Urban Agenda New York City, Feb/March 2015

URBAN AGENDA: NEW YORK CITY

February/March 2015

F E B R U A R Y/ M A R C H 2 0 1 5

Alyson Eastman Paris-inspired Romanticism and fresh Modernism

David Remnick: The New Yorker’s Princeton Connection Dr. Oliver Sacks | American Museum of Natural History’s Butterfly Conservatory | New York Public Library’s Vintage Menus | Zabar’s New York Deli | Brooke Shields on Motherhood and her latest Memoir | A Well-Designed Life

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CONTENTS

6 30

Q&A with designer Alyson Eastman

BY ANNE LEVI N

6

The Ne w Yorke r and Princeton: David Remnick Tal ks of the Town and Gown

BY ELLEN GI LBERT

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Urban B ooks Life, Death, War, and The Ne w Yorke r

FEB/MARCH 2015

BY STUART MI TCHNER

42

Cover Image: Alyson Eastman, Photography by Pilee Blue Mansfield.

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Brooke Shields on Motherhood and her Latest B ook

BY KAM WI LLI AMS

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Flight of the Butterfly The American Museum of Natural History

BY I LENE DUBE

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Food Glorious Food The New York Public Library’s Menu Col lection

BY ELLEN GI LBERT

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Zabar’s: What’s Not to Love?

BY LI NDA AR NTZENI US

36

Oliver Sacks Wants Details

22

BY ELLEN GI LBERT

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Calendar 54

Urban Shops Resort Wear 28

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A Wel l-Designed Life 46

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Photography by Pilee Blue Mansfield

Q&A

Alyson Eastman interview by anne levin

(top) Spring/Summer 2015. Whelk Dress

UA: Was fashion a big part of your growing up?

Not at all. I’m from just outside Portland, Oregon. I grew up on a farm where we had llamas and horses. I’ve ridden horses my whole life. I had a nice childhood.

UA: What sparked your interest in fashion?

I went to a Montessori school until high school and we had to wear uniforms every day. So when I got to the public high school and could wear whatever I wanted, I realized I loved clothing and expressing myself that way. I loved to see how different groups expressed themselves through fashion. And I developed this love for it. I actually put on a little fashion show in high school. I made all my dresses for dances. My parents said, “Where did this come from?”

UA: Did you study fashion?

Yes. I went to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, and after graduating I moved to Paris. I studied at Mod’Art International for another year and a half. Then I thought I’d give New York a try, and I’ve been here ever since. That was in 2009.

(above) Alyson Eastman, portrait by Donnell Culver

W

hen 27-year-old Alyson Eastman launched her first collection last year at Soho’s Dune Studios, she won praise for her unique mix of Paris-inspired Romanticism and fresh Modernism. An oversized, champagne-colored sweater paired with a white, button-down blouse and long pleated skirt; and a matching, maroon-hued set of high-waisted, draped trousers and a cropped, short-sleeve blouse were among the popular pieces in the collection. Clean, strong silhouettes are the backbone of Eastman’s aesthetic. Her newest collection is for spring/summer 2015. Until recently she worked at the NoLiTa boutique Warm, but she is now solely focused on own design work.

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UA: How important was the stay in Paris?

Paris changed my whole life. It was amazing and so hard at the same time.

I went to a French school. I was the only American there. I learned French very quickly, and they speak English, kind of, when they want to. But you didn’t really have to speak French—you could still learn so much in classes from doing fashion, art, and just being creative. If I had a bad day, I could walk down the street and be inspired by the buildings and the people. I’m really happy I went when I did. It was a big part of my growing up.

UA: What about your experience in New York?

I hated it when I got here. It was right after the crash, so it was impossible to find a job. And everything is so expensive. I was working at Top Shop for a while, and then I got to intern for Zac Posen and Badgley Mischka, so that was great. I freelanced for trade shows, showrooms, then got a job as store manager for the store Ports 1961. I tried to get on their design team but I would have had to move to China. I finally decided to start my own line. I

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Photography by Pilee Blue Mansfield

(top) Spring/Summer 2015, Seafoam Leather Jacket, Palm Tee, Palm Short; (below-left to right) Fall/Winter 2014; Spring/Summer 2015, Medusa Vest, Palm Short; Spring/Summer 2015, Seafoam Leather Jacket, Sunset Bra, Shore Skirt; Fall/Winter 2014.

figured I had the resources and the knowledge, so I took the plunge last February. The first thing I made was a coat, because I needed one. It was fun to make, and proved to myself that I could do it. Then I did a collection and a presentation, and it kind of went from there.

UA: What do you like to do in your spare time?

I love books. I’m very inspired by books and magazines. I could look through them all day long. If I need a treat, I’ll go to a magazine store and get lost.

I also like to play basketball, which I’ve done since I was a child.

UA: Is it important to you to design clothing that is as practical as it is original?

The one thing Paris really taught me is that you can design whatever you want, but people have to be able to wear it. You can make all these beautiful things, but at the end of the day, if you’re not selling it you’re not in business. And I’ve noticed, as I’ve gotten older, that simplicity is sometimes more of a statement. It is the silhouettes, the cut of a sleeve, that make a good design. The designs I made when I was 19 are very different from what I do now.

UA: Future plans?

I plan to just keep creating collections and getting my name out there— visiting stores, selling the collection. And I hope to do more collaborations, like the one I did recently with the shoe company Sigerson Morrison. I have a lot to work on and a lot to look forward to.

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(LEFT) Photo by Brigitte Lacombe (RIGHT) Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

1 World Trade Center

David Remnick

Talk of the Town and Gown “I have two words: John McPhee.” The New Yorker editor David Remnick’s (’81) explanation of what Princeton meant to him.

BY ELLEN GILBERT

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(left) Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (right) Photo courtesy of Wikipedia (bottom) Photo courtesy of Daily Princetonian

Princeton University, Nassau Hall

John McPhee

“Y

our parents will remember your graduation almost as acutely, and with the same sense of wonder, as they remember the day you entered this world,” observed New Yorker editor David Remnick (’81) in his 2013 Class Day speech at Princeton University.

“It’s an incredibly moving thing to see your child go into the word as a whole healthy person,” added the father of three.

As proud as they were at the time, Remnick’s own parents apparently had to adjust their thinking after he entered Princeton. “I majored in comparative literature —what my father insisted on calling ‘fancy English,’” Remnick recalled in his Class Day comments. “My mother, anticipating a doctor or a lawyer in the family, announced, in her disappointment, that I would now surely be able to open a ‘comparative literature store.’”

When you think about it, that’s not a bad description of The New Yorker, and Remnick’s mom might be reassured by the number of distinguished writers and artists like her son and his mentor, John McPhee, who have ties to both Princeton and The New Yorker, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary this month.

McPhee Pulitzer-Prize-winning author John McPhee, who has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1963, was born in Princeton in 1931 and still lives there. He graduated from Princeton in 1953, and is currently Ferris Professor of Journalism. “I grew up all over campus,” McPhee told Paris Review’s Peter Hessler. “I knew the location of every urinal and every pool table.”

“A Sense of Where You Are,” McPhee’s first New Yorker profile, appeared on January 23, 1963 and was about, not surprisingly, a Princetoncentric subject: Princeton University basketball star and future senator Bill Bradley. A book-length version with the same title appeared two years later.

Hessler points out that that first book “seemed to free McPhee. . . even as he continued to live in his hometown,” and, to be sure, McPhee’s subjects and locations since then have ranged far and wide. His 30 books—many of which originated as New Yorker essays—include Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World.

Literary Lights F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was from the class of 1917, and his papers—all 44 linear feet, 89 archival boxes, and 11 oversize containers of them—are housed in Firestone Library. His ties to The New Yorker are a little more tentative than some. “Fitzgerald’s work did not always meet with rejection from The New Yorker’s editors: between 1929 and 1937, he published three short stories and two poems in our pages,” the magazine reported in 2012. “The stories were brief and humorous in nature.” There’s more, though: the occasion for the 2012 look back at Fitzgerald’s contributions to the magazine was the publication of

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(this page) Images courtesy of Condé Nast

a recently discovered story he had written in 1936, “Thank You For the Light.”

In his essay “My Lost City,” Fitzgerald remembers former classmate Edmund Wilson as “the shy little scholar of Holder Court.” Wilson (18951972) graduated in 1916 and later became a New Yorker staff writer. An early poem, “Disloyal Lines to Alumnus,” accepted by New Yorker editor Katherine Angell White, improvised on his Princeton experience:

I, too, have faked the glamor of gray towers,

I, too, have sung the ease of sultry hours —

Deep woods, sweet lanes, wide playing fields, smooth ponds.

Over his long, distinguished career, Wilson wrote for Vanity Fair, helped edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. The author of more than 20 books, he was eulogized by Isaiah Berlin as “the most important critic of the twentieth century,” and writer Philip Lopate quotes New Yorker editor William Shawn describing Wilson’s prose as “’one of the halfdozen best expository and critical styles in the history of English.’”

In a 2005 piece in—where else?—The New Yorker, Louis Menand described Wilson’s career as being based on the belief “that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important, and, by doing the homework and taking care with the exposition, make it interesting and important to other people.”

Menand quotes Wilson as saying that to “write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity.”

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It’s probably no coincidence that writer John O’Hara (1905-1970) spent the latter part of his life in Princeton and is buried there. Fitzgerald-worship began early for O’Hara; he read This Side of Paradise as a teenager, and the first of his many short stories for the magazine began to appear in 1928 when he was only 23 years old. Brendan Gill, who worked with O’Hara at The New Yorker, ranks him as “among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language,” and credits him with helping “to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story.”

Alumni/Staff Writers

Writer John Brooks (’42) was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker who specialized in financial topics. Bill Gates called Business Adventures, a compilation of 12 of Brooks’s New Yorker stories published in 1969, his favorite business book (and claimed it was Warren Buffett’s favorite business book, too). Writing about Brooks, who died in 1993, New Yorker archivist Joshua Rothman notes that “he approached business in an unusual way. He had an eye for the technical details that mattered to insiders, but the sensibility of a broad-minded cultural critic.”

A New Yorker staff writer since 1960, Calvin Tomkins (’47) wrote his first fiction piece for the magazine in 1958, and his first fact piece in 1962. His 1962 New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy, describing the lives of American expatriates in France in the years between World War I and World War II, became the well-received 1971 book, Living Well Is the Best Revenge: The Life of Gerald and Sara Murphy. An excerpt from Robert Caro’s (’57), celebrated multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson ran in The New Yorker, and he used a 1998 New Yorker piece, “The Man Who Built New York,” to describe how he came to write The Power Broker, a major biography of Robert Moses.

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(LEFT) Image courtesy of Morven Museum. (RIGHT) Image courtesy of Condé Nast

(ABOVE) Carl Rose and E.B. White’s “It’s broccoli, dear” “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it,” from 1929.

(LEFT) WHAT IS SHE THINKING?: Painted in 1938 when she was 29, Virginia Snedeker’s self-portrait is a painting that asks to be read. Morven Museum, “Capturing the Spirit: Virginia Snedeker and the American Scene.”

(BELOW-LEFT) June 10, 1939 cover of The New Yorker by Virginia Snedeker. (BOTTOM) Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick.

VISUALLY SPEAKING New Yorker artist Virginia Snedeker’s connection to Princeton is nonnegotiable: her great-great-great-great grandmother was Annis Boudinot Stockton, who gave Morven, the former Governor’s Mansion, its name.

Snedeker made important contributions to the magazine including “spot art”—the small decorative drawings scattered throughout each issue—and a number of cover illustrations. In the catalog for Morven’s 2010 exhibit, Capturing the Spirit: Virginia Snedeker and the American Scene, curator Anne Gossen detailed Snedeker’s remarkable ability to capture the Zeitgeist of the ‘30s, ‘40s’ and ‘50s, and to respond to New Yorker editors’ request for art that spoke to wartime concerns. A reviewer observed that Gossen had “done a first-rate job of laying out the evidence for anyone who wants to see how things worked between the magazine and its artists.”

New Yorker cartoons are enduringly, famously funny; most people have at least one or more favorites and can quote the Carl Rose/E. B. White classic depicting a mopheaded child dismissively answering her well-meaning, broccoli-promoting mother with the immortal words, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” Those with Princeton links include Whitney Darrow, Jr., who was born in Princeton, and whose father was one of the founders of the Princeton University Press. A member of the class of 1931, he had his first New Yorker cartoon published just two years later; he remained a regular contributor for 50 years. Unlike a number of his colleagues, Darrow, who often drew upper-middle-class suburban couples, wrote his own captions. “He is an environmental cartoonist, in that he goes on setting the scene in that misleadingly easygoing style of his until he is ready for a one-liner,” observed New York Times art critic John Russell in 1978. “And what a oneliner!” After his death in 1999, Darrow’s family donated over a thousand of his drawings to the Graphic Arts Department in Princeton’s Rare Books and Manuscripts section.

Another regular New Yorker cartoonist, longtime Princeton resident Henry Martin (’48), made a similar donation to the Princeton University Library himself in 2010. “Henry never made fun of somebody,” observed graphic arts librarian Julie Melby at the time. “He was just funny. Some people are great artists. Some are great writers. Henry was both.”

Now based in New York City, cartoonist Arnold Roth lived in Princeton from 1963 to 1984. In a 2012 interview marking the opening of a retrospective exhibit at the Princeton Arts Council, Roth, who was born in Philadelphia, said that coming to Princeton “was happenstance.” A random drive through town “in April, when everything was in bloom” enchanted the Roths; “we thought we’d give it a try and stayed for 21 years.”

THE PRESENT More recently, authors with ties to both institutions include Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Moy Sand and Gravel, whose new collection, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, is just out. Muldoon holds a professorship at the University and is current poetry editor at The New Yorker, where his innovations include regular Poetry Podcasts of conversations and readings with guest poets. The Nobel-Prize-Winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, continued to contribute regularly to The New Yorker while serving as Princeton’s Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities from 1989 until her retirement in 2006.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex) is currently a faculty member at Princeton where he teaches classes in creative writing and introductory fiction. His byline has appeared in The New Yorker under short stories like “Find the Bad Guy,” an appreciation of John Updike, and an excerpt from The Marriage Plot. Another Princeton Creative Writing teacher, Gary Shteyngart, packed McCosh Hall when he appeared as the featured speaker at the 2014 Friends of the Princeton Public Library’s “Beyond Words” fund-raiser. The author of the novels The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story, was named one of The New Yorker

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Remnick on McPhee and Princeton: “It’s a huge part of his consciousness, the landscape of life. It imbues what he thinks about and what he writes.”

magazine’s “20 under 40” luminary fiction writers in 2010. He’s a regular contributor now, with recent posts chronicling book tour experiences for his new memoir, Little Failure.

MCPHEE AND REMNICK McPhee looms large—very large—in Remnick’s life. “I have two words,” he responded in a recent interview when asked to describe what Princeton meant to him. “John McPhee.”

“There are a number of writers and editors over the years who have been associated with Princeton, but the person who has made a life there has been John,” Remnick observed. “It’s a huge part of his consciousness, the landscape of life. It imbues what he thinks about and what he writes.”

In addition to the model of a longtime association with Princeton, Remnick appreciated the pragmatic aspect of studying with McPhee.

“If you study at Princeton you usually study with literary scholars,” he told Witherspoon Media. “The difference here is you’re studying with a practicing writer and learning all the processes that go into that.”

Editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992, Remnick has done no small amount of thinking and writing himself. His book, Lenin’s Tomb, won a Pulitzer Prize and his New Yorker pieces include reports on the Middle East and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Katharine Graham.

Remnick, who was born in Hackensack but grew up in Hillsdale, is frank about his take on Princeton before he met McPhee. “At first glance it seemed like a country club: off putting and intimidating and too shiny to look at.” Returning to campus as Class Day speaker in 2013, though, he was still bemused but clearly appreciative. “Now I don’t love Princeton for the eternal Halloween of its school colors,” he joked. “What I loved about Princeton, and always will, was the real core of it: The learning, the fantastically varied company, the enshrinement of free thinking, the rigor.”

Of McPhee, he humorously observes, “He was my teacher and now I exact my revenge by being his editor—and friend.”

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Life, Death, War, and

The New Yorker

I

BY STUART MITCHNER

grew up eating breakfast and lunch (and snacks) in the same room as a large three-part folding screen decorated from top to bottom with New Yorker covers. It was the only piece of furniture my parents owned that had no discernible purpose other than to be its own odd, cheery, colorful self. My Medievalist father, who was accustomed to working with illuminated manuscripts, had meticulously assembled and arranged it, making sure everything was precisely aligned. The screen, with all its vivid, amusing imagery reflecting our familial infatuation with New York City was a companiable presence at a time when my diet consisted mostly of open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then and now the ultimate comfort food.

It wasn’t until the Christmas week we spent in the city when I was ten that I began to understand why the name “New Yorker” meant so much to my parents, who had submitted numerous stories to the magazine over the years; now that I think of it, that may have served as a sort of surrogate journey, as if they were submitting themselves to New York through the New Yorker. Two of the plays they’d written together when they were courting had been bought by Samuel French, so they had reason to dream of leaving the midwest to live in the city and become a famous playwriting team. To make ends meet, my father would play piano in a bar, and my mother would be a stenographer. They settled instead in a college town where my father entered graduate school and my mother went to work in a law office. We did eventually get to live a year in the city when the Medievalist was busy “Englishing” a 15th-century encyclopedia in the vaults of Columbia University’s Low Library; we also spent two memorable summers in a house on Washington Square whose interior, we were told, had been used during the filming of The Heiress. It was around the time that we began to know the city as occasional residents that the New Yorker screen disappeared, although intact copies of the magazine continued to be a household presence.

The covers on the screen dated back to at least April 27, 1940, that being the date of the one I know I saw there—a James Thurber vision of spring in all its naked glory, with pink men and women, boys and girls, and sheep and birds, all capering nakedly about on a soft green landscape under a yellow sky. Another image I’m pretty sure I saw there was William Steig’s four-panel cartoon-style kids-and-fireworks cover from July 6, 1940. Years later when I was a sales clerk at the Eighth Street Bookshop in the Village it was a treat to say “hi” to Steig himself, always my favorite celebrity customer, a chunky, friendly, grown-up version of one of his own cartoon kids.

This screen decoupaged with New Yorker covers from 1950-53 is a generation once removed from the screen described here

As subscribers for the better part of thirty years, my wife and I have enough New Yorkers scattered around the house to decorate a dozen screens. Set apart from the contemporaries are a number of special issues, the earliest from 1941, the latest from 1986.

The only New Yorker my parents passed on to me is the November 22, 1941 issue, with a Rea Irvin cover that shows a butler looking askance at a group of trick or treaters because the one in front is wearing a Hitler mask. On the top right of the cover my father has written, “This issue supposed to be full of warnings of the Pearl Harbor attack.”

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THE PEARL HARBOR ISSUE

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According to Ladislas Farago’s book The Broken Seal (Random House 1967), the coded ads, headed Uchtung! Warning! Alerte!, were for a dice game called The Deadly Double and contained numbers—XX 12 24 on the white dice, 0 5 7 on the black dice—informing enemy agents about the date, time, and place of the attack. The smaller ads (a column wide, 2 inches high) definitely have a suspect, sinister look (in fact, the film reviewed in the same issue is Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion). The first one, on page 32, appears between an ad for Levando gloves (“beloved by every woman who treasures fine things”) and a caricature of Eddy Duchin advertising his appearance at “the new informal Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf Astoria (cover charge ranges from $1 to $1.50). The other small ones are identical and appear with ads for Crosse & Blackwell marmalade, Keen’s English Chop House, and the Persian Room at the Plaza.

The smaller ads direct readers to the main event, which runs the length of a single column on page 70. At the top is a black sky criss-crossed by airraid searchlights and starred with explosions while in an underground shelter a group of smiling men and women are rolling dice. The text begins “We hope you’ll never have to spend a long winter’s night in an air-raid shelter,” and urges you to bring along the dice and chips of The Deadly Double.

The FBI investigation, which involved a visit to the New Yorker offices, came up empty, and to this day the case is unresolved. While the coded ads give that particular issue a certain mystique, there’s pleasure enough to be had in simply turning the pages, still brightly, crisply substantial, reflecting the ambience of a great American magazine two weeks before Pearl Harbor changed everything. Of course if you own the CD-rom of the Complete New Yorker, or if you’re a current subscriber, you can scan it in the archive, but to “be there” you need to be in touch with the real thing; the character of the magazine exalts the content, an archive in the

making, living history, each issue part of a continuum where Imogene Coca will always be playing at La Martinque, Benny Goodman at the New Yorker Hotel, Glenn Miller at the Pennsylvania, of course (just dial “Pennsyvania 6-5000”), and Leadbelly and Josh White at the Village Vanguard.

SALINGER’S LAST? Of the other older issues I’ve saved, three are Salingers, one from 1948 (“Just Before the War with the Eskimos”), one from 1955 (“Franny”), both with covers

by Leonard Dove, and, most precious, the issue I’ve had since it came out in June 19, 1965, with one of Steig’s most most charming covers ever, man and woman kissing in a dream of spring, a pug-faced angel hovering overhead.

Inside is J.D. Salinger’s last piece of published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which runs nearly the length of the magazine (pp 32-113). I’m among those who see great things to come in this much-misunderstood and under-appreciated letter from camp by five-year-old Seymour Glass, with its sublimely (or ridiculously, depending on your point of view) comprehensive list of books to be rounded up by “the imcomparable Miss Overman” at the “customary annex branch” of the library. And as always, there’s the pageant of art and life in the city that never sleeps, where Mose Allison and Sonny Rollins are playing at the Vanguard, Charlie Mingus at the Village Gate, Dizzy Gillespie at the Metropole; where two plays produced by Mike Nichols (Luv and The Odd Couple) are at the Booth and the Plymouth, Zero Mostel’s all over the stage at the Imperial in Fiddler on the Roof, and Barbra Streisand is Fanny Brice reincarnate in Funny Girl at the Winter Garden.

CLOSER TO HOME Two other issues I saved were dated December 18, 1978, the day my mother died, and April 14, 1986, the day my father died. In the course of writing this piece, I’ve seen a lot of New Yorker cover art, from the years of my father’s screen to the edgier Tina Brown era of the 1990s. The great majority of the imagery is peopled, active, humorous, cute, topical, satirical, rarely elegaic, which helps explain how I felt when I saw Eugène Mihaesco’s cover image of shafts of light beaming through the great windows of Grand Central, the view my parents and I saw on the day we arrived for that first Christmas week in the city. The convergence of the imagery and the date would have pleased my sentimental mother. Eight years later, Robert Tallon’s cover shows an empty chair in a barren room, just the sort of no-nonsense image my austere, unsentimental father would have appreciated. These images sealed the bond I feel with the magazine I grew up with.

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Brooke Shields On Motherhood and Her Latest Book

A

INTERVIEW BY KAM WILLIAMS

ctress and author Brooke Shields is a familiar face within the entertainment industry. Starting her career at just 11 months, Shields went on to star in Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981). She also caused a sensation with her advertising campaign for Calvin Klein.

Shields attended Princeton University in 1983, graduating in 1988. Following college, Shields played the title role in Suddenly Susan and appeared on Seinfeld. She has just published her latest memoir There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, written after the death of her mother, Teri Shields, in 2012. In it, Shields honestly examines her remarkable and often difficult relationship with her mother. Her previous memoir, Down Came the Rain, was a New York Times Bestseller.

Childhood photos from There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.

UA: How important to you and your career has been the education you received at Princeton University?

It’s been the thing that’s helped me stay standing.

UA: Did classmates ask you out on dates while you were a student at Princeton?

After a while. Not much my freshman year, but by my sophomore year, I had asked enough people out that they started to ask me back.

UA: Princeton has eating clubs instead of fraternities.

Had they begun admitting women when you arrived?

Yes, although I went there in 1983, the Ivy Club was all-male when I arrived and it was still all-male when I graduated. I joined Cap & Gown.

UA: Would you ever be interested in acting in a French language film given that you majored in French Literature?

I would absolutely say “yes” in a second, if given the opportunity. I would take on that challenge enthusiastically and work really hard.

UA: If you hadn’t entered the entertainment industry, what do you think you’d be doing today?

I’ve been in the entertainment industry for so long, before I even knew that I wanted to be in it, so it would be hard to know what else I might be doing.

I probably would have still made my way into it somehow because, to me, making people laugh, and entertaining, and watching people experience storytelling is one of the most rewarding things I can imagine. So I think I would have found a way to entertain people in some capacity.

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Brooke and Teri Shields.

UA: What was the turning point in your life? To me, it seems that you have had more than one.

UA: If you could talk to your mother today, what would you say to her?

I hope you knew how much I loved you.

Most people assume there’s only supposed to be one turning point, which dictates the rest of our lives. But I think we have to be open to additional turning points when they arrive. Things happen in our lives. Classmates graduate, careers change, babies are born, friends are lost, loved ones die…

There are so many milestones that I believe are important to acknowledge as being significant.

UA: When I see the tremendous wealth of work you have done in the industry, I can’t help but wonder when you will try your hand as a director?

I directed Chicago at the Hollywood Bowl the summer before last, and I got a bit of the bug for it. So I’m sure that within the next few years, there will be some sort of foray into it.

UA: Who is your intended audience for this book? Is there a particular demographic you believe will gain from it?

UA: Given that you’ve been a legend since childhood, “What becomes a legend most?” is an interesting question to pose to you.

I think there’s a difference between who will be interested in reading it and those who might be able to gain perspective. I’ve been around for so long that those people who have actually grown up with me might read it just for the trivia.

However, I’m hoping that younger audiences will sort of tap into the part that simply deals with getting to know your parents and asking them to try and understand who you are. That’s a dialogue that needs to happen.

Well, there’s a certain sense of longevity that’s associated with legends, as well as a sense of endurance. I think what becomes a legend most is not only that which lasts the test of time but an ability to keep adapting. I’ve been around for decades and I’ve tried to stay afloat by seizing upon opportunity when presented to me. And the opportunities presented to me now look very different from the ones in the 1980s. But instead UA: I believe that your book will help many heal of waiting for everything to happen the way you from the pain of being raised in an unhealthy or Brooke Shields with daughters Rowan and Grier. Courtesy of Brooke Shields. think it should, it’s a matter of being able to see challenging environment. what the real lay of the land is, and figuring out how you can play a part in it.

I think we can all look at our situations and find reasons to make them healthier. Nobody really has it all figured out. I believe there’s healthy UA: Thanks again for the time, Brooke, and best of luck with the book. and unhealthy in each of us. It’s when you operate with a sense of love in Thank you so much, Kam. your heart that you maintain the integrity that enables you to keep going forward.

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..

. . . . F L I G . .

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butterfly F

PHOTO CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

BY ILENE

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PHOTO CREDIT: AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

I (LEFT) The

American Museum of Natural History houses the Butterfly Conservatory through May 25. (ABOVE) Come this close to one of 500 beautiful butterflies.

n its 17th year, the Butterfly Conservatory at the American Museum of Natural History joins such long-running family traditions as visits to the skating rink in Rockefeller Center and the model boat races in Central Park.

After passing the large dinosaur skeletons in the lobby, visitors go through a series of double doors to the Butterfly Conservatory, or vivarium, a 1,200 square foot freestanding transparent structure where they are surrounded by up to 500 fluttering, iridescent lepidopterans feeding on tropical nectars from flowers and lush green vegetation.

There may be polar vortices outside, but here in the Butterfly Conservatory, it’s a tropical 80 degrees.

Powerful halide lamps shine from the ceiling, simulating the sunlight that streams through a rainforest. The tropical temperatures are maintained through the use of the double doors, which also ensure no errant butterflies make their way into the IMAX Theater or the squid and the whale diorama.

Every day, it seems, we read in the news about the ways in which butterflies are important harbingers of environmental change. So upon entering the Butterfly Conservatory the first question I ask Hazel Davies, Associate Director of Living Exhibits, is how the worldwide butterfly population can be sustained when they are shipped to New York in the dead of winter, destined for a life indoors.

“All of our butterflies are raised on farms,” explains Davies. “They’re not taken from the wild.” It’s like Christmas tree farming: As long as you farm butterflies, you’ll have a steady supply.

She leads me to a rack of pupae that have just arrived from Florida farms. They look like racks of iridescent green earrings, except as I look closer I see they are not perfect pairs; everyone is different. And they are alive! Each has spun silk from which it hangs.

A brief review of butterfly metamorphosis: The butterfly starts as an egg and hatches into a caterpillar. After eating a lot of leaves and gaining weight, the caterpillar sheds its skin and enters the pupal phase. The pupa, also known as the chrysalis, neither eats nor moves (like those “earrings”). Soon legs make their way through, then wings, and an adult butterfly emerges.

Below the pupae are what look to be papery rocks. These are Luna Moth cocoons—12 moth species have been shipped from Florida.

“The pupa is the best stage at which to ship them,” says Davies, who also works with spiders, lizards, snakes and frogs in other exhibits. In addition to the farms in Florida, the pupae at the Butterfly Conservatory are raised in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kenya, Thailand, Malaysia and Australia. “The caterpillar is an eating machine and we’d never have enough food for them in the city,” says Davies. “When they pupate, the farms pack and ship them.” The pupae are packed in cotton wool and tissue paper for cushioning. They breathe through spiricles, or breathing holes, but don’t need air exchange, food or water.

“Caterpillars pee and poop,” I overhear a docent telling a group of visitors. So do butterflies, I learn.

Heat packs help to keep the pupae warm. If they were in the wild, the pupae would attach themselves to the underside of a leaf or a twig. The boxes are stamped “live” and “keep warm.” “FedEx knows not to leave them on the truck,” says Davies.

There’s a lot of paperwork for the pupae to get into the country legally. They must go through U.S. Customs and Fish and Wildlife and get a permit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The USDA is concerned about the butterflies getting out and becoming a plant pest, releasing pheromones and mating, when there may be no host plants on which to lay their eggs,” says Davies. One can imagine the headlines: “Invasion of the Butterfly Pupae.”

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PHOTOS BY ROY PRASAD, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

Butterflies are host-specific, when it comes to laying their eggs. Monarchs, for example, can only lay eggs on milkweed. The main host plant for the Eastern Black Swallowtail is Queen Anne’s Lace.

Precautions need to be taken so the pupae don’t bring in a parasite. Wasps and flies can lay eggs in the chrysalis, and these need to be isolated and frozen so they don’t get released into the environment, says Davies.

She assures me that the farms do their best to protect the pupae so they arrive alive and disease free. “They have been practicing shipping to exhibits like this for 25 years,” she says. Still, three to five percent of the pupae will not make it into adult butterflies. Yet in the wild, only five to ten percent would become butterflies—the others might be eaten as eggs, or the caterpillars might become food for songbirds. They may catch a disease, suffer from drought or have a parasitic fly. Raised on a butterfly farm, they are protected from life’s harsh realities.

OK, so the pupae arrive, become butterflies and live out their lives here. Some may live a week to ten days, others may live six weeks to two months. Shipments come every week, and there are 130 different species at any time.

One of the farms raising the pupae is El Bosque Nuevo in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, where land is reforested and dedicated to conservation and protection of native species. Exporting farmed butterflies actually helps raise the funds needed to preserve the land. The operation also provides work for Costa Ricans.

Butterflies flapping their wings overhead cast fluttering shadows on all below. One is perched on a dracaena—it is pure black with pink spots, and it suddenly takes flight. The most important sense for butterflies is smell.

Sensors on their antennae are highly attuned to odors. They can also

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taste—taste buds are at the end of the tongue, and the female can also taste with sensory structures on her feet.

They communicate through chemical cues, and a few species communicate with sound. Remember, in the insect world it’s all about reproduction, so their communication is love talk.

Yes, butterflies do mate while in the conservatory, but since there are no host plants for them to lay eggs on, they do not reproduce. So how do they do it? If you see two adult butterflies with abdomens linked tail to tail, they’re doing it. The male grasps the female and deposits a sperm packet, which fertilizes the female’s eggs. Butterflies can and do fly while mating, but prefer to avoid moving unless disturbed.

The Order Lepidoptera includes butterflies and moths, and here in the conservatory we see Cecropia, Polyphemus moths from Florida and Atlas moths—the largest moths in the world from Southeast Asia.

Although there are exceptions to the distinctions that separate moths from butterflies, in general the butterfly has straight antenna with a club at the end, whereas the moth’s antenna has filaments that come to a point. Moths have chunkier fuzzier bodies and rest with their wings open, while butterflies bring their wings together overhead while taking a break.

It’s a myth that butterflies are beautifully colored and moths are a dull brown.

The Madagascar Sunset Moth is beautifully iridescent, and there are dull brown butterflies. The biggest difference is that moths produce a cocoon like a sleeping bag around the chrysalis. Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar is wrong! I overhear a docent announce this. In Carle’s beloved children’s classic, the hungry caterpillar spins a cocoon but only moths do this.

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PHOTOS BY SHUTTERSTOCK, PHIL SQUATTRITO, DIG THE WELL

Visitors are discouraged from touching butterflies, both in the conservatory and outside. Butterfly wings are covered with tiny scales that look like powder—these are what give the butterfly its coloration and pattern. When the butterfly loses scales it can lose its ability to fly. If a butterfly gets stuck on, say, the ceiling, Davies will use a feather to coax it down for a drink.

Bright colors and distinctive wing patterns can, however, be advantageous. The caterpillars of many species feed on toxic plants, and throughout their lives their tissue is poisonous to predators. As adults, these butterflies make no attempt to hide themselves; instead, their bright, warning coloration is like a neon sign. A bird that eats one of these toxic butterflies remembers the experience and avoids repeating it. Other butterflies mimic the colors of toxic butterflies to defend themselves from predators.

From the exhibition, a visitor learns that butterfly fossils, such as the 40 million-year-old Prodryas persephone, are remarkably similar to modern day forms. Butterflies developed during the Cretaceous Period—the “Age of Flowering Plants”—65 to 135 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Because butterflies are sensitive to environmental change, scientists look to them as indicators of the health of the environment. Human activities, from logging and agriculture to urban expansion and industry, are the biggest causes of habitat loss. Pesticides and herbicides don’t discriminate against butterflies and their food plants. Climate change is altering the distribution of plants, including plants that feed butterflies.

Butterfly caterpillars are voracious plant-eaters, yet they contribute to plant survival. Arthropods consume 20 percent of the earth’s vegetation each year. By

chewing and digesting leaves, caterpillars excrete frass (take that, Scrabble players) and cycle waste into nutrition available for other plants and living organisms.

Adult butterflies consume flower nectar for carbs, proteins, salts and enzymes through a tube resembling a drinking straw called a proboscis.

In turn, butterflies and caterpillars are food for insects, songbirds, mice, lizards, turtles and spiders. Mice feed on Monarchs at their overwintering sites in Mexico.

Vladimir Nabokov was a serious lepidopterist. He volunteered at AMNH and conducted research, publishing a paper on American butterflies. In 1951 he hiked 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies and captured the first female Lycaeides argyrognomon sublivens—his notes found their way into Lolita.

The butterflies in the conservatory are welcoming—they check out visitors, landing on a shoulder or a head. They do not bite, but they may get stuck in your clothes, which is why you go through another set of double doors on leaving, where mirrors help you see if one has hitched a ride in the folds of your clothing.

After the tropical heat, it is refreshing to get outside for a walk in the cold air. More than 150 butterfly species are found in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region and maybe, if you time your visit right, you’ll spot a Summer Azure, Zabulon Skipper, American Lady, Common Sootywing or Eastern Comma fluttering through Central Park.

The Butterfly Conservatory at the American Museum of Natural History, Eighth Avenue at 81st Street, is open daily, 10AM to 5:45PM through May 25. Suggested admission is $22 adults, $17 students/seniors, $12.50 children. www.amnh.org U

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TAM O’SHANTERS (1949)

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY’S MENU COLLECTION

BY ELLEN

GILBERT

PHOTOS COURTESY OF NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

If they are not already familiar with it, foodies, chefs, historians, sociologists, graphic artists and many others are likely to be enchanted when they find out about the New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection.

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GRAND HOTEL (1901)

BENOIT (2008) WALDORF ASTORIA (1919)

T

he tens-of-thousands of documents, mostly from the mid-19th century through the present, are housed at the library’s main branch at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. New York City is represented most prominently, but the collection is international in scope. It includes elaborate cartes du jours and wine lists from famous old restaurants like Delmonico’s; lists of meals available to 19th century riders of particular stage coach lines (departure and arrival times included); lavish menus from ocean liners, as well as more homely news of local church suppers.

Since most of the menus have dates on them, the collection is largely in chronological order. It is a treasure trove of information, not to mention great fun. “Ever wonder how the Hotel Astor served their Virginia ham in February, 1933?” asked WNYC talk show host Leonard Lopate last fall when he featured a segment on the project with NYPL’s Collections Strategy Librarian Rebecca Federman and its Digital Library and Labs Director, Benjamin Vershbow.

ACCESSIBILITY The fact that the collection is systematically being digitized and transcribed makes it even more remarkable. Simply put, this means that anyone, anywhere, at any time can access images and information culled from the menus, with details about what people ate, where and when they ate it, and how much it cost.

Prior to digitization and transcription, librarians had begun to observe the different ways in which on-site visitors were using the collection, reported Vershbow. It became evident, he said, that the menus do not just represent “a series of artifacts.” Users’ interest in changing trends, locations, prices, and other details suggested that it wasn’t enough to just photograph and digitize images; people wanted content, but sometimes florid, faded handwritten lettering or idiosyncratic typography and layouts made it difficult to extract details mechanically.

Thus was born “What’s on the Menu?” NYPL’s first foray into crowdsourcing, enlisting the public's help in transcribing the actual contents of the menus (see menus.nypl.org). Anyone who’s game (er, perhaps we should say “willing”) can sign on to help transcribe the menus dish by dish giving “historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.” Thousands have already participated in what has become one of the most successful documented library crowdsourcing projects.

At this writing 1,324,518 dishes have been transcribed from 17,512 menus.

VERSATILITY “The food listed is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time,” reported Federman. What she described as “middle class dining” appears on menus from diners and luncheonettes “offering a much better sense of what people were actually eating” than what they aspired to eat. Things that people ate at home, like sardines or “half a grapefruit,” were once more available than they are today, and puddings (“cabinet,” tapioca, and rice, in particular) enjoyed greater popularity. Evolving interest in ethnic cuisines can be traced: Chinese restaurants are well-represented as are French and German cuisines. Italian influences came later. Menus from Mexican restaurants are scant, Federman noted, inadvertently suggesting, perhaps, a future focus for contributors of new material.

Prohibition had an obvious impact on liquor consumption and the Depression and World War II accounted for campaigns for “meatless Mondays” and “wheatless Wednesdays.” In those days, of course, “wheatless” was not about being gluten-free and, in contrast to today’s menus, there is nary a calorie count, and “sourcing” information was definitely not an area of concern. Kale was, perhaps surprisingly, available by 1900. Even when the lingo is different, equivalents can be guessed at: “mayonnaise of chicken” was presumably chicken salad, and “beef tea” was likely to mean broth, Federman told Lopate.

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CHARLES DUPPLER HOTEL (1889)

FAIRMONT HOTEL (1949)

WASHINGTON PARK (1907)

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DIGGING IN “Part of the joy of being a contributor to the project is perusing artifacts that tell a story of another era,” noted a New York Times account of the project.

“Each menu is like a snapshot of a specific time and place; it's fun to wonder what ‘cold pineapple cream might have been like at Mangler's in Chicago, IL at the turn of the century, or to see that dandelion was in vogue in the D&H Dining Car Service in May of 1900.”

Participants contributing to “What’s on the Menu?” are good at signing on new recruits to help out, and finding additional items of potential interest for the collection. An occupational hazard of the work is, apparently, its hunger-inducing potential. One contributor reportedly wanted to face the problem head-on by hosting a transcription party where guests would bring laptops, do their transcriptions, and eat dishes from the menus. Yesteryear prices make volunteers wistful. “If I could go back to 1900 with like $20, I could eat like a king!” tweeted one.

“For people who love food, typing up the contents of an old menu is a weird thrill,” Mr. Vershbow said. “I think people jump at an opportunity to commune with the past.” In addition to new transcriptions, the website is regularly updated to reflect current events. To celebrate Will and Kate’s fall visit to New York City, for example, old QE2 menus were featured.

HOTEL TRAYMORE (1919)

MISS BUTTOLPH The NYPL menu collection owes its beginnings to one Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), whom the library describes as “a somewhat mysterious and passionate figure, whose mission in life was to collect menus.” In 1899, Buttolph, a library volunteer, offered her existing collection to the NYPL and expressed her willingness to continue to collect menus on the library’s behalf. Then-Library Director John Shaw Billings is credited with accepting both offers. (Billings’s achievements went way beyond this gesture; in addition to being a librarian he was a surgeon who, after the Civil War, organized the Library and Museum of the Office of the Surgeon General of the United States Army and other army records into what is now the National Library of Medicine.)

Buttolph’s “principal method of acquisition was to write to every restaurant she could think of, soliciting menus,” notes one account. “When letters failed, she often marched into a restaurant and pleaded her case in person.” She also placed advertisements in trade publications like The Caterer and The Hotel Gazette. Her efforts on behalf of the menu collection were described no less than three times between 1904 and 1909 in The New York Times; one piece noted that “she frankly avers that she does not care two pins for the food lists on her menus, but their historic interest means everything.” By the time of her death in 1924, Buttolph had added more than 25,000 menus to the collection.

THE NEXT COURSE? Federman hopes to take the newly amassed data in new directions. “I'd like to explore dishes that have remained popular over time, but also talk about dishes that never see the light of day today,” she told one interviewer. Future efforts may also involve “manual semantic enhancements” necessary to tie dishes like “clear green turtle” and “tomato aux croutons” together as soups.

“We also might explore different categories (of restaurant or of dish) for browsing and searching, and perhaps eventually geographic and price-based exploration tools,” said Vershbow. “In other words, we're just getting started.”

Already, though, the collection has made an impact. “This archive has become tremendously important as there is nothing nearly as large, nor anything that has so much from the mid-nineteenth century when restaurants were first established in the U.S.,” enthused Yale University professor Paul Freedman. “How people socialized, what they ate, how things change over time and the actual experience of people living in the United States in the past 170 years can be made vividly alive with these materials.” In 2011 the project won the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History.

Using the materials will be, for those used to jumping through proverbial hoops to obtain permissions, pleasantly uncomplicated: there are no known copyright restrictions on the material and all that anyone using the material is asked to do is credit The New York Public Library as a source. U

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Artwork from Lotus Gallery

March 13 through March 17, 2015

The Asia Art Fair Bohemian National Hall 321 E 73rd Street New York, NY 10021 (212) 988-1733 info@theasiaartfair.com For more information please contact the Fair office.

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ZABAR’S

WHAT’S N T TO LOVE?

BY LINDA

ARNTZENIUS

IT’S ALL ABOUT FOOD, FRIENDS AND FAMILY

PHOTO BY: SHUTTERSTOCK

AT THIS QUINTESSENTIAL NEW YORK DELI

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP): ADAM KUBAN, DANIEL KRIEGER, JEREMAI SMITH (ABOVE) Entrance

to Zabar’s on 2245 Broadway. Zabar's sea salt dark chocolate bar. David, Zabar's Nova Scotia salmon slicer.

Simple Sweet Challah, its recipe is available on www.zabars.com.

N (LEFT) Zabar’s

o trip to New York is complete without a visit to Zabar’s on Broadway. Located across Central park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not too far from the Museum of Natural History, it’s the perfect detour on the way home from a daytrip to the city. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is known to enjoy Zabar’s and the late lamented Nora Ephron was a regular. My Manhattan friends swear they couldn’t live without it. And it’s easy to see why.

The Zabar family members who run the business roast their own coffees, smoke their own fish (whitefish and cod as well as salmon and sturgeon), pickle their own herring, prepare their own meats (corned beef and pastrami), cook their own dishes and salads, and bake their own bagels, breads and pastries. Besides imported and domestic cheeses and salamis, they also stock an enormous selection of honeys, oils, mustards, and lemonades of every hue and flavor—how enticing does elderflower sound? Gift baskets can be had for all occasions, made to order for the holidays, or just to enjoy on a picnic or for breakfast.

As Zabar’s own website attests, the place “has to be experienced, in person, to truly be understood. You have to see the crowds, hear the banter of our sales help, smell the croissants baking, admire the rich brown hues of our

coffee, sample cheese from every corner of the world, enjoy the beauty of hand sliced nova, walk upstairs and see the largest selection of imported copper cookware anywhere... it really is a one of a kind adventure.”

Every word of that is true. Go see for yourselves. On a recent trip, I stocked up on items that can be found nowhere else at prices that are hard to beat.

Zabar’s corner café serves hot Panini and fresh coffee but I opt for a classic hot corned beef on rye with mustard and a sour pickle on the side made for me at the deli counter. I confess, I had been craving the sandwich ever since I saw a demonstration of it being made by a veteran Zabar’s staffer on You Tube. It was on my mind all the way from New Jersey and while walking across Central Park after a visit to the MET. The overwhelmingly over-stuffed meal in your hand does not disappoint. Thus fortified, it’s time to shop.

My favorite Cantal cheese takes me back to past summers in the Auvergne region of France. It’s named after the mountains there and it is, I learn, one of France’s oldest cheeses and comes from cows fed on sweet hay from late fall until spring and then aged for several months. Although it looks a bit like Cheddar, its flavor is tangy and buttery. Yum. Zabar’s has two varieties, one young and one aged. I go for the aged. Don’t be put off by the crusty gray rind, it’s all natural.

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Inside the bustling store, recorded voice announcements share the internal intercom and are frequently interrupted by queries like “What’s the price on the Hungarian salami?” followed by a swift response from another store clerk.

Zabar’s homey atmosphere is further enhanced while waiting in line, number-in-hand, at the deli counter where the choices of prepared dishes that catch my eye and make my mouth water include boeuf bourguignon (which also comes as a puff-pastry covered pie), duck legs in a smooth velvety sauce, and braised lamb shanks. There are also fresh grains and green salads. With Zabar’s on your doorstep, one need never cook at home, at all, ever.

The elderly lady next to me is buying a half pound portion of a dressed kale concoction. It looks delicious and healthy. “Be sure to give me plenty of dressing,” she tells the counter-hand. He gives all his attention to selecting leaves with a good proportion of creamy dressing. He’s weighing the order and just about to put the lid on when his customer raises a knobby hand: “Just a little more of the dressing,” she pleads, pointing at one particular curled leaf.

To his credit, the clerk picks it out and adds it to the container. No sigh, no rolling of eyes, just doing his job. The next customer is exacting the same personal service from her server. “Let me see how you’re cutting it,” she demands. “No, it’s too thin, I want it thicker, thicker,” she responds when shown the slice of juicy roast beef. A further attempt elicits: “Perfect. That’s how I want it.”

At Zabar’s food is serious business. It’s also a joy.

Founded by Louis and Lillian Zabar in 1934, Zabar’s is still a family run business, three generations later. Then it was just a 22-foot-wide store-front along Broadway at West 80th Street. Now it extends almost the entire block and is run by Louis and Lillian’s sons Saul and Stanley as well as their sons, daughters and their cousins. A portrait of Saul and Stanley prominently displayed in the

store serves as a reminder of Zabar’s personal story.

“Louis was a real stickler for quality, roasting his own coffee, and personally visiting smokehouses to sample and inspect the fish—rejecting far more than he accepted,” recalls Saul and Stanley Zabar in a joint letter to the store’s loyal patrons marking last year’s 80th anniversary.

“The principles and practices of our founder and father continue to guide us: Respect the customer. Never, ever stint on quality. Offer fair value. And last but not least, keep searching for the new and wonderful,” they say.

Over the years Zabar’s has introduced New Yorkers to foods now taken for granted. In the 1960s, it was French Brie; in the 1970s, it was sun-dried tomatoes and gnocchi. The 1980s saw the arrival of caviar, of which the store maintains a fine selection, or so I’m told by one in the know. The selection varies so it’s best to check the website to see what’s available at any given time (and for prices too), but there’s usually some wild Alaskan red salmon caviar and hand-packed Russian Beluga “Malossol” (slightly salted) caviar.

And while such imported delicacies have extended the variety and richness of New Yorkers’ meals, Zabar’s bread and butter, so to speak, remains the meltingly delicious smoked fish that is still sliced by hand and freshly-baked goods like the traditional rugelach, “our Bubbe’s recipe” according to Saul and Stanley Zabar. Not to mention, the coffee blends that are roasted especially for the store, which sells over 400,000 pounds of it a year. And did I tell you about the (Kosher) bundt cakes and the most sumptuous cheesecake I know: Zabar’s Chocolate Grand Marnier Mousse, which can even be shipped (ditto handmade and gluten free French macarons baked in Brooklyn).

As Saul and Stanley explain: “to succeed as a family business, you have to love each other, and love the business in our case, great food, great service, great prices, great folks. We ask you, what’s not to love?”

PHOTOS COURTESY OF (CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT): ZABAR’S, WARNER BROTHERS, ZABAR’S, SHUTTERSTOCK

(BELOW) Louis and Lillian Zabar opened their first shop as a counter inside a supermarket in 1920. Scene from You've Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, filmed in 1998. Zabar’s daily bakes fresh bagels and roasts coffee. (RIGHT) Black and white cookies make a perfect accompaniment to Zabar’s fresh coffee.

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THE ZABAR’S BLOG

STILL SHOPPING

For dyed-in-the-wool fans, the Zabar’s blog is a source of recipes as well as information on what’s new in the store. There are coupons, too. Chef Tory Avey has delightful snippets of culinary history. Who knew carrots were not always bright orange. According to Avey, the Dutch are likely responsible for the carrot as we know it today, cultivating the color during the 17th century in honor of William of Orange, the king who led the Dutch revolt against Spain and was invited across the English Channel to rule England. Before that, carrots came in yellow, purple and white. “Thanks to the farmers and gardeners who have worked hard to revitalize heirloom vegetables in recent years, we are once again seeing these vibrantly colored non-orange carrots,” says Avey, who recommends roasting them with a mixture of kosher salt and dill for “something truly magical.”

Avey, who writes the two popular cooking blogs: The Shiksa in the Kitchen and The History Kitchen and is the resident food history writer for PBS Food, specializes in adapting historical and vintage recipes for the modern kitchen while telling the stories behind those recipes. She isn’t the only chef whose recipes you’ll find on Zabar’s website. Check out contributions from guest chefs Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, Ina Garten, Jennifer L. Heil, Marcy Goldman, Mark Bittman, Tom Valenti, Tracey Zabar and numerous others.

The blog is a mine of information for cooks, experienced or novice, with comments on traditional holiday dinners given some contemporary twists.

The store’s mezzanine floor is devoted to gadgets of all sorts, from upscale coffee makers, French copper saucepans and chef’s knives to pepper mills, even one that is battery operated, has a tiny LED light and needs only a tilt of the wrist to make it work. There are also mini chocolate fondues, egg timers and strawberry hullers. Whatever your culinary need, it can be met here.

I pick up a container of my favorite Lapsang Souchong (Hu-Kwa) tea. It seems to be difficult to come by these days. When I asked for it in one of those fancy new tea emporiums that sell every sort of fruit-flavored tea imaginable, I was met with a blank stare. It’s a dark tea from the island of Formosa that is smoked over pine branches. It adds an extra dimension to any tea with which it is combined. Still, it’s an acquired taste, so don’t try it neat; way too strong. But add a pinch to another black tea, particularly a good Earl Grey and you have something really special—a fragrant bergamot infusion with a smoky kick.

Next item on my list: bread. Half of it will be eaten by the time I reach New Jersey, so best get plenty. I’m reminded again of those trips to France—out first thing in the morning to the boulangerie for a baguette, or better yet, two, one to eat at home and one to eat on the way there. Zabar’s own rye bread has lots of seeds and a flavor like no other. I buy a loaf of it and another half loaf of a dark crusted wheat bread. And what could be more evocative of summer than honey in the comb.

Loaded with goodies, there’s just time for cup of coffee and a jelly donut before the train back to Jersey, my backpack stuffed to capacity with coffee, goat cheeses, olives, English Stilton, Italian Gorgonzola, Hungarian-style and peppered salami, Petit Saucisson aux Cépes, Russian Coffee Cake, Zabar’s famous Chocolate Babka, Parisian “Comptoir do Cacao” chocolates from Chocalaterie Artisanale, and a two-pound box of Zabar’s Extra Fancy Glazed California Apricots. I say again, Yum! Zabar’s is located at 2245 Broadway (at 80th Street), New York, NY 10024.

For more information and hours, call 212.787.2000, email: info@zabars.com, or visit www.zabars.com. U

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It’s Not Just the Disease

Oliver Sacks Wants Details “T

by ellen gilbert

he hunger for narrative has been very strong for me, but also is a necessity for me,” observed Oliver Sacks speaking to an audience at the University of Warwick, where he was Visiting Professor in 2013.

The title of his talk, appropriately enough, was “Narrative and Medicine: The Importance of the Case History,” and Sacks, who has been referred to as “the poet laureate of medicine,” was making the case for the “complete integration of science and story telling.”

The London-born, 81-year old Sacks is nothing if not a master doctor/ storyteller, whose work cuts across genres. His book Awakenings, the basis for the 1990 film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, also inspired a play by Harold Pinter and a ballet by Tobias Picker and Aletta Collins. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was the inspiration for a chamber opera by Michael Nyman and Christopher Rawlence, as well as Peter Brook’s L’Homme Qui...

Sacks is also the author of Musicophilia and, most recently, Hallucinations. “His essays and books about people living with various neurological conditions have earned numerous awards and inspired millions of readers around the world,” his website succinctly reports.

Sacks was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and is currently a professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine. He has lived in New York since 1965. In addition to tackling a startling number and variety of medical conundrums over the years, he makes it a point to regularly speak out—quietly, but forcefully— about current events. “What do Rachel Carson, J. R. R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, William Styron, Toni Morrison, Galileo, Mark Twain, Judy Blume and Madeleine L’Engle have in common?” Sacks asked during Banned Books Week in an online tribute to librarians who have championed intellectual freedom. “Thank you, Doris Lessing, for your work and support,” he declared when the Nobel-Prizewinning novelist died in 2013. “You will be missed.”

Sacks’s 2002 book Uncle Tungsten was characteristically idiosyncratic.

Subtitled “Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood,” the book was described by science writer Natalie Angier as a “joyous, wistful, generous and tough-minded

memoir.” In it Sacks details growing up in what he describes as “a medical household” where both parents practiced medicine using offices and creating lab space in the family home. “Table talk was always of medicine, and always presented in the form of stories,” Sacks recalled.

His mother, an anatomist and surgeon, “never lost the desire to go beneath the surfaces of things, to explain,” he told the Warwick audience. “Thus the thousand and one questions I asked as a child were seldom met by impatient or peremptory answers, but careful ones which enthralled me though they were often above my head. I was encouraged from the start to interrogate, to investigate.”

While Sacks claims not to remember medical school lectures he heard, he is quick to note that the building in which they took place is now “an ugly apartment building.” His impatience with dehumanizing practices came early: introduced for the first time to an emergency room he bristled when patients were identified by just their illness. To his joy, he discovered that “the one with a delirium” was a tea planter from Ceylon with fascinating stories to tell. Anxious that a later assignment at a migraine clinic in New York City would be dull, he was elated to discover “quite the reverse: migraine can provide a window into the nervous system.”

Patients’ stories about their suffering and the ways in which they coped with various ailments were, Sacks found, invaluable. When he was cured of his Sunday migraines, a mathematician Sacks was treating wanted them back, because they “cleared the decks of emotional debris, resulting in a surge of creativity Monday and Tuesday.” This willingness to compromise, says Sacks, “gave me some idea of the economy of an individual.” His father must have had a similar need to observe a person in context; encouraged at the age of 90 to give up making house calls he insisted that it was the one thing he would not give up doing.

Sacks is generous as he acknowledges others’ work, past and present. Since he casts a wide net in making sense of things, he may cite Shakespeare just as easily as he references William Osler, who is widely credited as the father of modern medicine. Osler’s observation that “it is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has” is

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particularly dear to Sacks. “Diseases and their effects are the same as they were for Hippocrates 2400 years ago, or for the writers of the Edwin Smith surgical papyrus,” he observes. “Whatever happens, one has to have good narrative— complete integration of the science and the story telling.”

Early in his career Sacks wondered about which of his contemporaries might write books that included nuanced case histories (as Wittgenstein noted, he says, a book should “consist of examples”) in which patients are presented as individuals, with details about their work, families, and how each of them coped and tried to hold onto their identities amidst illness. Such books would read like the “nonfiction novels” written by another of his heroes, Charles Darwin.

An epiphany—“you silly bugger, you’re the man to write it”—led Sacks to write his first book, Migraine, which he describes as “little vignettes” of “biographies” that were “not too intrusive.”

For many people, the name Oliver Sacks will forever be associated with the 1990 movie, Awakenings. Based on Sacks’s 1973 book of the same name, it chronicles how, at a chronic disease hospital in the Bronx in the late 1960s, Sacks (played by Robin Williams) encounters dozens of people standing around motionless like statues. Told that nothing could be done for them, “I wondered what was going on in inside,” Sacks recalled years later. Encouraged by nurses (who “know more than doctors in chronic disease hospitals”), Sacks treated them with a newly available medicine, L-Dopa. “The first effects of this were lyrical and wonderful,” Sacks said. These people had been “dropped, as through

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a vacuum, from their 20s into their 60s. The world had changed beyond meaning,” and the challenge they faced as they tried to create new lives only strengthened Sacks’s belief that medical care “can’t be reduced to just giving a medicine.”

Sacks sounds bemused when he reports on the “mixed reception,” that greeted both Migraine and Awakenings.

While they were well received by the general public, “a strange mutism” prevailed among his colleagues, and, lacking “the serious stamp of science,” no mention of either work appeared (at least for a while) in the medical literature. No matter. Sacks

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continues to tell stories about people who reorganized their environments according to color; to “see voices,” or who began to sing throughout the day as they valiantly rebounded from physical setbacks. And if medical science has been slow on the uptake, the public loves Saks’s messages. Writing in Slantmagazine.com about Sacks’s most recent book, Hallucinations, Tim Peters observed that “reading about a successful, well-respected medical doctor such as Sacks patiently describe that one time back in the ‘60s when he saw all the passengers on a New York City bus looking like bug-eyed aliens with smooth, white, ovoid skulls makes the prospect of you having a hallucination in your own life that much less socially and professionally damning. . .”

Sacks himself has no problem damning current trends in medicine. Recalling the “richly, beautifully descriptive” medical charts that used to capture the inner lives and imaginations of patients he decries the use of “mean lists of criteria” for making diagnoses (and enabling insurance reimbursement). A particular offender is the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, which Sacks describes as “an abominable book.” Doctors may say they don’t have time to write a case history, says Sacks, “but one does have time. A deep and detailed case history doesn’t have to be long, if one uses language properly, it can be a couple of paragraphs.”

Sacks can be observed taking sips (it’s not clear of what) from his “favorite bottle” at speaking engagements these days and he sometimes pauses a little breathlessly between words. In July 2013 he wrote about his impending birthday

in a New York Times op ed column: “Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.” Still, the title of the piece was “The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding),” and he is characteristically upbeat about the business of aging. “With a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive—‘I’m glad I’m not dead!’ sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.”

There are, undoubtedly, many, many people who are also glad he’s alive and still very much engaged. It doesn’t come as a surprise to tune into a new Radiolab podcast, “Where Am I,” exploring how your brain keeps track of your body, and Sacks is the first guest, reporting how he is coping with his precarious sense of direction by carrying heavy magnets in his pockets that help to realign him when he turns as he walks. A recent message from his office, responding to a request for an interview was disappointing, but ultimately reassuring: “Dr. Sacks is not taking on any new commitments at this time—he is currently working on a deadline with his new book, and feels he must concentrate fully on the project at hand.”

In his op ed piece on aging Sacks observed that “perhaps, with luck, I will make it, more or less intact, for another few years and be granted the liberty to continue to love and work, the two most important things, Freud insisted, in life.”

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calendar highlights Tuesday, February

24

Tuesday, March

3

Friday, March

Free, Guided tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Masterpieces of the Middle Ages. Learn more about the tapestries, stained glass, and goldencrusted treasures that were created between the beginnings of Christianity and the rise of the Renaissance. www. metmuseum.org

Careers through Culinary Arts Program Celebrates 25 Years with a Grand Tasting Event at Chelsea Piers. Forty of New York City’s best-known chefs will prepare the evening’s food. There will also be a silent and live auction emceed by Jamie Ritchie, CEO and President of Soetheby’s Wine. www.ccapinc.org

New York Philharmonic Chinese New Year Concert and Gala featuring superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Dress will be traditional Chinese/black tie. http://lc.lincolncenter.org.

24th Annual Bunny Hop hosted by The Associates Committee of The Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center at 583 Park Avenue. Petting zoo, photo booth and a live performance of three acts from The Big Apple Circus. http:// giving.mskcc.org/story/bunny-hop

Thursday, February

26

Saturday, March

Irish soul singer Hozier performs live at New York’s Beacon Theatre. www. beacontheatre.com

3/27

7

MoMA celebrates the multifaceted career of Icelandic artist Bjork, with a retrospective that encompasses the many mediums she’s worked in, such as costume, video, design and of course, music (on view through June 7). www. moma.org New York Theatre Ballet (NYTB) presents Keith Michael’s GOOSE! at Florence Gould Hall. Part of the NYTB’s “Once Upon A Ballet” series for children (also on March 8). www.nytb.org

Sunday, March

2/28

Cookies for Kids’ Cancer will host their second annual benefit at The Waterfront. Guests will be treated to dinner by some of New York City’s top chefs. John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls will also perform. http:// cookiesforcancer.org

6

“Beyond Rubik’s Cube” exhibit at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

7,000 square feet of games, puzzles, history, art, and engineering inspired by the Rubik’s Cube (on view through April 26, 2015). http://lsc.org

8

Varietal Perspective Wine Tasting at Martha Clara Vineyards, located on the North Fork of Long Island. Learn about each varietal, its origin, and how it grows on Long Island. http:// marthaclaravineyards.com

Adults in Toyland Casino Night at The Plaza Hotel. Cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and casino games featuring a silent auction to benefit the Stephen D. Hassenfeld Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders and the Department of Pediatrics at NYU Langone Medical Center. www.nyumc.org

february

3/6

Friday, February

27

New Jersey Devils vs. Boston Bruins at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. www.prucenter.com

Saturday, February

28

The New York City Kids Food Festival, a weekend-long event that focuses on educating families about making balanced food choices through fun and flavorful activities (through March 1). http://kidsfoodfestival.com The Annual Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden (through April 19). http://nybg.org New York Collaborates for Autism: “Night of Too Many Stars” at the Beacon Theatre. Hosted by Jon Stewart of Comedy Central, the benefit features an evening of live performances, short films, and stand-up. www.nyc4a.org

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3/3

2/24 “Celebrating the Genius of Orson Welles: Man For All Media” with film historian Philip Harwood at 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue. He was called “Boy Genius” as director of the Mercury Theatre and a radio actor during the 1930’s. Learn more through rare recordings, film, and television footage. www.92y.org

2/28

New Space Show, Dark Universe, at the American Museum of Natural History.

The presentation takes place at Hayden Planetarium and was produced by a creative team of astrophysicists, science visualizers, and educators (repeats Monday-Friday). www.amnh.org.

Wednesday, March

Thursday, March

Friday, March

4

Paul Krugman and his fellow Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz join Thomas Piketty to discuss The Genius of Economics at the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufman Concert Hall. www.92y.org

12

The Love Heals 2015 Gala at the Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan. Love Heals is the leading provider of HIV/ AIDS education in New York City public schools. The evening includes celebrity appearances, dinner, cocktails, and a live auction. www.loveheals.org

13

Preview opening of The Asia Art Fair at Bohemian National Hall, 321 E 73rd Street, 5pm-9pm. In honor of Asia Week, this nine-day celebration of Asian art throughout metropolitan New York runs through March 17. www.asiaweekny.com

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Saturday, March

14

Thursday, March

19

Saturday, March

New York City Vegetarian Food Festival at The Metropolitan Pavilion (also on March 15). http://nycvegfoodfest.com

Rubin Museum of Art’s Asia Week Celebration. www.rubinmuseum.org/ asiaweek

Last chance to view the “Madame Cezanne” exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (closes on March 15). www.metmuseum.org

Saturday, March

If the traditional St. Patty’s Day Parade is a little too much for you, try the tamer walking tour of Lower Manhattan’s “Little Ireland” district, led by St. Paul’s Chapel. www.trinitywallstreet.org

Tuesday, March

17

21

Final day of the Winter Wedding: Holiday Cards exhibit at Poets House in New York City. Features holiday cards, Valentine’s, and birthday greetings from some of the last century’s most beloved poets, including Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath. Come view these intimate exchanges. www.poetshouse.org

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Art Exhibitions:

“Garden of Laughs” at Madison Square Garden featuring comedic stand-up by Lewis Black, Bill Burr, and Dane Cook.

The event will be hosted by Steve Schrippa and will benefit the Garden of Dreams Foundation. The Foundation works with Tri-State area organizations to reach out to children who are facing challenges like homelessness, extreme poverty, and illness. www. gardenofdreamsfoundation.org.

“Countdown to Zero;” The American Museum of Natural History “Tools: Extending Our Reach;” Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum “On Kawara—Silence;” Guggenheim Museum “Sacred Traditions of the Himalayas;” The Metropolitan Museum of Art “Bjork;” MoMA “Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand;” Museum of the City of New York “2015 Triennial: Surround Audience;” The New Museum “Frank Stella;” Whitney Museum of American Art

2015 St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue. http://nycstpatricksday.org

3/4

3/3

3/7

3/17

3/6

3/23

Monday, March

Sunday, March

23

Poets & Writers Annual Dinner at Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers will honor the work of Margaret Atwood, Cheryl BoyceTaylor, Christopher Castellani, and Barbara Epler. www.pw.org/about-us/ donate/annual_dinner

Friday, March

27

Brooklyn Nets vs. the Cleveland Cavaliers at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. www.nba.com/nets

Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts opens its Target Storybook Series with Enchantment Theatre Company’s The Adventures of Harold and the Purple Crayon, based on the beloved book by Crockett Johnson. www.brooklyncenter.org

Tuesday, March

31

The National Audubon Society Gala at The Plaza Hotel. The National Audubon Society is one of the world’s oldest and most respected conservation organizations. www.audubon.org

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Theatre Performances: The Elephant Man; Booth Theatre Larry David’s Fish in the Dark; Cort Theatre Sting’s The Last Ship; Neil Simon Theatre The King and I; Vivian Beaumont An American in Paris; Palace Theatre Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Parts I and II; Winter Garden Theatre The Heart of Robin Hood; Marquis Theatre Skylight; John Golden Theatre

march

3/29

URBAN AGENDA New York City

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Middletown

Fair Haven

Princeton

“Riverside” the former Timolat Estate situated on 12+ acres has been entirely restored. Features amazing entertaining spaces, views of the Navesink River, a private beach and farm assessment. Geralyn Behring, Rumson Office: 732-530-2800.

Price upon request.

The finest property that has come on the market in Fair Haven in years. Over 200 feet of waterfront with a private beach and panoramic views. This spectacular home is only minutes to ferry. PJ Rotchford, Rumson Office: 732-530-2800 $4,400,000

The epitome of elegance on one of Princeton’s best-loved streets.

6+ beds, 5+ baths, party/guest suite, finished basement, terrace, and pool are just some things worth mentioning. Extraordinary! Alison Covello, Princeton Office: 609-921-2600. $3,900,000

Rumson

Princeton

Sea Bright

Capture the essence of what made Rumson synonymous with gracious living. Turn-of-the-century seashore Colonial replete with exquisite details, has been restored to perfection by current owner. Gloria Nilson, Shrewsbury Office: 732-842-6181. $2,525,000

A gracious portico welcomes you into this 5,700 sq. ft. Georgian Colonial. Nestled on a cul-de-sac, this spacious home affords privacy and wooded views, yet is within a comfortable walking distance to town. Anne Nosnitsky, Princeton Office: 609-921-2600. $1,825,000

Priced to sell with ocean and river views from numerous balconies and the roof top deck. Every day will feel like a vacation at this fantastic seashore retreat! No damage to the living space from Sandy. Donna Markowitz, Keyport Office: 732-264-3456. $1,799,000

Holmdel

Belmar

Holmdel

Impressive estate offers privacy and extraordinary quality. Designed with an open, flexible floor plan ideal for formal entertaining and casual living. The master suite boasts breathtaking NYC skyline views.

Mario Venancio, Rumson Office: 732-530-2800. $1,599,000

A boater’s delight, be in the ocean in 1.5 minutes! Walk to beach, town, or train to NYC. This three bedroom, move-in ready waterfront home is priced right. Aileen Byrne-Fahy, Wall Township Office: 732-449-5555. $1,190,000

Prestigious Walnut Hill! A grand 2 acre Colonial Estate Home with sumptuous master suite, 1st floor au pair suite. Private resort style grounds with pool, spa and waterfall. Virginia Caparro-Handley, Holmdel Office: 732-946-3200 $1,145,000

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Bay Head, 732-295-8099

Brick, 732-920-6060

Holmdel, 732-946-3200

Hopewell Crossing, 609-737-9100

Keyport, 732-264-3456

Manalapan, 732-536-2000

Mendham, 973-543-1000

Middletown, 732-747-5600

Monroe Twp, 609-395-6600

Ocean Twip, 732-493-4900

Pt Pleasant Beach, 732-899-8299

Princeton, 609-921-2600

Princeton Junction, 609-452-2188

Robbinsville, 609-259-2711

Rumson, 732-530-2800

Shrewsbury, 732-842-6009

South Brunswick, 732-398-2600

Spring Lake, 732-449-3200

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Washington Crossing, 215-862-2074

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