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 The autumn equinox
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| A bee in pollen heaven on the day before fall. 11:30 AM. Photo: JH. |
September 22, 2009. Yesterday was a beautiful, warm sunny day in New York. Today is the autumn equinox which occurs officially at 9:18 tonight. After that it’s Autumn In New York no matter what the weather.
About half after noon I went down to Bergdorf’s where Alexandra Lebenthal was having a birthday luncheon for her friend Michelle Smith, in the restaurant on the seventh floor.
I like to go into Bergdorf’s occasionally just to get a glimpse of the place. It is the crème de la crème of the ne plus ultra New York department store, old fashioned and au courant hip at the same time. The staff looks so New York and sophisticated, beautifully turned out. There is pride in the presentation everywhere. You can tell by looking at the way they’re dressed that they know about their business.
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| The view from the entrance of the restaurant on the 7th floor of Bergdorf's overlooking the Park and Fifth Avenue at 1:20 pm. |
As I was making my way to the elevator I saw a couple of women who were obviously tourists (carrying subway maps) entering and looking around wide-eyed. I knew what they were thinking: this is New York, this is glamour, this is chic, this is Bergdorf Goodman. I love watching people being introduced to New York. I know how they feel and it’s a good feeling.
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| Michelle Smith and Alexandra Lebenthal |
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Meanwhile. The lunch. The restaurant is not large and has a lot of light with great views of Central Park and the east side of Fifth Avenue. The crowd is mainly women, many fashionable, many professional, very much into their conversations.
Alexandra invited me for lunch but I was too far behind at my desk in the morning to make it on time. Just as well; it would have been twenty-four women and me, somebody they would have had to accommodate.
The guest of honor was celebrating her 45th birthday, which took place last Friday. I told her she had the same birthday as Garbo and my mother. She was politely impressed.
Michelle is Alexandra’s business partner who co-founded the firm Alexandra & James in 2006. She runs the wealth management division of the firm. She is also one of the top certified divorce financial planners in the country.
She specializes in all the financial aspects of divorce from forensic accounting to structuring settlements. This is some business, fraught with enough dramas to fill a hundred novels by Barbara Taylor Bradford, Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins combined, and got knows who else. People cheating lying swindling, it’s all there in the story. All in the name of Love at the beginning, and when it’s over all in the name of money. |
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| Alison Aston and Brigitte Kleine |
Tory Burch |
Michelle, whom I’d never met before, looks, as you can see, like a very pleasant young mother who has spare time when the kids are in school. It turns out she does somehow find time for everything and everyone in her day. She’s one of those New York powerhouses who is connected to the boys and girls at the Maine Chance.
She’s also the mother of Dylan who has Down’s Syndrome and is a special, all-around seven-year-old boy, and she co-founded the IDEAL School, an inclusion school for special needs children, which is on Central Park West.
Alexandra told me that as a friend Michelle is one of those people who becomes a friend to the people she does business with. “She’s a mother hen and a mother bear at the same time.” A lot of her friends feel lucky to have her. |
| Debbie Bancroft |
Judy Poller, Audra Zuckerman, and Silda Wall Spitzer |
| Kristen Neibhur and Laurie Ressin |
Julie Wurts and Dr. Susan Krysiewicz |
| Kim Hicks, Corinne Smith, and Tracey Nixon |
Lynne Connelly and Lisa Weber |
| Carolee Friedlander and Eva Jeanbart Lorenzotti |
Harriet Weintraub and Nancy Silverman |
Leaving Bergdorf’s, I decided to catch some scenes of the city since I had my camera with me. The Apple Cube across the street is on, has made, a very popular plaza for lunchtime and even all day people watching. There are a few tables and chairs set out, and many people sit on the ledges. Tourists, business people, people on a break, shoppers resting their feet, watching the world go buy. Or on their cell phones. Or taking pictures with their digitals.
Then there are the “pushcarts” selling their wares, always a bargain, be it a hotdog or a pashmina or a necktie. Two blocks up across the avenue by the park, the Strand Bookstore has its stalls and tables open for business. |
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I walked along East 59th heading toward Madison. The balcony above Crate and Barrel is a garden. I always love seeing that on the city streets. In front of the Carlton House I spotted the first autumn flowers planted around its trees.
In front of Barneys were several big black SUVs with the tinted windows and the guys in suits with coiled wires to their ears. Security, reminding that it’s UN Week in New York. This is when we see the city’s streets closed off so that the “officials” can go gliding through in their corteges of big black SUVs and accompanying NYPD cars with their red and blue rooflights spinning and whirring. Whole blocks are closed off for these, to protect them from ... the hoi polloi, I guess ... not to mention the riff-raff. |
| The hanging gardens of Crate and Barrel. |
60th Street looking east from Madison Avenue. The tallest building is the northeast corner of Park. |
| Sixty-first Street looking east from Madison, not entirely closed but limited to traffic. The Regency Hotel is on the corner of Park, on the left. |
I’m always reminded of those movies I saw as a kid when the people in the olden days, the peasants, would be trudging down the lane and suddenly someone from behind would shout “Make way for the King!” and before you knew it an army of galloping horses carrying soldiers in flowing capes would swoop through, practically knocking everyone off their feet. They were followed by the golden coach (red velvet curtains drawn) inside which the King was sitting with his beautiful Queen. Then later on in the movie you found out the King was a really bad guy who only cared about himself and his treasures until one day the good guys invaded the castle (Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster or Brad Pitt swinging into the courtyard on gigantic ropes).
They take the king prisoner (they don’t harm him – they’re good guys) and they free the peasants. Which nowadays in New York would be letting the traffic run smoothly. It’s really that simple. Although obviously it’s not. |
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| The flower beds at the Helmsley Carlton, a very popular apartment house for chic Manhattanites as a pied-a-terre. |
| This is the smokiest stand that I know of in Manhattan -- I'm sure there are many others. This is right next to the Carlton and it's always got a line waiting for that stuff that's smoking up the corner. |
These big black SUV entourages carrying politicians, be they local, national or international are fairly new on the city scene, in terms of their effect on traffic. They were not always, but that was back before importance was replaced by self-importance, which is quite a few years ago now.
I continued walking uptown, and over to Lexington. At 68th and Lex, by Hunter College, when another cortege of the BB SUVs in a parade accompanied by a couple of NYPD cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring, came barreling through, outta-the-way-outta-the-way. You don’t know who’s behind the tinted windows of course. Is it the king? Or his princess? Is it Hillary Clinton, or Tim Geithner, or some sheik from a far off land. Or just a retinue of shoppers and diners? Probably the latter. |
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| The tail end of a Security cortege crossing Lexington moving towards Third Avenue, with the Imperial House on the left. There were three SUVs and a stretch limo plus NYPD van and squad cars escorting these distinguished guests of the city of New York and its patient citizens. |
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Meanwhile, a beautiful night last night.
I went with my friend and neighbor Charlie Scheips for a bite down at Swifty’s. Swifty’s was jumping. Charlie, who is a curator/ archivist/art historian, is doing a major magazine piece on the New York art world of the 1930s when Modernism came to the fore.
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| Hassan El Garrahy, The Man at Orsay. Last night at 10:10 PM. |
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It’s full of drama and glamour and amazing creative forces along with the rest of the cast of the naked city. Charlie’s also getting his Masters at Columbia in 20th century cultural history, so we always have a lot of information to report to each other.
After dinner, heading home, we strolled up the avenue to Orsay on 75th Street to say hello to our friend Hassan who is now The Man at Orsay. Hassan El Garrahy you may remember was the Senior General Manager at Cipriani both uptown and downtown, for many years. He’s the ultimate of his age in the restaurant business.
Orsay, which exists on the site of the old Mortimers (whose antecedents Steven Attoe and Robert Caravaggi own and run Swifty’s), has been in business for quite some time. Since Hassan has joined them, however, Cindy Adams has given the restaurant a big thumbs up and Barbara Walters has been back five times.
No doubt many of Hassan’s old clientele will follow, if they haven’t already.
Don’t forget: The Fete de Swifty’s is tomorrow night at 73rd and Lexington in the big white tent occupying a large part of the block. You can get a ticket at the door.
And right now you can see what’s on the auction block at CharityBuzz.com. This is the sixth fete and the funds we take in go to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York – which means projects outside the city’s budget to help families and especially women and children in need. It makes a difference for all New Yorkers.
Here's a little look at last year's festivities ...
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| Matthew Modine and Cece Cord |
Joni Evans and Liz Smith |
Peggy Mejia, Bob Hardwick, and Muffy Miller |
| Robert and Blaine Caravaggi with Mark Gilbertson |
Somers Farkas and Pat Schoenfeld |
Konrad Kessee and Mildred Brinn |
| Beth Hardwick and her caricature |
| Frances Hayward and Catherine Gropper |
Daisy Soros and Gaetana Enders |
| Nancy Baker, Frank Driscoll, and Sean Driscoll |
Trina Andrews and Di Petroff |
Darcy Gould and Laurie Bodor |
| On the other side of town: JH took in the end of Summer at the 91st Street Community Garden in Riverside Park. Used as a backdrop in the movie “You’ve Got Mail”, the garden is staffed by volunteer members who are given individual plots to cultivate. It's open to the public from early spring until late autumn. |
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Memo to DPC: re yesterday’s list of the new Real Housewives of D.C. cast (Washington Social Diary) ...
Four out of five isn't bad. It seems I missed on one of the "Real Housewives of DC," though my error, Mai Abdo, was apparently seriously considered to the point of shooting an audition. According to someone close to Mai, "they didn't want her after her casting tape because they were afraid she would be 'too buttoned up' - i.e. no table throwing."
She may be thanking her good luck. Table throwing doesn't go down well in genuinely buttoned up Washington.
The actual fifth cast member is Edwina Rogers, who lives with her husband, Ed, in an 18,000 square foot mansion in McLean, Va., and is infamous in Washington for preferring to wrap her presents in real dollars bills she buys in sheets from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Clearly, Edwina is recession-proof. Her husband co-founded a successful Republican lobbying firm with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. An online profile says:
"Edwina has been a public policy expert for over 20 years and has worked for two Presidents and four Senators." Maybe one of them taught her the wrapping paper trick?
— Carol Joynt
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, Montblanc hosted a dinner on the Rodeo Terrace of the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel for 150 guests. The evening included an auction by Sotheby’s to benefit UNICEF. Pen collectors from around the world came to buy the jewelled pens and movie star photographs which had been displayed by Montblanc in London, New York and Hong Kong earlier this year.
The auction of the twelve unique jewelled gold Montblanc UNICEF pens and celebrity portraits raised $224,000 towards their goal of $1.5 million dollars - to benefit UNICEF's education and literacy programs.
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| Morena Baccarin |
Giuseppe Filianoti and Nino Machaidze |
Katie Cassidy |
| Mallika Sherawat and Billy Zane |
Perrey Reeves |
| Stephanie Powers, Michael York, and Patricia McCallum |
Anil Kapoo |
Caryl M. Stern, President and CEO of the US Fund for UNICEF, spoke movingly of visiting Brazil this summer, taking a group of women with their children the Amazon to visit villages, distributing pens (no jewels) and books in small schools.
Jamie Niven, Chairman Sotheby's, worked his magic under the stars and the bidding was fierce. Eva Longoria's portrait by Roger Moenks and a sapphire topped gold pen sold for $27,000. Lutz Bethge, CEO of Montblanc International headquartered in Hamburg, wore the custom Montblanc Ghandi pen, bound in white cotton, in his top pocket. The most recent pen added to the classic collection is the Ingrid Bergman pen. You can see all these on display at the new Montblanc Rodeo Drive and Madison Avenue (at 57th Street) boutique. |
| Rachel Griffiths |
Hakeem Kae-Kazim, President & CEO of the US Fund for UNICEF Caryl M. Stern, and Montblanc Int'l CEO Lutz Bethge |
WATCH THAT DOGGY DOOR
Could you imagine coming home from work to find this tiny creature napping on your
couch with your dog? Guess who came home for dinner? It followed this beagle home, right through the doggy door. This happened in Maryland recently. The owner came home to find the visitor had made himself right at home. This hit the 6 o'clock news big time. |
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