efforts of generations of Brooklyn Heights residents. In the 1930s, residents and civic activists successfully lobbied for a grand public promenade to be cantilevered over the proposed highway that was
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Street with his second wife, June, until they were evicted for failing to pay the rent. Arthur Miller moved into a seven-room apartment in the center of the Heights at 62 Montague Street with his wife Mary Slattery, and her roommates. (The young poet W.H. Auden was just around the corner at 1 Montague Terrace.) After a stint living at 102 Pierrepont Street, Miller would buy the imposing brownstone 31 Grace Court, writing Death of a Salesman there before selling it to the author and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife, the author and playwright Shirley Graham Du Bois. But perhaps the most renowned house of Brooklyn Bohemia was 7 Middagh Street, a creative commune dreamed up by the literary editor George Davis, and home in the 1930s and early ’40s to a rotating group of artists, writers, and composers, including Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, and the actress and burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee. The young Carson McCullers lived here just after publishing AVENUE MAGAZINE | SPRING 2020
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RECENTLY, THE NEIGHBORHOOD HAS HAD TO FEND OFF THE CIT Y ’S PL ANS TO REPL ACE THE L ANDMARKED PROMENADE WITH A SIX-L ANE HIGHWAY. threatening to obliterate their neighborhood. Decades later they lobbied for the area to be protected by the Landmarks Preservation Law. In 1965, Brooklyn Heights became the first neighborhood in the city to receive such a designation. “The area almost in its entirety by name was protected, with the zoning overlay for landmarks protection,” explains Brennan. “In addition to that, the views of New York Harbor, Lower Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge, to some degree, are protected by the ‘Brooklyn Heights Scenic View District’ as stipulated in the New York City Zoning Resolution.” He adds: “The BHA has been an unseen force that has helped protect and maintain an exceptional quality of life.” The BHA still has its hands full. Most recently, the neighborhood has had to fend off the city’s plans to replace the landmarked Promenade with a six-lane highway whilst a 1.5-mile segment of the BQE along the western Brooklyn waterfront is rebuilt, which will take at least five years. The plans brought out a level
of local activism not seen since the days of Moses and his quality-of-life obliterating masterplan. Among the mansions that occupy Columbia Heights are surely some of the most beautiful townhomes in New York. These are houses, after all, with soaring interiors largely unaltered from when they were built in the 1820s, and which have almost panoramic views sweeping from Lower Manhattan across the Bay to Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, and out to the horizon. Brooklyn Heights may be next door to the most urban metropolis in the world, yet it gives the impression of what the ancient Romans called a rus in urbe: a touch of the countryside in the heart of the city. As Dirk Wittenborn tells it, “Here you bump into friends in the street. You see the next generation coming in. When I’m being a cynic, I think Brooklyn Heights is a ghetto of good intention. But the more optimistic part of me sees it as an oasis.”
Photographer Arthur Elgort captures the Promenade in 1998, before the arrival of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
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David Childs’ limestone residential tower at 35 Hudson Yards.
The Future is Here The design laboratory otherwise known as Hudson Yards continues to reveal new breakthroughs. BY WENDY MOONAN
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udson Yards, Manhattan’s 28-acre city-within-a city on the West Side has garnered its full share of press in the past year with its cultural and performing arts center, the Shed, and its Neiman Marcus-anchored shopping center quickly becoming embedded within the life of the city. It is the largest private real estate development in the history of the United States, according to its co-developers, Related Companies and Oxford Properties, and within (and beneath) those millions of square feet are engineering feats, design breakthroughs, and technical innovations that have made it something of a 21st-century marvel. Hudson Yards has a first-of-its-kind micro-grid, which features two eco-friendly cogeneration plants. Four large engines generate electricity, and the excess heat they give off is recaptured and used to both heat and cool the neighborhood’s buildings. This process reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by an estimated 25,000 metric tons of CO2 per year, the equivalent of taking more than 5,000 cars off the road. There are ducts with four points of air filtration to feed fresh air to the residences; communications are supported by a fiber loop and there is a dedicated app for residents. Garbage chutes send trash barreling down at 45 mph to an ingenious underground processing area where it is then dehydrated and ground up. One building, 35 Hudson Yards, perhaps best exemplifies the cutting-edge technologies being
employed here. It is a 92-floor glass and limestone tower, the tallest residential building in the complex. David Childs, Chairman Emeritus of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), was the lead architect on 35 Hudson Yards and his colossal, mixed-use building of 1.1 million square feet includes 143 private residences, a 212room Equinox Hotel, an Equinox fitness club and spa, offices, and restaurant spaces. “It’s a small footprint for a building with so many uses,” says Childs. “Each must have its own elevator core. It isn’t simple.” He continues, “It’s also important to remember that the site has no land under it, only train tracks, so we had to slip everything in between the tracks, which are constantly in use. The building sits on transfer beams that look like bridges.” Childs says his design was inspired by its location at the intersection of 33th Street, which runs east to west, and the pedestrian park that runs from 34th street to 30th Street, north to south. The building is envisioned as the point at which these two axes meet. The base follows the eastwest, north-south grid; it stops with the overlook at 80 feet. The tower then begins to twist and turn as it ascends; a series of setbacks spiral around the building as it rises to express its different programs, from the retail podium, to the offices, to the hotel, to the residences. Terraces on each setback create outdoor gardens. “Nowhere in the world is there a design that is so site specific,” enthuses Childs. There are, blissfully, almost no cars on the site. “The northwest quadrant, at 33rd Street and 11th Avenue, is where we reserved space for all the mechanics, loading docks, and the underground collection of air,” he explains. As the architect of the One World Trade Center and 7 World Trade Center, Childs is concerned, above all, with safety. “We have taken every precaution possible at 35 Hudson Yards.” Childs is particularly proud of the materials he chose. “In the 20 years since we built the Time Warner Center, buildings have been constantly changing and improving,” he says. “The glass is much better and much more efficient. We can now block different sorts of light and transparency. We did a tremendous amount of work so the glass looks the same on the inside as it does on the outside.” He is also happy with the Bavarian limestone on the exterior. “Since a lot of structures at Hudson Yards are glass office buildings, I thought a residential structure should have stone, and I wanted to make sure the stone looked like stone, with an absorbent warm tone, but it would also have to perform like granite.” After much research, he chose a limestone from Germany that, he says, “performs well under pressure,” meaning water, wind, and abrupt changes in
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temperature. Childs noted that the columns of limestone are not square, but wedge-shaped, so the building looks different as you walk around it. “I’m interested in the interaction between the pedestrian and the building,” he says. “Its appearance changes every 20 feet as you walk by it.” Walking inside is another experience altogether, thanks to Tony Ingrao, who designed all of the residential and amenities spaces within 35 Hudson Yards. He explains, “The layouts are all generous; I took the principles from prewar apartments and applied them here. We took the same approach here as we do with our clients,” he says of a list known to include Stephen M. Ross, the late Jack Welch, Lisa and Richard Perry, and Donny Deutsch. “We know how they like to live.” The apartments range from 1,500 to 10,000 square feet and include entry foyers and tall, walnut doors, and ceilings nearly 11 feet tall. “Each space was designed to frame the stunning views of the Hudson River and city skyline, and to serve as a calming and comfortable oasis. Our goal was to create a mix of glamorous environments that work for gatherings that are large-scale as well as intimate.” Less intimate is the showstopper of a lobby: Amoeba-shaped and huge, it has a black, veined marble floor; a curving, custom-made bronze concierge desk; an immense Windfall chandelier from Germany; and furniture designed by Maria Pergay and Fendi. Related commissioned a massive contemporary, floral tapestry from the Swed-
Tony Ingrao’s cool palette of silver, gray, gold and beige is set off with marble and metallic fabrics.
“HUDSON YARDS HAS A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND MICROGRID, WHICH FEATURES TWO ECO-FRIENDLY COGENERATION PLANTS.”
A lavish, Tony Ingrao-designed amenties space at 35 Hudson Yards.
ish artist Helena Hernmarck that complements Ingrao’s design. The luxury extends to the apartments where master suites include bathrooms with polished iceberg quartzite sinks, freestanding tubs, and custom Sherle Wagner hardware. The kitchens were designed in collaboration with British firm Smallbone of Devizes and include Gaggenau appliances. The floors are oak, the cabinetry is high-gloss, stained and lacquered eucalyptus wood. The powder room sinks are thick, translucent onyx. To hear Ingrao describe it: the sky’s the limit. He also decorated two model apartments, which are fitted with custom furniture, rugs, and cutting-edge contemporary art. Residence 5503, for example, is a fully decorated, 1,892-squarefoot, two-bedroom priced at $5.8 million. “They are amazingly detailed,” says Ingrao. The palette is cool, with silver, pale gray, gold, and beige predominating, and it is all set off with marble and with metallic fabric. Imposing building amenities include a golf simulation room, corner lounge, dining room/event space, and a boardroom with office suites. According to Ingrao, “The building offers a totally integrated luxury experience for mind, body, and soul.” SPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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The Making of a Miser
When the 19th-century nonconformist Hetty Green stormed Wall Street, she didn’t ask for a seat at the table, she took it. That America’s first female tycoon also eschewed any future claim as a feminist hero, or any laudable legacy at all, only adds to her enigma. BY CHARLES SLACK
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hen the inscrutable Wall Street titan Hetty Green died in 1916, having singularly amassed a fortune worth $2.4 billion in today’s money, the New York Times took a shrewd look at her legacy, or what would later be determined to be a shocking lack thereof. “Probably her life was happy,” the obit stated. “At any rate, she had enough of courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased, and she observed such conventions as seemed to her right and useful, while coldly and calmly ignoring all the others.” It was the latter appraisal that helps explain why Hetty Green never became a household name, despite her ability to beat Gilded Age robber barons at their own game in an era when women were denied the vote, let alone given access to the halls of power. Her riotous, headstrong disregard of how rich New York women lived their lives should also have been enough to make her iconic in these days when shapers of the #MeToo movement are looking for historic role models of women carving out their own paths in the face
of male adversity. But in Hetty they’d have a hard time holding her up as a standard-bearer, during her own time—or in ours. Many of the very attributes that led to the brilliant financier’s success also led to her undoing, both during her life and afterward. Unlike such contemporaries as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, or John D. Rockefeller, whose philanthropy managed to smooth out their rough edges for posterity, Hetty had little regard for her personal legacy. She left no public monuments nor endowed any libraries, universities, or foundations whose staffs might have dutifully curated her reputation. In this sense, she can be seen as the architect of her own obscurity, or at best, her own infamy. As her financial triumphs and exploits faded from memory, what has been handed down is a compilation of anecdotes surrounding her cheapness. Google the term “world’s greatest miser” and Hetty dominates the page. This monochromatic, oft-repeated view of the brilliant financier does much to minimize a complex figure who is arguably worthy of contemporary attention. She’s as fascinating for her pioneering qualities as she is for her flaws, but the sheer tonnage of dismissive,
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Hetty Green at the wedding of her daughter Sylvia to Matthew Astor Wilks in Morristown, New Jersey, February 23, 1909.
disparaging stories have done much to bury a narrative worth telling. She was born Hetty Howland Robinson in 1834. Her delicate, retiring mother Abby was a Howland, and the Quaker Howlands were the most successful whaling family in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at a time when the nation ran on whale oil. It was Hetty’s father, the shrewd, hard-driving Edward “Black Hawk” Robinson—a Philadelphian who married into the family—whom she most identified with. An only child after the death of her infant brother, she might have spent her youth playing with other children in the fine homes overlooking the harbor. Yet it was to the docks where her father presided amid the heady smells of whale oil and money, that she gravitated. She read the financial papers aloud to her grandfather and learned thrift from her father, who turned down 10-cent cigars so as not to ruin his taste for 4-centers. She watched men drive tough bargains and learned quite literally to swear like a sailor. When her father died in 1865 with an estate totaling $90 million in today’s money, only a small portion of it was left directly to his 30-year-old
daughter. The rest went into a trust to be managed on her behalf by professional men of finance. While the bequest was more than enough to make her wealthy, the arrangement left a deep sting. Had Hetty been a son instead of a daughter, she would doubtlessly have been full partner in her father’s operations and taken over all of his fortune. Soon thereafter, She lost a contentious and highly publicized battle in court over the estate of her spinster Aunt Sylvia, forcing her to share Sylvia’s estate with New Bedford charities and ancillary relatives. It’s no exaggeration to see Hetty’s adult life as an obsessive quest to prove that she could manage the family fortune as well as, if not better than any man. (Over the years, her own investments would multiply and vastly outperform the funds left in trust, which she finally gained control of in 1896 when the last trustee died.) Hetty married businessman and investor Edward Green in 1867, bore two children, Ned and Sylvia, and for years was content to raise them in Edward’s hometown of Bellows Falls, Vermont. Although the locals were taken aback by her plain dress and her insistence on haggling over the most trifling expenses when she could have lived like a queen, these were the years when she lived the closest to what might be called a conventional life. Then, in 1885, Edward became involved in some bad railroad investments with Cisco and Son, a prominent New York brokerage firm. Hetty’s money was at Cisco, and when the brokerage failed, her finances were put directly in jeopardy. Enraged at Edward and fearing the loss of the inheritance she had dedicated herself to preserving, she stormed Wall Street. Prior to that time, she had been known as “Mrs. E.H. Green.” Now, she was simply “Hetty.” Over the next 30 years this woman ahead of her time built up a colossal fortune, buying and selling stocks and bonds, railroads, and gold mines. She lent money and, often through foreclosure, acquired buildings in New York, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis. Throughout her career as an investor, Hetty displayed unflinching, steely nerves while her male counterparts typically buckled. She avoided speculating and remained patient: she bought low, sold high, and kept her calm through every panic. She eschewed living in grand style in a mansion on Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row (though she owned property there), and instead chose to lodge in inexpensive rooming houses across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, or in Brooklyn, often under assumed names. Hetty famously made her rounds of New York banks using public transportation, and once stepped off a public coach lugging a parcel containing $200,000 in negotiable bonds. When the Wall Street banker awaiting her arrival suggested she take more secure, private transportation next time, Hetty snapped: “Perhaps you can afford to ride in a carriage. I cannot.” A cottage industry of miser tales about Hetty developed in every town or city she lived in: the furious, two-day search in Bellows Falls, Vermont, for a lost, 2-cent postage stamp; the nasty feud with Hoboken over a $2 dog license; the
heating of oatmeal for lunch on the radiators at Wall Street banks, and instructing cleaners to wash only the bottoms of her skirts—since those were the only parts dirtied by the muddy streets. But by far, the most damaging story about Hetty’s thrift involves her son, Ned, and his amputated leg. Ned had initially injured his leg as a child in a sledding accident. As the leg grew chronically worse over the years, Hetty was documented dressing Ned and herself in old clothes and presenting themselves as charity cases when seeking treatment. While there is no documentation proving that money could have saved the leg, the very act of withholding it in such dire circumstances made her a lifelong object of derision. While she was ridiculed for personal oddities in her own time, Hetty was nonetheless also respected for her financial knowledge and power. During the financial panic of 1907, when New York ran so low on funds that it froze municipal construction projects and the hiring of new police officers, Hetty’s loan of $1.1 million helped keep the government running. She had made similar loans to the city in 1898 and 1901. During the panic of 1907, J.P. Morgan organized a famous gathering of banking leaders in the private library of his home on East 36th Street. The meeting, which led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve several years later, was uniformly male, except for a lone woman who wore a black veil as she entered and exited the building. Though the mysterious woman was never formally identified, reporters of the time were convinced that it was Hetty, because she was known for wearing dark veils for privacy and because there was no other woman who carried her level of financial clout. When she lent money to churches or to a city (in 1900, she financed Tucson, Arizona’s first municipal water and sewage system), Hetty often did so at below-market rates. Yet when the transaction involved other capitalists, she was ruthless. In 1886, a group of New York investors plotted a hostile takeover of a Southern railroad called the Georgia Central. Hetty got wind of the plan and began quietly buying up every share she could get her hands on. She bided her time until the wouldbe raiders had fully committed themselves, and as the deadline neared, Hetty’s 6,700 shares could make or break the deal. Through several rounds of financial brinksmanship, Hetty let the swashbuckling investors twist and turn. Like them, she stood to lose a substantial amount if the deal fell through and the share price dropped. But she had nerves to match her foresight, and the other investors blinked first, paying her a greatly elevated share price for her pains. While Hetty enjoyed matching wits with other shrewd financiers, few things excited her ire more than a bully. Railroad magnate Collis Huntington was famous for intimidating everyone from congressmen to railroad workers, but Hetty wasn’t so easily cowed. Their ongoing feud over railroad holdings was chronicled for decades in the press, including an incident when Huntington came to her office at Chemical Bank and made the misstep of threatening her son, who was helping her manage railroad investments. Hetty didn’t flinch. NodSPRING 2020 | AVENUE MAGAZINE
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A scene on Wall Street during the panic of 1907, when Hetty famously kept her cool while others decidedly did not.
dust-covered mementoes from her life: the sleigh in which she rode with her father around the snowy streets of New Bedford as a child, old jewelry and clothing, furniture from her childhood, family photographs. Tears filled her eyes as the objects recalled memories of her youth. Then she came across a newspaper clipping about her old enemy Huntington. “That old hyena thought I’d die before him, but he’s long in his grave.” As she mulled over the titans she fought over the years, she declared to her young assistant: “I’ll outlive all of them!” In large part, Hetty achieved these goals, and it’s possible that this brought her the kind of happiness that spending her fortune did not. She proved herself more than the equal of Gilded Age Wall Street’s fiercest competitors and she did it on her own terms. She exponentially grew the small portion of her father’s fortune that he deigned appropriate to leave in her control, but he wasn’t around to express pride in that feat. It’s her loss, and ours, that she didn’t gain more gratification in mentoring other brilliant women of her day, or of helping to jump-start the women’s suffrage movement that has just marked its centennial.
But Hetty didn’t live by others’ rules or expectations, and it’s doubtful that she would even have cared that history would go on to relegate her to the sidelines. At least the paper of record recognized the double standard with which she was judged in her own era, the New York Times noting that the world’s endless focus on her personal quirks rather than on her accomplishments was owed to her gender. Had a man showed such monomaniacal zeal for acquiring wealth, stated the article, “nobody would have seen him as very peculiar.” How odd, then, that in today’s current climate of female empowerment, Hetty’s singular accomplishments have yet to spark renewed interest in the trailblazer. It’s hard to celebrate a figure as complicated at Hetty Green, but it seems even harder to ignore her. Charles Slack is the author of several books, including Liberty’s First Crisis on the early architects of American free speech, Noble Obsession on Charles Goodyear, and Hetty Green: The Genius and Madness of the America’s First Female Tycoon.
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ding to a souvenir pistol on display in her office, she said calmly, “Harm one hair on Ned’s head and I’ll put a bullet through your heart.” Hetty was also capable of swanning around in society with the other swells when it suited her, and she was liberally possessed of a lively, sharp wit that would add life to any gathering. She enjoyed a lifelong friendship with prominent socialite and philanthropist Annie Leary, and to further complicate any caricature version of her persona, she displayed quiet kindness when out of the spotlight. While living in modest boardinghouses, Hetty often nursed ill neighbors through the night and was known for handing out piggy banks to children, with money inside, and admonitions to save. Despite her groundbreaking position as a woman in finance, Hetty never professed to be a feminist. She refused when asked to advocate for the right of women to vote, and, until such time as she felt required to enter the workforce by her husband’s missteps, Hetty raised her children along more or less traditional lines. It was Ned whom she trained to take over business operations, while keeping her daughter, Sylvia, as a sort of domestic companion until she finally married. Of Hetty’s two children, it was Ned who made attempts at buying his way to happiness. After his mother’s death, he built palatial homes in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and in Florida, while indulging passions for aviation, broadcasting, auto racing, and collecting rare gems and stamps. Sylvia lived quietly in New York and in Greenwich but never had children, nor did her brother. It’s been speculated that Hetty’s fear of interlopers entering the family was the reason both Ned and Sylvia married late in life. When Ned died, he passed the bulk of his estate to Sylvia, and when she died, her estate scattered Hetty’s meticulously built fortune to dozens of distant relatives, universities, private schools, and charities—none of the gifts having been earmarked for reputation management of the iconoclast who built it. In her zealousness to protect and grow her fortune, Hetty lived a life of extraordinary secretiveness—as if by hoarding her treasures away from public eyes she might more meaningfully preserve them. She didn’t appear to gain pleasure by spending or sharing the money she earned, and it’s difficult to determine where she did gain pleasure. An assistant recalled accompanying Hetty, near the end of her life, to the top floor of a nearly empty loft building she owned in lower Manhattan. In the stultifying heat and near-darkness, they climbed floor after floor. At the top landing was a door. She bent down and felt for a thread running from the bottom of the door to the floor. “If anybody ever goes in here, I’ll know it because the thread will be broken,” she said. Satisfied that the room was secure, Hetty unlocked the door to a chamber packed with
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The world of interior design and architecture gathered at Pace Gallery for a star-filled evening in honor of Architectural Digest’s 100th anniversary. Party hosts Roger Lynch, Anna Wintour, and Amy Astley welcomed the industry’s biggest names to the gallery’s 75,000-square-foot flagship at 540 West 25th Street, unveiled in 2019. Since the ribbon cutting, the gallery’s curatorial team has launched “Pace Live,” a multidisciplinary platform for music, dance, film, performance, and conversation—an expansion in programming befitting of a major milestone as Pace celebrates its 60th year. David Lauren and Lauren Bush Lauren
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ESH Executive Director Daniel Diaz with ESH students and the Porsche auction
Eric Wittenberg
EAST SIDE HOUSE SETTLEMENT TO HOST THE NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL AUTO SHOW GALA PREVIEW On April 9, the annual ESH Gala Preview will be co-chaired by Christopher LaSusa, Eric Wittenberg, and Philip L. Yang, Jr., and offers guests the rare chance to view the NYIAS before it opens to the public. Produced in partnership with the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, the evening benefits ESH, a leading provider of innovative social services in the city’s most vulnerable communities. The new Post-Secondary Pathways (PSP) program connects at-risk students with careers in tech and healthcare via certification programs taken while completing their high school diploma. Finding themselves on a path to dropping out, these students use PSP to help them attain a livable wage and a pathway out of poverty. “We teach students not just about getting a job but about achieving career mobility,” said Daniel Diaz, Executive Director of ESH. “Our groundbreaking PSP program sets up our youth to attain credentials and skills that increase their employability.” Tickets/tables are available at galapreview.org and range from $250–$100,000.
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WHITNEY ART PARTY
You know it’s a good party when there is a bar set up in the elevator. The Whitney Museum of American Art (which happens to have a super-sized elevator that can accommodate such things), pulled out all the stops for its annual art party that brought together an adaucious mix of sports stars, artists, celebrities, fashion designers, and the people rich enough to patronize all of the above. Co-chaired by Olivia Palermo, Michael Carl, Micaela Erlanger, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Nigel Sylvester, the party featured DJ sets by Dizzy Fae, Okay Kaya, and SHYBOI, along with a performance of triple DJ by Darren Bader. Katie Holmes was wearing Carolina Herrera, which must have pleased Wes Gordon (see photo above for evidence) since he serves as the brand’s creative director. Victor Cruz
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AVENUE MAGAZINE RELAUNCHES AT 35 HUDSON YARDS
Avenue celebrated its relaunch on January 22 at 35 Hudson Yards, an evening featuring music by DJ Brendan Fallis and top-flight fare by Olivier Cheng Catering. The setting was a model residence inside one of Hudson Yards’ most luxurious new developments, with sweeping views and interiors designed by Tony Ingrao. Hundreds of New York notables attended, from fashion designers Dennis Basso, Peter Som, and Nicole Miller, to Avenue cover star Calvin Royal III and dozens of ABT dancers, who mingled with Kyra Kennedy, Dorinda Medley, Amy Hargreaves, Andrew Warren, Josh Beckerman, Alex Lundqvist, Jhoan Sebastian Grey, Domenico Vacca, Jimmy Pezzino, and the glamorous people you see here.
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Martine Assouline and Lou Houllier
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have to know to ask for them, an off-menu item like steak tips on toast were at Elaine’s. They’re for contrarians who miss the sulfur hiss in the hand of a live flame, cool-looking matches still owning a kind of street cred. Matchbooks and boxes never quite went extinct for another, equally good reason; they’re fun to fiddle with. So, put them to work on scented candles, pilot-light outages, and the fireplace on cold, winter nights. Give yourself a point for every one of those pictured that you, too, could fish from a kitchen drawer.
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIELLE KROLL
ou don’t have to smoke to love matchbooks, and savvy restaurateurs around town acknowledge this on some level in the form of these seemingly arcane, and yet still omnipresent, portable objets d’art. Bans may be in force, but brands never die. (Not even the ones attached to defunct—but still beloved—NYC institutions). In the slightly nannied environment in which we now live, giveaway matchbooks are maybe not so politically correct. You
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Getting Lit, by the Book
AVENUE MAGAZINE | SPRING 2020
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Gateway to Southampton Gary R. DePersia Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker m 516.380.0538 | gdp@corcoran.com
Southampton. A masterful symphony of architecture, interior design and landscaping, orchestrated by an exacting owner with strong continental sensibilities, has hit all the right chords within this magnificent Southampton estate awaiting its next maestro. A gated drive winds its way through park-like grounds to find the nearly 6,000 SF residence overlooking a stunning 2.3 acres of manicured grounds. Architect Peter Wrangel has crafted a stunning home that has been beautifully interpreted by builder Richard Flood forming the perfect canvas for the stunning interiors articulated by world renowned, interior designer Charles Pavarini. A regal entry leads to the gorgeous formal living room with fireplace under high ceilings. Sundrenched by day, this room will at night be the focal point of all your entertaining as conversation and laughter resonate from the contiguous formal dining room. The fully outfitted kitchen by St. Charles of New York is highlighted by a La Cornue range under a custom hood and is joined by professional appliances and the sun-filled breakfast nook. Generous stone terraces allow for lounging, dining and views of the expansive grounds below. Begin and end your days in the exquisite first floor master wing augmented by an expansive, luxurious bath. Upstairs finds three additional bedroom suites, each distinctively appointed and all with baths ensuite and access to an intimate roof deck. A separate bedroom suite awaits at the top of its own staircase suitable for both special guests or staff. A garage is artfully located beneath the residence. Outside a stone staircase descends through elegant stone retaining walls to the arboretum-like grounds curated by landscape architect Michael Spitzer. Illuminated at night by extensive ground lighting, this lovely tableau offering a sea of lawn amidst a kaleidoscope of color, frames the heated Gunite pool and pool house augmented by a bath with marble vanity and full kitchen with Brazilian granite counters. Outdoor seating and dining areas are found under romantic vine-covered arbors on either side of the pool house. A separate cottage provides a gym on the main level, second floor studio with full bath and room for a small car. With easy access to and from Manhattan as well as proximity to the village of Southampton and its pristine ocean beaches and nearby marinas, this extraordinary estate, at a commanding new price, deserves your attention today. Exclusive. Price Upon Request. WEB#347196 Real estate agents affiliated with The Corcoran Group are independent contractors and are not employees of The Corcoran Group. Equal Housing Opportunity. The Corcoran Group is a licensed real estate broker located at 660 Madison Ave, NY, NY 10065. All listing phone numbers indicate listing agent direct line unless otherwise noted. All information furnished regarding property for sale or rent or regarding financing is from sources deemed reliable, but Corcoran makes no warranty or representation as to the accuracy thereof. All property information is presented subject to errors, omissions, price changes, changed property conditions, and withdrawal of the property from the market, without notice. All dimensions provided are approximate. To obtain exact dimensions, Corcoran advises you to hire a qualified architect or engineer.
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