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COVID-FLEEING NEW YORKERS ARE MOVING UPSTATE IN RECORD NUMBERS,
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WRITES MATTHEW PHILLP. BUT WHEN THESE NEWCOMERS CAN’T
ADJUST THEIR BIG CITY EXPECTATIONS TO SIMPLE COUNTRY LIVING, HILARITY ENSUES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CELYN BRAZIER
“P ut it this way,” explains realtor Erin Flaherty, “there’s a two-to-threeyear waiting list to have contractors break ground on a swimming pool in Woodstock right now.”
Sitting by the fishpond in her Woodstock backyard, the Halter Associates Realty agent marvels at the current property boom in the upstate counties nearest to New York City, which is unlike anything in living memory. According to the National Association of Realtors, Ulster County saw a second quarter increase of 17.6 percent in home prices between 2019 and 2020, the highest increase in any US metropolitan region; neighboring Dutchess and Putnam Counties saw a boost of 6 percent.
“There are almost no rentals available either,” Flaherty says. “Scoring a desirable house upstate is like winning the lottery—and it’s a lottery you pay a lot of money to enter.”
When Covid measures e ectively shut down life in the five boroughs last year, many New York City residents made a snap decision to try full-time rural living. As a result, small towns are now bursting at the seams with New Yorkers in search of the simple life. The result has been scenes playing out like real-life versions of (depending on your generational frame of reference) Green Acres or Schitt’s Creek, with cashed-up city slickers confronted by pared-down country amenities that don’t always satisfy their metropolitan expectations.
“Most restaurants up here don’t deliver,” says one frustrated Ulster restaurateur. “That hasn’t stopped the calls from people who want us to deliver dishes that we don’t even make. One lady called the other night at closing, she wanted a platter of unseasoned, skinless, grilled chicken breasts. When I said we couldn’t help, she berated me for wasting the time she’d spent explaining her order. I wanted to say, ‘Calm down, it’s just dinner!’ ”
Of course, upstate towns like Woodstock, Saugerties, Hudson, Phoenicia, and Rhinebeck have been popular escapes for New Yorkers for decades. The region has a robust cultural legacy— including the legendary three-day “Aquarian Exposition” of 1969, known around the world simply as Woodstock—that reaches back a century. Since 1903, the Woodstock Byrdcli e Guild has attracted countless artists, among them Bob Dylan, sculptor Eva Hesse, painter Philip Guston, and the Broadway legend Helen Hayes, whose namesake hospital in West Haverstraw is still in operation.
For this reason, along with its bucolic charms, the region is a magnet for the most successful among the city’s creative class. Iman and her late husband, David Bowie, purchased a 50acre Woodstock compound in 2011—on whose grounds the singer’s ashes were reportedly scattered following his 2016 death. From the Hollywood crowd, the actors Paul Rudd and Jeffrey Dean Morgan own Samuel’s Sweet Shop in Rhinebeck. Amanda Seyfried, Michelle Williams, and Blake Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, all have homes upstate, as does the photographer Terry Richardson.
Flaherty, a former Harper’s Bazaar executive editor who owns homes on Manhattan’s East
Side and in Woodstock, has lived upstate fulltime for two years. She says it’s now common to list a property midweek and by the weekend have hundreds of interested buyers lined up, with cash o ers submitted almost immediately—many wanting to buy the staging furniture as well.
“Woodstock is the new Hamptons, except it’s not played out,” she says. “People who move here tend to be creative and passionate about getting involved in the community. This has always been a Subaru and VW van town. And now, all of a sudden, it’s Beemers and Rangers. Covid pushed the migration rate to Hamptons level. People now pay one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars over asking price.”
David and Lauren (who requested their surnames be withheld), both New York executives, live in a two-bedroom duplex in the West Village. Until quarantine, they hadn’t considered upstate as a viable destination, preferring the Hamptons instead.
“I’d started noticing ‘#UpstateNewYork’ in my feed, and the photos were just so beautiful,” says Lauren. “I’m a total hippie at heart and David’s favorite band is the Rolling Stones, so we were immediately into it.”
“And, with Covid on the rise, upstate seemed like a safer place to live,” David adds. “I wasn’t so worried about myself, but Lauren was feeling anxious and the city was dead anyway.”
But while shopping around New Paltz for their ideal house—something not too far from town with four bedrooms, a kitchen with an Aga, and a large yard for their French bulldog—the couple has had some hair-raising experiences. “We’re not afraid of a little real estate competition,” says David. “But it’s been intense a few times.”
“On one trip, I was doing a quick k-turn on the main street in Woodstock and some woman yelled at me and called me a [expletive]!” says Lauren. “It wouldn’t have shocked me if that happened in the city, but upstate? I feel like she didn’t like that I was driving a Porsche.”
Carter Edwards, programs director at Mount Tremper Arts, a nearby dance and performance center, and his husband, Joshua Lyon, a writer and editor, have owned a bungalow in the hamlet of Shady since 2012. They split their time between Ulster Country and a Brooklyn loft until last summer, when they moved upstate full-time.
“We’d been making the transition gradually,”
ERIN FLAHERTY, REALTOR
says Edwards, sitting by a fire pit in their treelined backyard. “I’ve talked to people up here over the years, and that seems to have been the trend for decades. You get a weekend house and, over time, it becomes your home and eventually you move or retire here. Josh and I were already doing that, but the pandemic accelerated it. I think if you move here from the city without acclimating, it can be a bit of a culture shock.”
Indeed, Edwards first noticed the tension between Woodstock residents and new arrivals mounting last summer, exacerbated by Covid restrictions. “It was significantly more crowded than it normally is. No one was going to the bars, of course, but they were outdoors a lot and everybody had descended on Big Deep,” he says, referring to a popular local swimming hole surrounded by walking trails.
Concerned about infection rates, local authorities put up signs declaring the area closed. When that was ignored, the area was cordoned o with police tape, which also failed to stop large groups of people swimming. “Everyone decided that the rules didn’t apply to them,” says Edwards. “Locals got territorial, and weekenders saw a quaint swimming hole and just went, ‘Of course it’s fine for me to walk nearby.’ It became a real point of conflict.”
Woodstock Fire Department chief Kevin Peters has been a firefighter and resident of Woodstock for more than 40 years. He says the influx of unprepared visitors and new residents has brought an increase in avoidable alarm calls. “Airbnbs should provide detailed instructions on how to operate a wood fireplace and chimney,” he says. “It’s also clear people just aren’t taught the right way to use a CO2 alarm.” Locals trade stories about the most ridiculous 911 calls that have been made by clueless newcomers, some expecting emergency services to respond if their child has a mild rash or their small dog is unsettled by local wildlife.
As someone who has divided his time between upstate and Brooklyn since 2014, I can also attest to the recent uptick in NYC-style agita. The days of driving along Woodstock’s main street, Mill Hill Road, without fearing a collision came to an end last summer—and not just because of Porsches making k-turns. Now, unfamiliar drivers regularly charge through stop signs from side streets, causing honking tra c to screech to a halt.
The other day, I also made the mistake of accidentally cutting in front of a Lululemon-clad woman pushing a $1,500 champagne-black Mima Xari stroller outside the local bakery, Bread Alone. To be fair, she was practicing social distancing, so it was a little unclear if she was in line. But when I stepped in front of her, she hit me with the kind of broadside I would normally associate with the passive-aggressive yoga moms of Tribeca or Park Slope. “If you want to cut in line in front of an 18-month-old who hasn’t had breakfast yet, then by all means make that decision,” she said. Taken aback, it took me a moment to realize I wasn’t in a midtown Starbucks.
South of Woodstock, near Bethel, live Samara Naeymi, a voiceover artist, and her husband, Brendan Regimbal, who works for Columbia University. Last year, they purchased a 36-acre lakefront property in Sullivan County from a couple who were retiring to Mexico.
“There is a definite influx of people who don’t get it,” she says. “We went for a walk recently and ran into some hipster bro with an artisanal co ee, talking loudly on his phone in the woods. Our dog bounded up to him and he panicked, dropped his co ee, and bolted in the other direction without even saying hello. Who does that in the country?”
Naeymi says she wouldn’t be surprised if their home’s previous owners could see the influx of city dwellers and knew the area was no longer for them.
“We’re really happy to have found this place—we’ve loved upstate New York for years,” Naeymi says. “It was odd though, because at the time prices were going through the roof and bidding wars were everywhere. These guys had lived here since the ’80s but were so eager to sell that it was listed for $499,000 and we got it for just $530,000. We weren’t sure we’d get it given the market—it could easily have been a hundred over asking.”
But the lower-than-expected closing price wasn’t all that pointed to the owners’ frantic need to get out before the crowds took over. After having in-person walk-throughs postponed several times, Naeymi and Regimbal finally entered their new property on the day they closed the sale and saw that while everything was spotlessly clean, the sellers had left all their possessions behind. Among the furniture, they found collectibles including vintage Playboy and Playgirl magazines; Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Disney memorabilia; a chest of costume jewelry brooches; a stack of faded family photographs stashed beneath a chair; and an entire room full of neatly piled wicker baskets. What really shocked Naeymi, however, were two plain envelopes, one marked “2019 Tax Returns,” and the other “Last Will and Testament.”
“I haven’t opened the envelopes, but taxes and a will seem like pretty important paperwork,” she says. Clearly, the previous owners couldn’t get out fast enough.
Ironically, the boom in property prices has been so lucrative for upstate residents that it has also funded movement in the opposite direction. Some sellers have taken the money and opted to move back into the city, despite the virus, where relative bargains are suddenly available.
Dr. Giancarlo Poletti and his wife, Yumi Kurosawa Poletti, both musicians, moved from the Upper East Side into a three-bedroom house on 1.6 acres in Saugerties in 2008. They’d been considering selling up and buying a house elsewhere for years, but the increased interest in upstate made the decision that much easier.
After putting their house on the market one morning in June, it didn’t even have time to appear online before their broker called with interest from a New York City buyer. A virtual tour was conducted via iPad at 11 a.m., and by 3 p.m. the place was sold with no contingencies.
“It was the quickest sale of a property I’ve ever been involved in,” says Dr. Poletti. “We got almost $70,000 more than we’d asked for in a matter of hours. We loved living upstate in that house, but we’re glad we got out when we did.” The Polettis have since moved back to Brooklyn and have their sights on a house somewhere in Europe, but haven’t yet decided where.
How the easing of Covid restrictions and the sudden population increase will impact life upstate in the long term remains to be seen, but there’s no sign interest is waning. “One of the many things that makes Woodstock cool is that it’s always been the kind of place celebrities can hang out and nobody bothers them,” says Flaherty, the realtor. “David Bowie used to go to the local deli, the Cub, regularly and no one would bat an eye. There’s never been paparazzi up here.”
But now, she adds ruefully, “I wonder if that’ll change.”
LIVING
HOW DO YOU IMPROVE ON A HERITAGE LUGGAGE BRAND
ALREADY BELOVED BY MOVIE STARS, ROYALTY, AND POP ICONS? CLO COHEN, T. ANTHONY’S NEW PRESIDENT AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TELLS BEN WIDDICOMBE SHE HAS SOME IDEAS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK MELE
GoingPlaces
ZOOM MEETING Clo Cohen is always ready to go with pieces from T. Anthony, including the classic du le in red ($525); wheeled suiter in black and tan ($795); and boating totes in black and red ($385 each).
Clo Cohen says that she never plans an outfit. “I even wasn’t sure I would wear my wedding dress on the day,” she quips. “I go with how I feel at the moment—I’m very last-minute.”
One thing she definitely knows how to do, however, is pack a bag. The longtime fashion executive, writer, sometime model, and now president and creative director of T. Anthony, the New York heritage luggage and accessories brand, comes from a family of inveterate travelers. “My father is South African, and my mother is from Ireland,” she tells Avenue. “They met in Dublin when my father was traveling around Ireland by motorbike.”
Fast-forward a decade and their daughter, Clodagh Margaret Jacobs, the youngest of four children, was born in Johannesburg. Her father’s business consulting career soon took the family to Europe, however. “We lived in Cap d’Antibes for 18 months, and then he moved us to Brussels for two years and I attended a French-speaking school,” she recalls. There were also stints in Ireland and then Britain, the country she returned to after finishing high school in South Africa; she later studied at Oxford.
IN WITH THE NEW In New York, T. Anthony opened a new flagship store on East 57th Street in November. Below: a flight of credit card cases from the new accessories range ($255 each).
As a young graduate she worked in the advertising industry, and as a model and voiceover artist. “I love singing and music and even sang at weekends in a cover band that did parties and bar mitzvahs—we sang at Fergie and Andrew’s housewarming, amongst other things,” she laughs, referring to the Duke and Duchess of York. Then she was approached by a headhunter to work in the press department of Gucci in London when Tom Ford had just debuted his first collection for the brand.
“Tom Ford had just taken the helm and I never looked back,” she says wistfully. “Fashion was my thing—I had found my niche.”
Working with the designer at his creative peak was an eye-opening experience for the young luxury brand professional. “I adored Tom. To me, he was the epitome of living, breathing elegance and style,” she says. “What I learned from him was simplicity in fashion. My exquisitely stylish mother had always told us, ‘When in doubt about what you are wearing, don’t add a piece, take something o , darling.’ Tom’s design ethic resonated with that.”
At Gucci, Cohen was head of accessories, jewelry, watches, fragrance and sponsorship— experience that would be invaluable at every subsequent stage of her career. Indeed, after seven years at the Italian luxury house, she was approached by Tamara Mellon, who with designer Jimmy Choo cofounded the eponymous British shoe label in 1996. By 2002 she was living in New York and opening stores for the brand, as well as wrangling celebrities and managing red carpet looks for the Oscars.
“Tamara is wonderful. She taught me that fashion could be very joyful and fun—up until then I had taken it all a bit seriously, and suddenly I was handling shoes with pompoms and feathers and arranging girls’ lunches all over the US,” Cohen says. “It was such a tonic in my life.”
Another significant life event also happened around this time. “I had met my future husband, Charles, in London at a dinner party given by a mutual friend, Lady Caroline Wrey. We dated from the moment I moved to New York,” she says. “We became engaged and were married in six months.”
Cohen now has two boys, aged 12 and 14, as well as two older stepchildren, and the family splits their time between residences in New York City, Greenwich, West Hollywood, and Palm Beach. With all this moving around, it’s no wonder she developed a taste for high-quality luggage—and one of the first brands that caught her eye was T. Anthony.
“When I first came to New York, I lived near the store on 56th Street. As I walked past, I thought the luggage was so clean and distinctive without obvious labels. I was traveling a lot across America, opening Jimmy Choo stores, and I wanted my luggage to be very clean to reflect my design aesthetic. So, I started collecting pieces,” she says. “And when Charles and I got married, for various anniversary or birthday gifts, I would buy him pieces to start his collection.”
The young fashion executive could hardly have known that, just a few years later, T. Anthony would collect her.
MAMA’S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG Clockwise from right: monogram flip wallets ($295 each) in tones to match every mood; Cohen with pieces from her personal collection, including classic du les, boating totes, a wheeled suiter—and even a T. Anthony tassel ($65); and, below, relaxing at home with classic du le in blue ($525).
In 1931 Theodore Anthony Froitzheim, a young graduate of the University of Heidelberg, fled the growing turmoil in Germany for a brighter future in America. After landing in New York at the age of 18, he worked his way up to become manager of the luggage department at Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1944, businesswoman Florence Nightingale Graham tapped him to create product cases for the burgeoning cosmetics empire she founded under a pseudonym— Elizabeth Arden.
Froitzheim—perhaps taking a cue from his successful client—rebranded himself as T. Anthony, and opened his first store under that name in 1946, on Madison Avenue at 66th Street. It was an immediate success, attracting influential clients including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, assuring his wares would be seen in media around the world.
After that, the celebrity clientele rolled in— notably, in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, whose signature red luggage is still in production today. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a frequent customer starting in the 1960s—followed by Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the 1970s and ’80s. In the ’90s and beyond, Elton John traveled with so many dozens of T. Anthony cases that his caravan became an object of fascination with the tabloid press, which would publish stories based on paparazzi shots of his luggage alone.
Froitzheim died while on a European cruise in 1972, earning a New York Times obituary, and control of the business eventually passed to his sonin-law, Michael Root. Over the years he declined many o ers to sell the business, until receiving interest from Cohen’s husband, Charles, who also publishes Avenue magazine.
“It tuned out that I was actually part of the deal, because the owner knew me as a longtime customer and knew that I loved the company,” Cohen says. “He didn’t want to sell to someone who would totally change the brand.”
Root says that he feels fortunate to have worked in luxury goods for 38 years. “My goal for the succession was to find an individual who was better than I was,” he wrote in an email last year. “Someone who shared my love of the brand, who understood the T. Anthony customer and the brand’s DNA. But more important, the company needed someone with the vision, skills, and resources to the take the T. Anthony brand to a new international audience. That individual, our new president, is Clo Cohen.”
CLO COHEN
TOTES MAGOTES The stylish T. Anthony tote, introduced by Cohen, looks as good at the beach as it is practical at home.
Today, as president and creative director, Cohen is expanding T. Anthony’s range while preserving its greatest hits. “The DNA of the brand is the most important element to me,” she says. “I’m moving cautiously with the product, keeping the key pieces and adding where I believe our customer has needs. I want to provide the highest quality product with an ethical and responsible provenance.”
That means new color options for the brand’s classic canvas luggage, as well as smaller pieces like organizing bags that fit within the luggage; cosmetics bags; luggage straps; and wallets and card cases. “I’ve also introduced a beach tote for traveling around town or to the Hamptons; we have polycarbonate for a younger traveler that is super lightweight and has a webbing design that echoes the canvas fabric that is part of our heritage collection,” she says. “I’m also working on some collaborations. In the past we created a capsule luggage collection with Vogue, and we did a leather travel bag with Jay-Z.”
It helps that Cohen knows the T. Anthony customer so well. Their totes carry groceries in the morning, go on a school run each afternoon, and cart snow or beach gear on weekends. Their hard cases are just as likely to be tumbling o the roof of a Land Rover on the veldt as they are to be cosseted in the hold of a Gulfstream; their canvas du els need to look equally stylish on a stroll along the Champs-Élysées or being thrown onto a dock in Curaçao.
“Most of us daydream about traveling the globe and experiencing this beautiful world, and so how much fun is it to collect luggage pieces or grow a collection for yourself or your children or for somebody you love? The memories endure and the collection increases with the trips you take, and it all becomes part of your life’s tapestry and history. Our cases have seen every corner of this world: Africa, upstate New York, Vegas, Hawaii,” she says.
“They’re like stamps in a passport—except you renew your passport, and hopefully these cases go on forever.”
NEIGHBORHOOD SPOTLIGHT
SOHO SO GOOD
FLANEUR CENTRAL Fanelli Café (est. 1922) is a familiar beacon across from the Mercer Hotel (est. 1997).
THE DOWNTOWN NEIGHBORHOOD BELOVED BY BLUE-CHIP ARTISTS, STREET STYLE STARS, AND LUXURY SHOPPERS IS MANHATTAN’S SPIRITUAL HOME OF BOURGEOIS-BOHEMIAN BONHOMIE.
JOSHUA DAVID STEIN, A SELF-DESCRIBED “RESENTFUL OUTER-BOROUGHER,” PLAYS TOURIST FOR A DAY
New York City is a metropolis of millions and yet, to a shocking extent, its character has been shaped by the vision of one man, Robert Moses. Before they became literally concrete, most of the traffic channels that course through our city from the Bronx to the Hamptons, sluicing cataracts of cars, existed first in the mind of this farsighted but ruthless mid-century maestro of public works.
Entire neighborhoods were razed or bisected to make way for his vision of an automotive-forward city. And yet, one of New York’s most iconic quarters, SoHo, is a testament to his failure.
Had Moses had his way, the ten-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway would have subsumed Broome
Street from the Holland Tunnel in the west to the
Williamsburg Bridge in the east. It is hard to imagine that SoHo’s charm could have withstood such a bifurcation of its frontal cortex.
Happily, Moses was thwarted by the remarkable urbanist Jane Jacobs, in an epic, true-life confrontation between David and Goliath. Today,
Moses has a beach named after him, and is the subject of a long book—a volume essential for a particular caste of New Yorker to have in the background of their Zoom calls—but his reputation has fallen. Jacobs, on the other hand, has become the patron saint of a livable city, and SoHo has blossomed into the perfect distillation of what makes New York New York. The neighborhood, its name a portmanteau indicating its situation South of Houston, boasts extraordinary character, unexpected beauty, the admixture of grit and glitz, luxury and not, along quiet cobblestone streets in the heart of Manhattan.
Once dubbed the Cast-Iron District, SoHo’s past is proudly on display. Many of the buildings are landmarked, and the windows—which once admitted light for artists like Andy Warhol,
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Glass, and Twyla
Tharp, who began illegally moving into former manufacturing loft spaces in the 1950s—are still intact. In 1971, after years of organizing and advocacy, the SoHo Artists Association managed to convert those lofts to legal residences, arguing that the arts are a big business for New York. They were, perhaps, too successful. SoHo has now become so prized a locale that only the most successful artists, or the longest-living—Je Koons,
Tom Sachs, Arthur Elgort—can afford a loft.
Nevertheless, art and commerce, history and the cutting edge, still commingle on these charming streets.
THE DUTCH
Chef Andrew Carmellini’s charming corner of comfort food opened in 2011, but the warm wooden interior, the fastidious attention to detail, and a menu that reads like the NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation of French-tinged American classics, including a famous hot chicken, served with honey butter biscuits, makes the Dutch— named after Manhattan’s European colonizers—a timeless SoHo standby.
TABLES FOR TWO Model Elsa Hosk and partner Tom Daly are some of the street-style favorites who can often be spotted in the neighborhood. Opposite: The Dutch has been a trendy staple since 2011.
IS SOMETHING OF A SOHO RITUAL.
DOWNTOWN DARLINGS The Rem Koolhaas-designed Prada store made SoHo a new fashion destination when it opened in 2001. Below: baker Dominique Ansel made headlines when he invented the “cronut” in 2013.
PRADA
When Miuccia Prada hung out a shingle for her family’s fashion label at 575 Broadway, in the space formerly occupied by the Guggenheim’s downtown branch, it was certification that SoHo had o cially become New York’s new luxury center. With a reported $40 million interior designed by Rem Koolhaas, the space boasted an undulating zebrawood floor called “The Wave,” and was as much a place for the cool kids to gather as it was a boutique of shoes and handbags. Soon after Prada set its stake in SoHo in 2001, an endless procession of luxury stores followed, which now includes everything from a newly designed Celine boutique and a renovated Michael Kors flagship, to Italian streetwear line Stone Island and boutique Swedish brand Acne Studios.
DOMINIQUE ANSEL
If the two-syllable portmanteau “cronut” doesn’t immediately conjure images of long lines stretching from Spring, north past the chain-link fence of Vesuvio Playground on Thompson, then you were not alive in 2011. Since then, the French pastry chef has continued to churn out these addictive pastries, a half croissant, half-donut chimera, with ever changing flavors. (A recent variation with pistachio cream was particularly delicious.) But, as he has written on the to-go box, just under “Home of the Cronut,” is the admonition “Don’t let the creation kill the creativity.” But even if the cronuts sell out, which they do to this day, his buttery kouign amann, a Breton pastry, still beckons.
DINE STORE The French restaurant Le Mercerie, inside Roman and Williams Guild NY; below: Swedish bags and candles at Byredo.
Strange as it may seem, much of SoHo’s bobo interior design aesthetic has been determined by Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, two former Hollywood set designers who together founded the firm Roman and Williams. After having designed restaurants such as the Dutch and Lafayette; retail spaces for the likes of GOOP and Nike, and hotels like the Ace and the Standard Highline, the pair opened their own block-length emporium Roman and Williams Guild NY in 2017. The space, chock-full of linen napkins, shearling pelts, copper fixtures, and an $1,850 leather log basket, also contains La Mercerie, a (very good) French restaurant run by Marie-Aude Rose, the wife of Daniel Rose, the chef at the nearby (also very good and also Roman and Williams–designed) Le Coucou.
VICTORINOX
A swaggy, sexy store devoted to... Swiss Army knives? It’s true: This former firehouse on Wooster has been remastered to showcase the Swiss company’s foldable tools. Their line of performance wear is also on display, as are watches, kitchen knives, and fragrances described as “smooth yet highly masculine.” Here you’ll find not only $430 Swiss Army Knives (with pharmaceutical spatula!) but capsule editions like the all-black Onyx collection and a FieldForce Titanium edition watch. But the boutique also stands for the almost alchemical magic of SoHo, which by its very location adds a mystique not just to knives but to goods in other nearby shops featuring mattresses (Keetsa); socks (Happy Socks), and co ee pods (Nespresso.)
BYREDO
The city during summer is notoriously pungent, but in SoHo even the side streets smell like bergamot and musk. Parfumiers—like the Argentine brand Fueguia 1833; Perfumarie; Florentine house Santa Maria Novella; and MiN New York—proliferate. At Byredo, a Swedish brand whose minimalist flagship opened in 2015 on quiet Wooster Street, those scents include Rodeo, an earthy unisex parfum available exclusively at the SoHo location, as well as richly aromatic candles. These waft over Brazilian pony hair sofas (designed by Byredo’s founder, Ben Gorham) that occupy the sweet-smelling aerie.
CAFÉ SOCIETY Sasha Noe is the current owner of Fanelli’s, which occupies a space built in 1847. Below: The Drawing Center is one of the neighborhood’s many cultural attractions.
FANELLI CAFÉ
Fanelli’s neon sign on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets has long been a beacon to thirsty or hungry travelers, or just a port for a soul in need of a barman’s ear. The second-oldest bar in New York, the Fanelli Café has always catered to a neighborhood crowd. First truckers and warehouse men in the first half of the 20th century, then artists in the ’70s and ’80s—many fed from early- to mid-career fame—and now a mix of tourists, regulars, and roustabouts who gather under the gaze of framed boxers for beers and a remarkably robust burger.
THE DRAWING CENTER
Galleries are the crawling cacti of cultural cachet. From the Upper East Side to Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, they bring and are brought about by the presence of a creative class. SoHo, once the home of many of New York’s most daring artists, still bears traces of its heyday as an artists’ paradise. Chief among these are the
SOHO’S GALLERIES ARE THE CRAWLING CACTI
OF CULTURAL CACHET.
FIAT LUXE Tom Dixon’s well-lit interior.
Drawing Center, opened in 1977 by Martha Beck. Over the years, its expansive ground floor gallery has o ered space to artists from architect Antoni Gaudí to, most recently, a group of formerly incarcerated artists. But perhaps the most magical gem is the Dia Art Foundation’s installation of Walter de Maria’s The New York Earth Room, 250 yards of 22-inch deep soil, filling a Wooster Street loft since 1977.
LOUIS VUITTON
Treading up four cast-iron stairs, dotted with small glass circles, into the pleasure domes of international luxury brands is something of a SoHo ritual. The circles, called vault lights or deadlights, once allowed (some) light into the neighborhood’s basement factories, like those under 116 Greene Street, now a Louis Vuitton emporium. Built in 1881, the space has been occupied by Vuitton since 1998, and was redesigned by Peter Marino in 2016. Much like the Prada store a few blocks to the northeast, the Vuitton HQ is itself as much a work of art as the wares on display. Its columns boast the work of Japanese artist Shuji Mukai, a member of the Gutai (a sort of Japanese proto-Fluxus art movement) and Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, who, ironically perhaps for a luxury boutique, is a lion in the arte povera movement.
SIXTY SOHO
There are 97 rooms at the Sixty SoHo hotel, each designed by London designer Tara Bernerd, but much of the action happens on the ground, second, and top floors. Working one’s way from the bottom (open to the general public) to the top (a members-only rooftop), is the vertical version of Graydon Carter’s Seven Room theory of increasingly rarefied access to influence. Perhaps the most appealing is the second-floor boîte, the Butterfly. Run by nightlife veterans Nur Khan and John McDonald, the lush interior boasts Damien Hirst’s butterfly collages—pity the lepidoptera!— cocktails like the Gatekeeper, and a late-night crowd that spills out into the SoHo streets after being thoroughly danced out by live deejays. During the warmer months, the rooftop—A60— whose entrance is guaranteed with a hard-toobtain membership card, beckons with peaceful perches on an open terrace.
TOM DIXON
On cloudy days, SoHo still seems ablaze, thanks to the many lighting emporia that illuminate its side streets. From the architectural lighting of Milanese firm Artemide, to the Czech designer Leon Jakimič, these represent both SoHo’s past as a manufacturing hub, and its present as an intersection of art, design, and commerce. In 2018, the British designer Tom Dixon opened a 6,700-square-foot flagship, where his metallic orbs cast their light upon furry wingback chairs. Sofas, not meant to be sit upon, are arranged as if in the world’s most stylish (and brightly lit) living room.
ROARING TRADE The Cotton Club in its original 1920s location in Harlem.
The Cotton Club: A Scandal in Two Acts
The legendary jazz club links Owney Madden and Roy Radin, two very di erent kinds of New York rogue, who lived and died a generation apart, writes Aria Darcella
Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club, with its ebullient orchestra and packed dance floor, brings to mind Jazz Age luminaries like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and Cab Calloway. But the name that put the club on the map—or rather the crime blotter—was
Owney “The Killer” Madden: murderer, bootlegger, racketeer, and one of Prohibition-era New
York’s most notorious gangsters.
Madden immigrated to Hell’s Kitchen in 1902 at the age of 11, and fell in with the Gophers, its vicious Irish-American street gang. “If you were
Irish and were living in the Kitchen...a Gopher was what you wanted to be, when either you hadn’t quite grown up or weren’t quite expecting to,”
Michael Walsh wrote in his 2003 best-seller, And
All the Saints. Madden became the gang’s leader, and a precociously violent one at that, being implicated in six murders—although witnesses were rarely willing to come forward.
In 1915 he was finally sent to prison for manslaughter, and by his parole in 1923 the Gopher Gang was all but done. But a new, more lucrative business opportunity presented itself in the meantime: bootlegging alcohol during Prohibition. And Madden would prove to be far more ambitious than his fellow mobsters. In addition to importing whiskey, he started his own breweries, and began snapping up speakeasies where he could peddle his poison. Among these establishments was a struggling venue on West 125th Street known as the Club Deluxe, which Madden purchased in partnership with gambler George “Big Frenchy” DeMange. They renovated the joint—expanding its seating capacity and giving its interior a glamorous overhaul—renaming it
the Cotton Club. Most importantly, Madden was able to tap the absolute best performers on the jazz circuit.
Though the Cotton Club became a premier venue for Black artists, it was far from progressive. Madden barred Black audiences from entry, and frequently used racist caricatures to promote his shows. Meanwhile he was raking in a fortune.
His success brought unwelcome competition, however, from the Italian mob. Madden was also under police scrutiny for the killing of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll—a onetime hitman for Dutch Schultz and Salvatore Maranzano—who died in a barrage of bullets in 1932. (It is believed he partially funded a hit on Coll, who had once held DeMange for ransom). Rather than go out with a bang, Madden left it all behind, fleeing to Arkansas in 1935, where he lived until his death in 1965.
The Cotton Club eventually fell victim to changing tastes, and closed after relocating to Midtown. But with such a wealth of characters, it’s no wonder the club made an attractive subject for filmmakers. And when the time came to turn its story into a big-budget motion picture, the production attracted a new cast of sleazy characters.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the 1984 crime drama The Cotton Club should have been a hit. The film starred Richard Gere as musician Michael “Dixie” Dwyer, while ’80s-favorite Bob Hoskins played Madden. It cost $47 million to make, but was a box-o ce flop, and today is remembered more for a grisly cocaine-fueled murder than for anything that happened on-screen.
Despairing at Coppola’s ballooning costs, the film’s producer, Bob Evans, began seeking more investors. That’s when his limo driver told him about a wealthy woman named Karen DeLayne “Lanie” Jacobs, whom he started dating.
Tall, good-looking, and casually glamorous, she was also in the cocaine business, which Evans later claimed not to know. Others alleged that he did know—and wanted to use the drug money to finance his films. Whatever the case, Jacobs introduced Evans to one of her customers, New Yorker Roy Radin, as another potential source of funds.
JAZZ HANDS Film producer Roy Radin in 1981; above left: Cotton Club proprietor Owney Madden in a 1931 mugshot.
As the son of a noted Broadway producer, Radin got his start in showbiz at 17 doing publicity for a circus. That kicked o what would become a lucrative career as a producer of vaudeville revival shows and bought him a 66-room mansion in Southampton. But it couldn’t get him the acclaim he craved, even though his ambition didn’t quite align with his talent.
“What he really wanted was acceptance on Broadway and in Hollywood,” Radin’s press agent Richard Gersh told the New York Times after his death in 1983. “Basically [the shows he produced] were schlock. In fact, some of the stu was embarrassing, it was so bad. But you couldn’t tell that to Roy. He had no taste at all.”
Radin’s sketchy operation, which claimed to split ticket sales with local charities, got him investigated by the New York State attorney general. There was also an incident in 1980, when actress Melonie Haller claimed she was beaten and raped during a party at his Southampton mansion. Radin was charged with menacing Haller, as well as for possession of cocaine, LSD, and an illegal firearm, although the charges were later dropped.
That didn’t stop Evans from bringing Radin in on The Cotton Club, however. But the two cut Jacobs out of the action, instead o ering her just a $50,000 finder’s fee.
Jacobs, who already suspected Radin was involved with a break-in at her home during which $870,000 in cash and cocaine were stolen, was furious. In May 1983, she suggested they meet for dinner in Los Angeles, which was the pretext for a kidnapping. When Radin’s body was discovered a month later, in woods 65 miles north of the city, it had a single gunshot wound to the head.
Detectives concluded Jacobs hired a hit man to commit the murder, and while Evans was implicated by the shooter, she ended up taking the rap. Meanwhile, the tabloids salivated over Evans and other Hollywood names being dragged through court over what they dubbed “the Cotton Club murder.”
Ironically, Jacobs should have taken the $50,000 up front: given what a flop the movie was, she may have been the only one who got paid. “I didn’t make one dollar on the film,” Evans later grumbled to New York magazine, “and look what I got for it.”
Noma Dumezweni
THE BIG CHILL
Stylish New Yorkers showed o their winter wardrobes, enjoyed a snow day, and warmed up at the Gotham Awards.
Hannah Bronfman and Brendan Fallis introduce baby Preston
Nancy Brinker and H.E. Sheikh Meshal bin Hamad Al-Thani, Ambassador of the State of Qatar
Amy and John Phelan Nolan and Michael Greenwald Anka Palitz and Michel Witmer
TWO TICKETS IN PARADISE
In Palm Beach, the Society of the Four Arts opened its “Charles and Jackson Pollock” exhibit, while the Promise Fund of Florida held its Major Donor Awards and Dinner at the home of Nancy Brinker, sponsored by the Miami Cancer Institute, Baptist Health South Florida.
Flakes on a Plane
What will fragile fl yers do, now that the Department of Transportation has banned emotional support animals? Bob Morris makes the case for a compassionate exception
Dear Global Airlines,
I am a licensed psychologist writing on behalf of my patient, Willow Long Reed, who has been distressed by new rules banning emotional support animals from fl ights. The purpose of this letter is to secure a medical exception for her Germ Pit (German shepherd/pit bull designer mix) on the basis of her prominence as a style and travel infl uencer.
Although Ms. Reed isn’t wheelchair–bound, sight–impaired, or living with any of the physical disabilities assisted by a certifi ed service animal, she has many existing conditions that make being accompanied by her dog therapeutically essential.
First, she su ers from several serious allergies—chiefl y to fl ying commercial, but also to turning her cell phone o , single-serve vodka bottles, the sight of polyester crew uniforms, and being told “no.”
Additionally, Ms. Reed becomes emotionally triggered when exposed to boisterous children whose parents are not celebrities or socialites. This distress may not be immediately visible to untrained airline sta , owing to her medically imperative regime of Botox, Restylane, and Juvederm. Instead, it takes an expert clinician such as myself to diagnose the symptoms of each of her anxieties. These include throwing her iPad at the purser, sage burning in the bathroom, and demanding to speak to the captain (whom she will likely refer to as “the manager”) in a fake French accent.
Would it not serve your airline to allow one impeccably groomed, emotionally supportive Germ Pit on the frequent fl ights Ms. Reed takes to Miami, Aspen, London, Paris, and Cannes? The animal is typically well-behaved and never aggressive, unless Ms. Reed is provoked by sudden intrusions into her personal space, o ered an o -brand snack mix, or confronted with what she perceives as authority.
In return, Ms. Reed is prepared to o er Global Airlines sponsored content placement in her TikTok and Instagram stories, as well as a YouTube unboxing video of products from your duty-free o erings, if she determines them suitably luxurious. That, of course, requires she be given special permission to keep her phone on at all times. I hope you can accommodate my patient’s special needs at this challenging time. Without the usual runway shows, red-carpet events, comped dinners, and swag bags, she, like so many of us, can use all the emotional support she can get.
Sincerely,
Dr. Sidney Head New York, NY 10021 License #1234567 @shrinkinginfl uencers
