VERNISSAGE

Panic! At the

HedgerowF orget the infinity pool, the ten-car garage, the infrared sauna, and even the outdoor screening room. This summer’s must-have accessory for the Hamptons elite is a panic room. “Safe rooms” have been around for thousands of years, from Roman villas and medieval castle keeps to priest holes. Their growing popularity on the East End is the result of a number of factors, from growing wealth in the area (which in recent years has soared from merely stratospheric to almost galactic heights), to an increase in gang activity on Long Island, and most recently a local politics dustup about whether to “save” or “defund” the police. Last summer, a 24-count indictment was brought against eight members of the MS-13 gang, including multiple racketeering offenses in connection with six murders. This went down in Central Islip, which at just under an hour away from Southampton is too close for many residents’ comfort. Charlie McArdle, president of the Eastern Long Island Police Conference and who also owns a private security company in the Hamptons, said there were gang arrests in Montauk and the North Fork in recent years, as well. “They’re everywhere,” he says.

He knows of several larger Hamptons homes outfitted with safe rooms, and that they are not for the hoi polloi. The cost of installing one starts at $50,000, and can run as high as half a million, depending on add-ons such as a backup generator, supplies storage, and of course bulletproof electronic doors.

Mike Peters, CEO of Ultimate Bunker (tag line: “America’s Best! Underground Bunkers”) adds that you also need to budget for air conditioning and bathrooms. “Those are almost always a must-have. And everyone is always concerned about communication. A cell phone booster is needed to get cell phone service or installation of a landline,” he says. “Communication with the outside world is key.”

It’s not unusual to find four-inch-thick steel doors with ten-gauge carbon steel inner plates and secure bolts around the perimeter. Electronic key guards are de rigueur to prevent lock manipulation. And safe rooms are meant to be secret, so blending into the rest of the house is also important, he points out: “Matching the Sheetrock, lighting, and flooring is important to the high-end customer.”

Larger panic rooms can also do double duty as a wine cellar or a home theater—a guest invited for a screening would never guess the doors are blast-resistant. Others opt for a safe room behind a fireplace or a bookcase, where a hidden switch in a book or on the mantelpiece opens up the hideaway. These are often outfitted with flatscreen TVs, comfortable furniture, and bedding, and stocked with food and even booze because who knows how long you will be in there.

“The most important thing people want in a safe room is that once you close the door, you’re bulletproof and people proof,” says Peters.

In Southampton, “Save the Police: Village in Crisis” signs have sprung up on lawns all over town, symbols of a contentious divide between the mayor and the police department. Mayor Jesse Warren commissioned a controversial outside investigation into his own force, even as the Southampton Village Police Benevolent Association hit him with a vote of no confidence last fall. Though he has denied it, many residents fear the mayor is looking to disband or reduce the Village police, leaving the Town police to handle local crime. Some residents report their pro-police yard signs being burned or defaced, adding to a backdrop of tension McArdle says is increasing demand for private security solutions.

One Hamptons couple told Avenue they have a panic room to which not even their children have been given the code. “We had been robbed in the past, so we built our house with a safe room off our bedroom,” the homeowner says, adding: “Home invasions usually happen at night.” Ingeniously, this safe room is located over the garage and equipped with a chute, so they can slide down to their car for a quick getaway. Fortunately, they have yet to use it.—nancy kane

“THE MOST IMPORTANT THING PEOPLE WANT IN A SAFE ROOM IS THAT ONCE YOU CLOSE THE DOOR,

YOU’RE BULLETPROOF AND PEOPLE PROOF.”

Mike Peters

Board Certified

The pandemic hasn’t been easy on New Yorkers, which nobody knows better than Dr. Samantha Boardman. The self-described “positive psychiatrist” recently returned to her practice at Madison and 76th, after a year of treating patients over video and phone calls. “Nothing beats in person,” she told Avenue earlier this summer. “Zoom can be distracting—people don’t love to look at themselves.”

Dr. Boardman has been in the public eye, one way or another, for decades. In the 1990s, she and her sister, Serena (now a top Sotheby’s realtor), were much admired on the social and fashion circuits. She holds degrees from Harvard University (cum laude, thank you very much) and Cornell University Medical College. And in 2005 she married Aby Rosen, the real estate titan and leading art collector. It hardly seems fair that on top of all that, she is a fabulous writer as well.

“This was five years in the making,” she says of her debut book, Everyday Vitality: Turning Stress into Strength, out August 10 from Penguin Life. “The takeaway is, positive mental health comes from your [interpersonal] connections, and your ability to contribute to something and challenge yourself.”

The book’s 22 fluid chapters contain practical advice for combating ennui and languishing, without ever descending into navel-gazing. “There’s lots of overpromising in the wellness-industrial complex of, you know—you can just download happiness or buy a crystal that is going to transform your life and diminish your stress. And I’m troubled by that,” she says. “You can’t ‘eat-pray-love’ yourself into well-being.”

The book also examines the feelings of ambivalence many people are expressing about coming back out of their shell following a year of lockdown.

“To people who are feeling avoidant and scared to get back out there, I would say: Pick and choose carefully, and spend time with the people whom you know you can have meaningful conversations and positive interactions with. Avoidance is a response that in the short term might make you feel better, but in the long term we know it is not a way to handle something.”

Dr. Boardman credits the shift in her approach, to focus on positivity, to a former patient who fired her in 2011. “She said to me, ‘Dr. Boardman, all we ever do is talk about everything that’s wrong with me—we never talk about anything else.’ And that ended up sending me back to medical school.”

And the fruit of that, at least partly, is this book. Did she ever reach out to the patient who fired her, to say how much that changed her life?

“I tried—I couldn’t find her,” she says, chuckling. “At the time, that experience really stung. But it really made me rethink what I thought I knew—some of the best challenges can turn out to be transformational. I’m extremely grateful to her. I have a friend who says, ‘Whenever you have an experience with someone when you feel diminished in a way, send them flowers.’ I think there’s something very nice in that.” —ben widdicombe

Ball Player

It’s a wonder Maye Musk ever goes out. For the silver-haired entrepreneur, model, nutrition expert, and mother of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, small talk at society events inevitably involves attempts to curry her son’s favor and a subject off-limits to many New York women: her age.

“Most people just ask me how I look so healthy and have so much energy for a woman of 73,” the red-carpet habitué said good-naturedly over email from her vacation in an undisclosed location. “I tell them it’s because I eat well, following science and common sense, not trendy and fad diets,” she said.

Musk will put her earnest proselytizing to good use when she is honored alongside jewelry designer Simone I. Smith at the Angel Ball Summer Gala in Southampton on August 20. Hosted by Denise Rich and her daughters Daniella Rich Kilstock and Ilona Rich Schachter, it’s the first time the renowned cancer charity event is being held out east. (Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation for Cancer Research, named for Denise’s late daughter, Gabrielle Rich Aouad, has raised around $38 million since being founded in 1996.)

“This is special, a fundraiser for scientists who do cancer research,” said Musk, adding that the funding for the research work on her two master of science degrees were from scholarships. “Most of us have been touched by cancer in our families, and we need to find a cure.”

And if that means going the extra yard then so be it. As her recent appearance on Saturday Night Live attests, she shares her son’s boundless sense of adventure. Can we expect a duet with Mary J. Blige, who, along with Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, is a dinner cochair? “I’m always game for anything,” Musk said. “If someone wants to hear a really bad singer, that’s fine with me. We can’t be great at everything.”—horacio silva

Typo Personality

“Iam an appellate lawyer and persnickety dude. As a hobby, I correct typos in the Times, which no longer employs copy editors and consequently has tons of typos.” That’s the characteristically concise bio offered by Twitter user @nyttypos, an anonymous account that delights in antagonizing the New York Times, as well as many of its journalists by name. In thousands of broadsides aimed at the so-called Paper of Record, sometimes dozens a day, he corrects mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar for an audience of more than 23,000 followers.

No detail is too picayune to call out, from an improperly italicized quotation mark to a missing comma. “Gibberish” is a word he frequently uses to describe the paper’s tweets.

Speaking over the phone from a cell number with a Pennsylvania area code, the government lawyer in his mid-30s (whose identity Avenue has agreed not to disclose) said he relies on a 2015 copy of the paper’s internal style guide to make his corrections.

“Sometimes they’ll tell me, ‘Well, you’re relying on this old style guide,’ and that ‘we've changed and we view the CDC as a singular and not as a plural as we used to,’” he said. “And then I correct people over that.”

One reporter who is sometimes a target, and who seems to enjoy sparring with the account on Twitter, is business section media columnist Ben Smith.

“I’ve always appreciated people on the internet helping make the work better,” Smith told Avenue in a deadpan e-mail. “So, of course I appreciate it.”

Not everyone feels so kindly about the criticism, however. “Occasionally, people do make comments on Twitter complaining about my tone,” Mr. Persnickety said. “They’ll say, ‘You're complaining about the placement of an apostrophe during a pandemic!’”

One culture desk reporter was especially aggrieved by a correction to a tweet about the Academy Awards. “The next morning, I see this notification that she says that she was having a bad day. And she theorizes maybe I knew that, because I looked up her Twitter and read her tweet, and so I shouldn’t have” piled on, he said, adding that he remained unmoved. “I mean, if they’re having a bad day, I don’t think that I’m going to ruin their bad day because I’ve mentioned that there’s a typo in their article.”

Being a government attorney, and not tethered to billable client hours as he would be in private practice, is perhaps what allows him to scrutinize the Times in such detail. But what do his friends and family think about his unusual hobby?

“I think that, knowing me, it doesn’t seem to surprise them,” he said. “Nobody really has anything negative to say about the whole thing other than, you know, suggestions that I ought to be nicer.”

To which his response is “No.”

Asked what other career he might have considered had he not been a lawyer, he said that he had always wanted to write films. This might surprise people who imagine that he is desperate to be a copy editor.

“No, I wouldn’t like that,” he said. “It seems a little insignificant to just copy edit.”—bw