AVENUE July | August 2022

HANK WILLIS THOMAS Takes Over the Parrish

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THE H E R I TAG E COLLECTION

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CONTENTS JULY–AUG. 2022 VOL.45 NO.4

FEATURES 44

THE ROAD TO PEBBLE BEACH When it comes to Best of Show in the classic car universe, authenticity is everything.

By Angela M.H. Schuster.

52

THE UNCOMMITTED

The only thing hotter than a New York summer is the city’s dating scene. Here, a roundup of the demimonde’s sexiest singles.

By Todd Kingston Plummer.

58

GIMME SHELTER Shelter Island is the East End’s low-key, no-drama, secluded slice of heaven.

By Heather Hodson.

CREATIVE FREEDOM Hank Willis Thomas photographed in Williamsburg by Jai Lennard for Avenue.

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VERNISSAGE

Avenue’s insider preview of all that’s new and noteworthy: Martha Stewart on the making of a Martha-rita for her new Baccarat collaboration; dining en plein air with Outstanding in the Field; and dishing the dirt on the Gettys with James Reginato.

BY HORACIO SILVA AND JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

20

CULTURE 30

BUY CURIOUS

BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

BY HORACIO SILVA

FEASTS OF FEEDING

Three new restaurants offer spectacles, but only in one does food steal the show.

38

36

FRANKLY FRANCESCA

78

A new novel from one of the social smart set.

Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas and his For Freedoms Collective light up the Parrish Art Museum.

The road to summer is paved with gold; plus, conversationstoppers for your interiors.

24

FREEDOM FIGHTER

The father-son duo James Gordon Bennett Sr. and Jr. made headlines—good and bad—in the Gilded Age.

BY CELIA MCGEE

42

BOOK REVIEWS

Edie, Andy, Harvey, plus two novels that turn on wealth and trust.

SHAPE OF SUMMER

REVIEWED BY PATRICIA VOLK, BETHANIE ALHADEFF, CELIA MCGEE, AND CONSTANCE C.R. WHITE

Sculpture takes center stage in the Hamptons and the Hudson Valley.

LIVING 66

BY ARIA DARCELLA

82

ON THE AVE.

’Tis the season for gowns and garden parties.

88

SOCIAL SKILLS Decoding this season’s tan lines.

BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

AVENUE’S FARMERS’ ALMANAC

A new generation of farmers, chefs, and oystermen carrying on the Long Island history of agriculture.

BY NANCY KANE. PHOTOGRAPHS

Top: Author Francesca Stanfill photographed in her Southampton garden by Rick Wenner for Avenue.

Left: Driving engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut and his son Roger in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR racing car prototype in 1955.

COVER: Illustration by Cecilia Carlstedt 8

Visit our website at avenuemagazine.com

COURTESY DAIMLER AG

FOR AVENUE BY JAMES WOJCIK

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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SOME LIKE IT YACHT A view of the Shelter Island Yacht Club.

S

ome people are people people. Some are things people, and some are place people. I happen to be a person person. I make eye contact on subways and small talk at the cabaret and prefer portraits to landscapes in gallery halls. This issue, to be sure, is one full of places and things. It reflects the heat of the city and the consequent migration of its luckier denizens to the farthest and most fetching reaches of Long Island. It peeks inside peaceful private gardens and takes in sculptures and tapestries too.

If you want to get away this summer, this issue is all you’ll need.

But the simultaneous impulse of these pages is to get closer too.

The issue is filled with personalities, of people you might know or you might want to know. They burst forth in a stunning portfolio of East End farmers, chefs, oystermen, and vintners, captured by Nancy Kane in words and James Wojcik in images. In Todd Kingston Plummer’s latest installment of “The Uncommitted”—we’d call it New York’s hottest singles list but we’re too classy for that—their passions are there on the page for us to meet. And sure, the Concours d’Élégance is about classic cars, as Angela M.H. Schuster explores, but behind every restoration is a restorer, often maniacal and always driven.

Those gardens have an owner (the writer Francesca Stanfill); those tapestries have a maker (Hank Willis Thomas); and in this issue of Avenue you’ll meet them all.

So this summer, get away and come together too. Above all, enjoy.

Yours, Like and follow us at @AVENUEinsider

JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

Editor-in-Chief 10

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Getaways

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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THREE CENTURIES IN ART

F I N D L AY GA L L E R I E S P A L M

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Joshua David Stein CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Courtney Gooch

NANCY KANE (Avenue’s Farmers’ Almanac, page 66) grew up in the Village of Southampton, where her father owned and ran the historic Old Post House on Main Street. As a publicist her clients have ranged from Matt LeBlanc to Duran Duran, while her work as a journalist has appeared in Purist, Grazia, and Hamptons Cottages & Gardens, among other publications. “I was fascinated to talk to so many creative visionaries,” she says of working on the Farmers’ Almanac. “I have a newfound consciousness for the water I swim in and the land on which I live.” Kane is working on a book about growing up in Southampton in the ’70s called 34 Post Crossing.

ZIPENG ZHU (Suntan Semaphore, page 88) is an artist, designer, art director, illustrator, and animator. He arrived in New York from China at the age of 18 to attend the School of Visual Arts, where he earned a BA in graphic arts before beginning a career in graphic design. His work has been exhibited in cities across the world, including Barcelona, Dubai, Mumbai, and Shanghai. He currently lives in Williamsburg, where he runs his own creative practice, Dazzle Studio.

JAMES WOJCIK (Avenue’s Farmers’ Almanac, page 66) spent 30 years living and working in New York City as a still-life photographer, shooting for publications and clients including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Estée Lauder, before moving with his wife, Marianne, to Shelter Island in 2018. For Wojcik, who owns a micro no-till farm with Marianne, the Avenue portfolio couldn’t have been a better assignment. “[It was] like connecting with the next generation of inspired friends who share the same desire to reinvent the food culture in one of the most beautiful places in the world,” he says.

TODD KINGSTON PLUMMER (The Uncommitted, page 52) spent five years in New York as a society reporter before being bitten by the travel bug. He has since explored over 50 countries on assignment and writes about a wide range of topics inspired by travel.

For this issue he compiled Avenue’s annual portfolio of New York singletons. “This year I really wanted to focus on who was interesting, and why, and what they’re doing to shape a modern take on New York ‘society.’”

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DEPUTY & MANAGING EDITOR

Angela M.H. Schuster EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Heather Hodson PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR

Catherine G. Talese PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Jessica Lee STYLE EDITOR

Horacio Silva LITERARY EDITOR

Celia McGee DIGITAL FASHION EDITOR

Aria Darcella DEPUTY PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Daniela G. Maldonado CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Constance C.R. White, Joshua David Stein, Tom Shone, Judd Tully, Alexis Schwartz CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Anders Overgaard, Richard Kern, Landon Nordeman, Rainer Hosch, Johnny Miller, Martin Vallin, Nick Mele © 2022 by Cohen Media Publications LLC AVENUE MAGAZINE 750 LEXINGTON AVENUE 16TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10022 EDITORIAL@AVENUEMAGAZINE.COM

MEMBER OF ALLIANCE FOR AUDITED MEDIA

PUBLISHER

Spencer Sharp COHEN MEDIA PUBLICATIONS LLC CHAIRMAN

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JAI LENNARD BY JAI LENNARD; NANCY J. KANE COURTESY NANCY J. KANE; ZIPENG ZHU BY SANTIAGO CARRASQUILLA; JAMES WOJCIK BY MARIANNE DIORIO; TODD KINGSTON PLUMMER BY LEXIE MORELAND.

JAI LENNARD (Freedom Fighters, page 30) grew up in San Jose, California, and received his BA in photography at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Aside from his editorial and commercial work for publications and clients, including GQ, CNN, HBO, and Club Monaco, he is the founder of the nonprofit Color Positive, which champions Black photographers, stylists, and directors in the art and commerce worlds. For this issue, the Brooklyn-based Lennard photographed the artist Hank Willis Thomas. “[It] was a dream come true. I have a profound respect for his art and his demeanor. Despite how bold the work is, I see a sensitive artist and hope it comes through in the images.”

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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VERNISSAGE

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Martharitaville

W

hen Mar tha Stewar t bought Edsel Ford’s former summer house in Seal Harbor, Maine, in 2021, she got a sweet gift with purchase: an important collection of Baccarat crystal in the house’s legendary Nancy design. The bonus stash that came with the property, from tiny cordials to red wine goblets, did not however include a margarita glass. “So we started to talk,” Stewart recalls. “I modernized the pattern a bit and designed a big fat goblet which is actually perfect for margaritas, or Martha-ritas as I call them. And I made the glass large because I hate refilling cocktails.”

Allow Stewart to pour herself a big gulp. Just one of a handful of people who have collaborated with the famous crystal maker, she is quick to point out that her new additions to the Baccarat

“MY SECRET IS POMEGRANATE JUICE,

A LITTLE BIT OF SUGAR,

LIME JUICE,

AND A SALT-RIMMED GLASS.”

Illustrations by Laura Junger

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collection, which also include a bucket and a cordial, are a little more expensive than her usual offerings but are heirlooms in the making. “I used to give Norwegian or Swedish down pillows as wedding gifts because that’s such a nice luxury item,” Stewart says. “Now they’re all getting Baccarat.”

Stewart even has her name etched on the bottom of each glass—an honor not previously reserved for the living. “I’m not dead,” she jests, “and I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.”

She certainly has enough to keep her busy. In addition to the new Baccarat gig the indefatigable 80-year-old is extending her brand with deals ranging from clothes to CBD edibles, as well as a successful new white wine, Martha’s Chard (the result, she explains, of a business introduction made by her friend and frequent collaborator Snoop Dogg). And did she mention she has a podcast? “I just got off the phone with A-Rod,” she says of her friend and guest. “He was so charming and honest, and we talked about his former drug use, his years of psychoanalysis, life after J.Lo, and how living with his teenage daughters is an adequate replacement for her.”

Sounds like she could use a stiff drink, but as she tells me, she is not much of a tippler. However, when she does indulge, Stewart’s (non-Chard) poison is a margarita made with Casa Dragones Blanco. “It’s a bit too good to be mixing with fruit, but it’s such a great tequila and never gives me a hangover. My secret is pomegranate juice, a little bit of sugar, lime juice, and a salt-rimmed glass, and Cointreau is my go-to orange liqueur. Oh, and my ice cubes are made from frozen pomegranate juice, so there’s no dilution.”

That hack is certainly not as controversial as the viral recipe for guacamole that Stewart recently shared on social media, which involved the use of a soft-boiled egg and had more than one commenter wondering if Martha hadn’t been hitting the edibles a bit too hard. “You’re adding protein and a little bit of buttery delicious bulk,” she says. “Not authentic? You know what, in Guatemala it is muy autentico.”—horacio silva JULY—AUGUST 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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VERNISSAGE

Field Notes

I

OUTSTANDING IN THE FIELD

GREW FROM A FEW EVENTS STAGED IN THE WILDERNESS TO A PERIPATETIC DINNER SERIES SHOWCASING WORLD-CLASS CHEFS

AND WORLD-CLASS FARMERS. 16

f, this summer, you happen to be flying above Sagaponack and catch sight of a very long table set in the middle of Foster’s Farm, one of the last potato farms on Long Island, and this table has on it many bottles of vodka (from said potatoes) and plates of succulent tomatoes dolled up with burrata, do not be alarmed. And if, a few days later, you see a very tall man in a cowboy hat molding sand on Long Beach Island while another very long table is set before him and guests in floppy hats are feasting on homemade pastas, stay your nerves. This is all the work of Jim Denevan and his gallivanting de trop dining series Outstanding in the Field.

Founded nearly 20 years ago, Outstanding in the Field—OITF to aficionados—grew from a few en plein air events staged in the wilderness to a peripatetic dinner series showcasing worldclass chefs and world-class farmers whose tickets sell out in a matter of minutes on the OITF website. In addition to the Hamptons and New Jersey, this season’s locations include the Hearst Ranch in San Simeon, California; a secret sea cove in Pescadero, California; an oyster farm in Edgecomb, Maine; and an oasis in Fez, Morocco.

Leading it all is Denevan, an artist, former chef, and model, who grew disillusioned with kitchen life and set out to create his own sort of dining experience.

What was once a one-man show has now grown to include a team of around 100 people who spend the year finding fields (and other locations) and chefs willing (eager, even) to tackle the challenge of feeding a hundred or so lucky souls without the benefit of a traditional kitchen. Call it charm or perhaps just the accumulation of clout, but recruiting chefs hasn’t seemed to be a problem. In the past, chefs have included David Kinch from Manresa and Paul Kahan from Blackbird. This year’s crop includes chefs from award-winning restaurants such as Julien Hawkins of Austin’s Hestia and two-time James Beard Award nominee Kelly Whitaker of Boulder’s Basta.

But it’s not just that the number of chefs or events that have broadened; Denevan’s field itself has diversified. “Ten years ago we were one of the few companies to include chefs from cultures other than Europe,” says Denevan. “Now we can include chefs from all over the world.” As the scope of the events have grown, the roster now includes farmers like Fatmata Binta of Ghana’s Fulani Kitchen, ranchers like Doniga Markegard, and farmers like Christa Barfield, a Black female farmer from Philadelphia whose farm, Farmer Jawn, will host its own long table this September. Like a long-gestating seed, 20 years on Denevan’s idea of communing with the land while dining like a god has finally blossomed.—joshua david stein outstandinginthefield.com

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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6/23/22 3:09 PM

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VERNISSAGE

Dynasty

I

f Gordon Getty, the billionaire composer and fourth son of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, were to attempt an opera based on his own family, he certainly wouldn’t be short of material. As James Reginato notes in his impeccably researched and divinely dishy new book Growing Up Getty: The Story of America’s Most Unconventional Dynasty, “It would be loaded with extraordinary characters and require many acts.”

Richer and more dysfunctional than the Kardashian and Roy clans combined, the Gettys and their misadventures (from patriarch Jay’s myriad marriages to Gordon himself, who turned out to have had a secret family for decades) continue to hold sway over the culture.

“Many of them have genuine style and charisma,” Reginato says of the family’s enduring appeal, “and because of the tragedies surrounding the family the public thinks they know them all intimately. But despite the perception of them being very public, or even flamboyant, most of the family are very private.”

It’s a testament to Reginato, who chronicles the foibles of the bon ton for Vanity Fair, that he finds new threads pull on. The 1971 drug overdose of doomed beauty Talitha Getty and the 1973 kidnapping of Jay’s grandson Paul III and severing of one of his ears as an inducement to pay are given short shrift. “I wanted to focus on the parts of the story that weren’t so played out,” he explains, “and it’s a sprawling family tree and I don’t think many people have an idea of just how complicated it is. A couple of branches are virtually unknown.”

Reginato reassesses “some of the narratives that have taken root in the fertile soil of the tabloids,” spending time on lesser-known descendants such as the Georgettes, the three fiercely private daughters of firstborn George—Anne, Claire, and Caroline—who have become noted environmentalists and philanthropists.

He also shines the spotlight on the younger generations of Gettys who are ticking all the

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“IT’S A SPRAWLING FAMILY TREE,” REGINATO SAYS, “I DON’T THINK MANY PEOPLE HAVE AN IDEA OF JUST HOW COMPLICATED IT IS.” boxes—no small feat given that there are 19 grandchildren and 44 great-grandchildren on four continents—including digital influencer Ivy, LGBTQ+ advocates August and Nats, and mariculturalist Beau.

In a conversation with climate change activist and philanthropist Aileen Getty, a former heroin addict who married Elizabeth Taylor’s son Christopher Wilding and contracted HIV in the mid-1980s, Reginato addresses the elephant

in the room: despite the admirable efforts at rehabilitation and conservation, the family fortune derives from fossil fuel. “I’m aware that the optics are what they are,” Getty tells the writer. “It’s not necessarily restitution. It’s what I get to do as a human being, I happen to have resources that I get to bring to the mix. At the end of the day, we all have to do what’s right.” A family legacy defined by drama and guilt. Sounds like the makings of a hit opera.—horacio silva

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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Future Fortune “Bianca” diamond bracelet; $21,000; futurefortunejewelry.com

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VERNISSAGE

Feasts of Feeding

T

he restaurant matrix, according to this little scrap of paper I just jotted it down on, consists of a vertical line (y) indicating quality of food and a horizontal one (x) the liveliness of scene. A place like, say, Noz 17, a small omakase spot by Nozomu Abe’s protegé Junichi Matsuzaki, sniffs the rafters of y while the subdued susurruses of its acolyte diners edges the place to the far left margin of the quadrant.

(Liveliness of scene, ranging from subdued to rollicking, is independent of quality; quality of food, ranging from blech to virtuosic, is obviously not.)

Tao, that giant goiter of a nightclub in Chelsea, on the other hand, is in the bottom right-hand quad-

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rant. You get it. Are you looking at the food or are you looking at the people or are you looking at something else entirely, like the view?

This summer, while others might be boarding aeroplanes to flit around the globe, I’m sticking to traversing this restaurant plane. There’s plenty of ground to cover, including Four by Jesse Schenker, which occupies a small house in Oyster Bay, Long Island; Fasano, a sprawling showroom for conspicuous carbohydrate consumption, which has taken up residence where the new Four Seasons restaurant recently (and briefly) was; and The Fulton, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s bi-level pleasure palace, with its view of the river on Pier 17, where the Fulton Fish Market once stood.

GORDON PARKS/HERITAGE ART/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY

And, Three new restaurants offer spectacles, but only in one does food steal the show, writes Joshua David Stein

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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6/23/22 1:29 AM

COURTESY JEAN-GEORGES VONGERICHTEN

SEE FOOD Left: The Fulton Fish Market in its glory days, Right: One nice piece of bass. Below: The Fulton’s surprisingly triumphant cheeseburger

I wonder what Joseph Mitchell, New York’s greatest chronicler, would feel, wandering around the Seaport today. Many of Mitchell’s best stories unfolded in this small brick-laid corner of Manhattan, from “Up in the Old Hotel” to “The Mayor of the Fish Market.” “Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom,” he once wrote in the New Yorker, “I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market...

The smoky riverbank dawn, the racket the fishmongers make, the seaweedy smell, and the sight of this plentifulness always give me a feeling of well-being.” At dusk on a recent evening, the East River was indeed shimmering a glittering salubrious pink. The fishmongers had all fled to the Bronx, taking with them the seaweedy smell, but there was plenty of plenitude. The Fulton is one of the crop of over-the-top luxurious restaurants to occupy Pier 17. (Among the others are Momofuku Ssäm Bar and Carne Mare.) It is billed as Jean-Georges’s first seafood-focused outing, fitting for the locale.

Like sunflowers, the restaurant follows the view. The best seats in the house all face the water, whether on the patio or on the second floor.

Jean-Georges has always restricted his whimsy to the margins of his cuisine, while knowing enough not to sacrifice the old familiarity that has kept him in business since 1986. Here is no exception.

Some menus one reads with a sense of wonder; this one gives a feeling of Mitchellian well-being.

There’s a seafood platter, which is exactly that.

There’s a fluke crudo, of course, this one with a touch of heat thanks to a habanero vinaigrette and Szechuan bud and a hint of herbaceousness, thanks to some chiffonade mint. That herby, vervy sweetness mix is repeated in the red snapper ceviche, this time with cucumber and lime. The only thing intriguing in the crispy calamari salad— which was compulsively enjoyable—was whether the addition of a few sprigs of arugula under the fried bodies actually constituted a salad or not. But with the calamari’s carrot-and-ginger topping, the question was academic, as they soon disappeared.

If it sounds like I’m being dismissive of the food, well, I might be. But it’s hard not to neglect what comes from the kitchen when the view of the water and the sun bouncing off of it draws one’s eyes and attention away from the plate.

The same sense of familiarity is found in the main courses. Each is expertly made but seldom revelatory. The best of them, like the black sea bass, a crisp-then-yielding filet sitting in a light carrot broth with fava beans and a peanut romesco, captured springtime. Others, like the Dover sole Grenobloise, check the boxes in elegant script. The single best thing I ate at this Poseidon’s temple was a cheeseburger, the Gruyère cheeseburger au jus. My gods, what a glorious thing that was. It wasn’t just that it felt somehow illicit to order it but that it arrived with deeply caramelized onion jus for dipping, with crispy onions secreted twixt burger and bun, and Gruyère for days atop a juicy patty.

If it sounds like I’m being dismissive of the food, well, I might be. But it’s hard not to neglect what comes from the kitchen when the view of the water and the sun bouncing off it and the tug boats tooling down it and the Brooklyn Bridge spanning it draws one’s eyes and attention away from the plate. That’s hardly a knock on Vongerichten’s food, but more a testament to the view his restaurant boasts. So if what you’re looking at is the view, The Fulton is my favorite place.

After all, the sun sets at the end of every day. That it is familiar does not make it any less beautiful.

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DINNER AS THEATER Above: Fasano’s luxurious saffron risotto. Above right: The mirror, the most important part of the dining room.

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Now, if it is people and a scene that you wish to watch, there is no better venue than Fasano, housed in the old-new Four Seasons place on West 49th. Fasano, of course, operates firmly in the realm of comfort. The most excitement I felt was mistakenly walking to the Fasano Hotel on 63rd and Park only to realize I was 20 blocks away. Would my companion wait or not? I speedwalked and she did.

What awaited me is the sort of hushed fine dining experience meant for people for whom dinner is more an opportunity to socialize than to delect. Nominally northern Italian, the restaurant proffers forth a standard carte of risotti, paste, and carni. Much has been made of the veal Milanese, so perhaps the less said of it here the better. (It was powdery and desultory.) The saffron risotto

with lobster had both saffron in it and lobster. It was risotto. Beyond that, what I admired most was that it was served by congenial waitstaff with slick backed black hair and white blazers. They were a welcome diversion from the white-haired grazers and pearled princesses who filled the rest of the carpeted dining room with their cheerful chatter. More stimulating than what came out of the kitchen was the sort of high society Kremlinology by which one sought to divine social standing based on where each party sat in the room.

Such a pastime is pleasure itself, and if a meh $72 Milanese is the price of admission to be blessed in the carefree company of New York’s sweet-smelling panjandra and their elegant consorts, who am I to puncture the placenta with vulgar quibbles such as taste?

ERIC MEDSKER/COURTESY BECCA PR

caption TK

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Here, Schenker runs hog wild over 17 courses. Each one is an exquisitely balanced punch of flavor.

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and a mini arepa with a touch of Alp Blossom cheese—are shots across the bow. Liberated from Manhattan, Schenker is gonna Schenker. So it is that the audacious menu includes an ethereal beef tendon chicharron and a fermented fennel sea bream and silken langoustine served in an Italian glass ashtray (it looks like the most beautiful plate in the world) and a duck fat croissant filled with foie gras and served on a pillow. It’s wild cooking on Long Island, man, the work of a chef on a spirit quest, rummaging the world for delicious. It’s high on x, high on y, and high on my list for dinner.

CROISSANT: CHRIS BASFORD; INTERIOR: BENNY MIGS/COURTESY FOUR

A PEARL IN OYSTER BAY Right: The duck fat croissant comes on a pillow. Below: Anthony Bourdain, the patron saint of Four.

If taste is what you’re after, take 495 to 108 North right up to Oyster Bay. Remember Jesse Schenker? Back in 2010 he had a restaurant in the West Village called Recette and later The Gander. But a while ago he moved out to Oyster Bay and, in 2021, opened Four. Four occupies a two-story Victorian cottage on Spring Street. It has ten seats at a chef ’s counter and an open kitchen over which hangs a painting of Tony Bourdain holding a Burger King bag and swigging a glass of wine. Here, Schenker runs hog wild over 17 courses. Each one is an exquisitely balanced punch of flavor. The first bites—a deep fried char siu and pomme mousseline croquette

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Freedom Fighter

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Artist Hank Willis Thomas and his For Freedoms collective bring their take on justice to the Parrish Art Museum this summer, writes Angela M.H. Schuster

Photography by Jai Lennard for Avenue

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his July, six large tapestries made of prison uniforms and American flags stitched together will be unfurled at the Parrish Art Museum. They are part of a bold new exhibit called “Another Justice: US Is Them,” featuring the work of Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas and his For Freedoms Collective. The tapestries, Thomas says, speak to the founding contradictions in our society: “America has been hailed as the land of the free, yet it was built on the backs of slaves. And it continues to be a land of the free, yet it is a nation that imprisons more people than any other in the world.”

But in each work of the ten artists from the Collective that fill five of the galleries and include a suite of outdoor installations, the notion of justice in the 21st century takes center stage, revealing a host of contradictions and reflecting the pursuit of justice that the artists see in their own lives and in their own art making. Besides the tapestries, Thomas’s Remember Me, a 55-foot neon sign, will grace the south-facing façade of the museum. For her contributions to the show, London-born Brooklyn-based artist Zoë Buckman addresses interpersonal violence, messaging often difficult conversations via the delicate medium of embroidery. For Buckman, the intimate process of making the embroideries reflects the way in which justice can start at home, and how such fraught discussions might find a place alongside the pursuit of joy, love, and intimacy.

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For Zoë Buckman, the intimate process of making the embroideries reflects the way in which justice can start at home, and how such fraught discussions might find a place alongside the pursuit of joy, love, and intimacy.

ON PINS AND NEEDLES Above: Artist Zoë Buckman in her DUMBO Brooklyn studio. Opposite: A selection of billboards across America, produced by the For Freedoms Collective as part of their “Another Justice” campaign, launched in 2020.

BUCKMAN: HONOR WEATHERALL

“Part of looking toward the future is revisiting the past through a new lens,” says Thomas.

“For us, this translates into seeking justice by any means necessary and using any medium necessary.

This, in turn, leads us to consider a host of new possibilities.

“When we launched our ‘Another Justice’ campaign in 2020,” the artist tells Avenue, “we were inspired by Norman Rockwell's renderings of FDR’s four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom of worship.

And we thought that in the 21st century those freedoms could be revisited through the concepts of listening, healing, justice, and awakening. In society, most people tend to associate justice with punishment. In examining how justice might be interpreted more broadly, we have sought new avenues, new pathways, new media, and modes of communication.” For the Collective such new modes of communication include the appropriation of billboards across the United States—53 to be exact—using them as unconventional canvases to prompt conversation through the medium of advertising.

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Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Vision & Justice, Boston

JoRee LaFrance, Bethany Yellowtail, Elan Creative, and Nina Sanders, The Land Remembers, Billings

“In examining how justice might be interpreted more broadly, we have sought new avenues, new pathways, new media, and modes of communication.”

Hank Willis Thomas

VISION & JUSTICE: TAISUKE YAMADA; MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDON, © THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION; THE LAND REMEMBERS: NATHAN STRATAN; CHANGE: TOMMY DASPIT; DOES PUNISHMENT RENDER JUSTICE?: COLIN MILLER; APACHE DECLARATION: TAISUKE YAMADA; GET SCHOOLED: JEFF GREEN; ANOTHER JUSTICE BY ANY MEDIUM NECESSARY: MIKE BUTLER, ALL COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, FROM FOR FREEDOMS ANOTHER JUSTICE BY ANY MEDIUM, 2022

Brian Mclucas, Change, Montgomery

Jesse Krimes, Does Punishment Render Justice?, Newark

Douglas Miles and Gina Belafonte, Apache Declaration, New York

Angeles Zaragoza, Get Schooled, Las Vegas

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LEST WE FORGET From top: Hank Willis Thomas's 55-foot-long neon work Remember Me, 2022, installed on the south façade of the Parrish Art Museum, and the artist's 2021 mixed-media tapestry, Imaginary Lines, which includes American flags. Opposite: Thomas in his Brooklyn studio.

As part of the Another Justice billboard project, the Parrish exhibition will be complemented by conceptual works by Shinnecock Nation artists Jeremy Dennis and Shane Weeks and others that will flash across the “Shinnecock Monuments”— two 62-foot-tall double-sided electronic billboards erected along the Sunrise Highway, which have generated no shortage of controversy since they were put up by the Nation in 2019 to generate advertising revenue for the community. (At the time, a local politician complained to the New York Times, “The summer crowd comes here to escape 34

the metropolis, only to find this urban element at the gateway to the Hamptons.”)

“Collectively,” says Thomas, “the works being presented on Long Island’s East End this summer are a call for us to reconvene to reconsider what justice can be in a time of imbalance, and to imagine for a moment a just world. How do we get there from here?” Following the exhibition, Thomas and members of the For Freedoms Collective will take up a residency at the Watermill Center.

“Another Justice: US Is Them” runs July 24–November 6 at the Parrish Art Museum. parrishart.org.

REMEMBER ME: © HANK WILLIS THOMAS, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK/GARY MAMAY; IMAGINARY LINES: © HANK WILLIS THOMAS, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KAYNE GRIFFIN GALLERY

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAI LENNARD FOR AVENUE

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The Shape of Summer Sculpture inspired by nature takes center stage at Storm King and in Hamptons galleries, writes Angela M.H. Schuster

“Wangechi Mutu” runs through November 7 at the Storm King Art Center. stormking.org.

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© WANGECHI MUTU, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY

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he Storm King Art Center, nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley, is inaugurating its 2022 season with an exhibition of eight monumental sculptures by Wangechi Mutu, a multifaceted Kenyan-born Brooklyn-based visionary whose stunning quartet of bronzes, The NewOnes, will free Us, recently graced the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At Storm King, the offerings include In Two Canoe, a sculptural fountain cast earlier this year in which two figures become one with their vessel and the landscape around them, and Crocodylus, executed 2020 (pictured at left). The suite of works take their place in the center’s 500 acres of lush rolling hills and verdant forests among 200 permanent installations and earthworks by Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, Maya Lin, Andy Goldsworthy, Mark di Suvero, Louise Bourgeois, and Lynda Benglis, just to name a few.

As a self-described “city girl with a nature brain,” Mutu says her goal has always been “to make work that sits with nature—that sits under the sky, with the sun, the rain, and the wind.” According to Storm King’s artistic director and chief curator, Nora Lawrence, the artist has clearly done just that in the current exhibition, which continues inside the museum building galleries. “There,” says Lawrence, “Mutu has literally brought the natural world inside through her use of raw materials and a visual language that underscores the importance of the natural environment within her practice and worldview.”

The artist is presenting two films, My Cave Call (2021) and Eat Cake (2013), while public programing is to include an outdoor screening of her films on September 3 and a talk slated for October 1.

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STEFAN RINCK → Skarstedt East Hampton, 66 Newtown Lane, East Hampton August 1–September 21

© STEFAN RINCK, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND NINO MIER GALLERY/MATTHIAS KOLB; © KIKI SMITH, COURTESY PACE GALLERY; © ADAGP CAMILLE HENROT, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

The German artist will make his New York solo debut with an exhibition of sculptures executed in marble, sandstone, and diabase that take the form of cheeky cartoon creatures that exhibit an imaginative blend of animal and human traits and manifestations—a bear practicing yoga and a “fashionforward” dog sporting high heels. skarstedt.com

KIKI SMITH ↑ Pace, 68 Park Place, East Hampton August 4–14

In this latest exhibition with Pace, German-born American artist Kiki Smith will present a suite of new sculptures in bronze, aluminum, and silver that explore the tensions between heaviness and fragility, stability and ephemerality.

The works, shown alongside drawings and prints, including cyanotypes, etchings, and photopolymers, explore themes related to the natural world, presented through her quintessential whimsical lens. pacegallery.com ← CAMILLE HENROT Hauser & Wirth, 9 Main Street, Southampton Through September 4

The gallery is presenting an outdoor installation of handsomely scaled bronzes by French artist Camille Henrot, which will be complemented by a selection of paintings from her ongoing series Butter and Bread, Is Today Tomorrow, and Systems of Attachment, which were made over the course of the pandemic. hauserwirth.com

RARE FORMS From top left: Kiki Smith's Small Wave, 2016, in bronze with white gold leaf; Stefan Rinck's sandstone Titza, 2011; and Camille Henrot's bronze OCPD, 2018.

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Frankly, Francesca One of the social smart set is back with a new novel

BY CELIA MCGEE

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“I

’ve always been fascinated by falconry,” says Francesca Stanfill. Also, in no particular order, by medieval history, Edith Wharton’s architectural theories, Leonardo in Venice, Plantagenet banquet fare, Arab trade routes, 12th-century herb gardens, pagan Europe, biography, court dress, Shakespeare, Angevin divorce law, Saxon enslavement, and books, books, books.

Stanfill is seated in the great room of her beachfront home down a hidden private road in Southampton. Books are everywhere, in orderly piles and tasteful displays on carved ottomans and inlaid console tables, on upholstered benches and in the

deep bookcases flanking the grand stone fireplace.

The lettered atmosphere may slightly astonish anyone who has encountered Stanfill from one gala to the next on the Upper East Side, or seen the Slim Aarons photograph of her alongside Carolyne Roehm and others in Porto Ercole, or read her New York Times social reportage dissecting Gloria Vanderbilt’s bluejeans marketing and the de la Rentas on the climb. Perhaps they still think of her as just the privileged Yale blonde whose father, Dennis Stanfill, was chairman of 20th Century Fox, or they’ve run into her at book parties for Lee Radziwill and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s One Special Summer, or Absolute Beauty

by Dr. Gerald Imber.

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SO SOUTHAMPTON Francesca Stanfill at home at the beach in her study (below) and great room (opposite).

Photography by Rick Wenner for Avenue

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An absolute beauty, her blue eyes immense, her figure trim in summery white trousers, Stanfill explains. “My parents bought me books from the time I was little, and I would go to the library on 23rd Street, near PS 40,” where she went to school. The family lived in Peter Cooper Village then, Dennis Stanfill a recent Rhodes scholar not long out of the Navy and a stint of duty at the Pentagon. “Money was very tight,” Stanfill says. It wasn’t until she was a teenager and her father had gone from corporate finance specialist at Lehman Brothers to vice president of the Chandlers’ media fiefdom in Los Angeles that she first went to Europe with her family. “It hit me like a thunderclap,” she says. She pulls a notebook from a stack of materials she’s balanced on her slender lap. It’s her diary from her trip to Poitiers and Limoges,

says, she wanted to explore “the eternal struggle for freedom by women and the meaning of the confinements placed on them.” Stanfill located a telling symbol of such tensions in the lightning-swift falcons Gerard raises in captivity for his lavish hunting parties, and crystallized in the form of a falcon-shaped incense censer he gifts his young bride.

The object, enthroned in the title of Stanfill’s novel, was suggested by a bronze incense burner depicting a bird of prey she saw in “Court and Cosmos,” an exhibition on the Seljuq Turks dynasty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016.

It assumes different implications as Isabelle’s marriage founders and a darkening world closes in, only to have the bronze falcon’s gaze pivot with her escape to the cloistered enlightenment

the ruined fortress of Chinon, and the Fontevraud Abbey, bubbling with royal intrigues, most specifically during the various reigns and exiles of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Stanfill reads aloud from the journal, its teenage penmanship tidy and tiny, “One can almost imagine Eleanor and her sons plotting together.”

Now she has done just that with The Falcon’s Eyes, a detail-rich, suspenseful novel clocking in at 832 pages inspired by Eleanor’s life and turbulent times. “She was the greatest queen of the Middle Ages,” Stanfill says, “and what an amazing and startling example she must have been to women of that century.” One of them is the heroine Stanfill has created for her story, Isabelle de Laplisse, whose striving Provençal family marries her off at sixteen to the powerful Count Gerard de Meurtaigne, seigneur of a vast estate to the north and an intimate of kings and their most merciless counselors. With Isabelle, Stanfill

of Fontevraud and the refined order of nuns at its helm. Another course is charted to England and Eleanor’s dazzling, imprisoned circle at Sarum, where Isabelle becomes the scheming queen’s closest confidante, and back to Fontevraud for Eleanor’s final years. In Eleanor’s case, Stanfilll writes of intelligence combined with ambition so ruthless it stops at nothing and no one, not even the fates of her own offspring. New York, Stanfill laughs, “is rife with people like that.” She sees Eleanor’s molding of her image and legacy “rather like Jackie Kennedy’s crafting of a legend.”

At the same time, the prologue hints at an extraordinary occurrence in Isabelle’s life that has her resorting to coded messages, perilous secrets, and a series of actions once more informed by the need for self-determination, independence, and a woman’s right to choose. “I was struck,” Stanfill says, “by how eternal this struggle is, again today with the challenges to Roe v. Wade.”

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spent in Europe, the more deeply she treasured the art, architecture, and history of Catholicism.

In California she attended Polytechnic, a small private school in Pasadena, and decided she wanted to become a stage actress in the vein of Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier, which was a reason she applied to Yale. She wrote letters to people she admired, like Lawrence Durrell, who would later blurb her first novel, and Olivier, whose reply she has framed and hanging on the wall of her study in the apartment she shares with her husband, arbitrageur Richard Nye, on East 72nd Street. She gave up on the acting idea by

SLIM'S CHANCE In 1986 Slim Aarons photographed Stanfill along with Carolyne Roehm, Henry Kravis, Diana and Richard Beattie, Stanfill’s former husband, Peter Tufo, and Marie-Louise Sciò at the Sciòowned Hotel Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole.

SLIM AARONS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

To write about Isabelle’s internal struggles, of her ambivalence toward motherhood and her complicated fears about her ability to nurture and love, Stanfill says, she undertook extensive research into the history of contraception and beliefs surrounding childbirth even while drawing on her own religious background. “It helped to be a Catholic writing this book,” she says. “My mother’s parents emigrated from southern Italy” to working-class West Haven, Connecticut. “I was brought up not strictly, but Catholicism was a huge part of my childhood—devotion, confession, mortal and venial sin.” The more time she AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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“She was the greatest queen of the Middle Ages,” Stanfill says of Eleanor of Aquitaine, “and what an amazing and startling example she must have been to women of that century.”

her junior year, lured instead to focus on history, literature, and art history by such renowned Yale teachers as Vincent Scully and George S. Hersey.

It was Hersey, she says, “who indulged my love of the imagination” in her papers for him, “and who said to me, ‘You really should write novels.’”

Her first, Shadows and Light, “a typical first novel, about erotic obsession,” she says she wrote early in the morning before heading into work at the Times, its fictional portrait of tarnished glamour, auction house dalliances, and romantic betrayals mirroring her society beat at the paper and her after-hours social life of cocktails at the Henry Kravises’, dinners at Mortimer’s, and dates with some of New York’s richest and most sought-after men. Her second, Wakefield Hall, had a similar high society setting and centered on the smart, pretty biographer of a celebrated Shakespearean actress, and sinister doings around an estate in the Berkshires not unlike Edith Wharton’s The Mount and its transformation into the site of a summer Shakespeare festival.

Her next novel, Stanfill divulges, though she isn’t yet willing to share the title, will be set in late-19th-century New York and the Europe of the Grand Tour. “I hope it will be a taut and somewhat dark tale about self-invention, money, and social status,” she says. Is it reminiscent of Wharton? “Yes,” she agrees, “with a touch of Hitchcock.” An assem-

blage of Grand Tour souvenirs, large seashells carved with neoclassical scenes in Naples, are among Stanfill and Nye’s varied collections, from classical busts to Byzantine fragments, early Germanic stone carvings, rare books, Eastlake bamboo, monumental paintings by Alex Katz, Sean Scully, and Manolo Valdes—and several falcon pieces, of course. “Collecting,” Stanfill says, “is a form of storytelling, of putting things together for beauty, peace and joy.”

She’s moved out through the living room’s tall French doors to the expansive deck, swimming pool, and several thickly grown oceanview acres connected by a short sandy path to one of the more picturesque beaches on eastern Long Island. Together with her garden designer, Fay Henderson, Stanfill has carved two “garden rooms” into the vegetation near the deck. In one she has arranged in a semicircle four sculptures of the Four Seasons. In the other stands a late19th century Milanese bust of a gentlewoman, a pearl necklace carved around her neck and a stiff lace collar sculpted into a stately frame for her face and elaborately upswept hair.

“I found her at some motley sale,” Stanfill says with a smile, “and she came from the Warner Brothers lot.

No one else wanted her. She’s quite regal, don’t you think? I think she looks very much at home.”

The Falcon’s Eyes: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine,

by Francesca Stanfill (HarperCollins) will be available July 5 JULY—AUGUST 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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Edie lives, Harvey pays, and two novels delve into wealth and trust

AS IT TURNS OUT: THINKING ABOUT EDIE AND ANDY

by Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Francis Minturn Sedgwick, better known as Duke, had a deep history of mental illness. Warned by his psychiatrist at Austen Riggs never to have children, he proceeded to have eight. Three were dead by their twenties: Bobby drove his motorcycle into a bus. Minty hanged himself with a tie. And Edie, Andy Warhol’s original Superstar, did what supernovas do.

The Sedgwicks were Urbluebloods. Edie was raised by governesses to curtsy when introduced to grown-ups, and drop her r’s at the end of words.

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Fuzzy (Duke preferred that to “Daddy”) built a school on his 6,000-acre California ranch, effectively isolating his brood from any experience he couldn’t control.

Except for Edie, who galloped her horse bareback through thunderstorms at night. “What she wanted more than anything was the intense experience of life,” writes her older sister Alice Sedgwick Wohl, the translator and independent scholar, in As It Turns Out: Thinking About Edie and Andy. Wohl was the child most frequently punished while Edie “was the only one Fuzzy never spanked.” Until, that is, at 14, she caught him en flagrante with “a beautiful young wife we all knew” and told Mummy. He slapped Edie, then called the family doctor, who kept her sedated in a darkened bedroom, shooting her up with tranquilizers several times a week.

Thus began Edie’s life with drugs, first prescribed, then not.

She arrived in New York all arms and legs, with the luscious face of Marilyn Monroe, down to the mole. Like Monroe, she was smart but didn’t mind playing the ditz.

On being introduced to Dalí: “How does it feel to be a famous writer?”

And on meeting Warhol: “What’s that? Pop Tart?” Warhol fell hard.

They dressed like twins and dyed their hair silver. They partied till dawn. (Edie and I patronized the same leg-shaping place in 1967, which worked until you drank a glass of water.) Andy featured her in Vinyl. Next she starred in Poor Little Rich Girl. Overnight Edie became New York’s “It” girl, the last in a line that started with Evelyn Nesbit.

I did the math: Alice Sedgwick Wohl was in boarding school when Edie was born. They were 12 years apart, rarely living under the same roof. Much of what Wohl learned about Edie is after the fact. It wasn’t until 2015, reading Vogue, that she discovered her sister’s birth date and of her 15 minutes of fame. (Actually, it was more than 15. Her collaboration with Andy lasted from March 1965 to January 1966.)

Stories about patricians running off the rails have been known to foment schadenfreude. As It Turns Out turns out to offer something bigger. It’s the best book I’ve read pinpointing the New York art scene at a precise pinnacle of change.

Along the way, it broke my heart.

—PATRICIA VOLK

TRUST

by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead)

Hernan Diaz is a masterful writer. In 2018, his first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Trust, his second, tightly constructed in four interlocking parts, is the tale of a 20th-century financial mastermind named Andrew Bevel answering questions about his life and career posed by a young writer named Ida Partenza.

As Bevel’s story unfolds, the book invites us to interrogate heady and topical issues: fiction versus lies, genius versus madness, love versus trust. What is the difference between the accumulation of capital and the theft of it, after all?

There’s a book within a book in Trust, and it is called Bonds.

Based on Bevel’s trajectory, it’s a popular 1938 novel about an iconic American family named the Rasks.

The narrative-within-the-narrative reads like a blend of Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser, gorgeously rooted in the material world of the time, and graced by a philosophical probing of such lofty ideas as the common good, the equality of wealth and entitlement, and the morality of giving. Compelling mysteries gather momentum.

The Rasks are eccentric and philanthropic not because of how they live but, at least in part, because of the puzzle surrounding the roles they play.

Trust’s plot thickens in the character of Bevel’s late wife, Mildred, whose story this really is.

She comes alive after Andrew, the last of his line, engages Partenza to take a new pass at the truer story. Is the “confident chaos” we know the only true truth, as Partenza asks, writing away? When one character says that “History itself is just a fiction with an army…Reality is a

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fiction with an unlimited budget,” it’s hard not to see how this tale pokes not only at the past.

The novel’s four parts, with four different points of view, are all centered in the city of New York. An irresistible energy surrounds the rise and crash of the 1920s, foreseen and manipulated at glittering parties and in terrifying reversals, in the dark rooms where the movers and shakers keep their secrets. Fancy financial footwork, the lag of the ticker tape and the immediacy of news, fake or otherwise, abounds.

In the mix, the public display of concert halls and the intimate world of artists and writers clamber for our attention. Diaz is unafraid of language. He invites us to listen to the cadence of church bells. They rise, and we trust precisely where the final note will fall.

Diaz erects a mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that contains an entirety of madness and money, and the power and legacy of both. Inside, the remarkable chronicle of survival and resurrection, of fiction and reality. It is unforgettable.

—BETHANIE ALHADEFF

THE LUNAR HOUSEWIFE

by Caroline Woods (Doubleday)

Caroline Woods is a nifty literary hostess. In her new novel, The Lunar Housewife, she brackets a big hunk of her story between a magazine launch party in the summer of 1953, where Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, and movie star Rory Calhoun are in attendance, and a funeral reception barely a year later, with the same crowd gathering and Peggy Guggenheim, Norman Mailer, and William Holden paying their respects. It’s a social scene that beckons the young

and the talented, the best and the brightest, and, almost exclusively, the Ivy League and male. Smart, pretty Louise Leithauser, an aspiring writer from the wrong side of Westchester’s tracks, has nonetheless set her sights on scaling those heights. On the arm of the magazine’s Yalie publisher, Joe Martin, with a byline of her own in Downtown’s first issue (correction: under a male pen name forced on her), she’s come a long way from waitressing for a precarious living. But during the festivities, has she really overheard her Joe warn the New England blueblood who edits Downtown for him that he better toe some mysterious line, “Or you’ll get us…I don’t know…killed?”

That she has will ring a bell with anyone who has followed news stories in recent years about The Paris Review and its covert backing by the CIA, which pulled the noxious strings behind a slew of influential and respected cultural forces in its crusade to defeat “Communist propaganda” in all its imagined forms. On June 19 of the same summer that Woods’s absorbing, suspenseful novel opens, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing, in Ossining, Louise’s hometown. Is her twin brother actually MIA in the Korea conflict, or is he part of a more clandestine war, too?

Because Louise is keeping so many secrets about herself, she’s attuned to others who are hiding the truth. But her involvement with the unreliable cast of characters in Downtown’s orbit tangles her in manipulations of reality unforeseeably galactic in proportion. Thanks to some suspicions she voices, even the manuscript of a novel she’s been writing, also called The Lunar Housewife, is under more threat than she’d like to think. A science fiction trial balloon, it calls out the frustrations of women in her era, floats ideas that can explode the conventional sky-high, and features some steamy US-Soviet nooky.

By giving Louise’s manuscript a denouement that would do the most nefarious undercover runner proud, Woods goes for the jugular of American pieties, intellectual assumptions, and social norms, without sparing the Iron Curtain’s side. As ominous figures shadowing Louise from the Minetta Tavern to the ballroom at the Edison Hotel,

from her stoop in Greenwich Village to the bowels of the Hearst Building, grow increasingly menacing, along comes Ernest Hemingway, with classic bluster, to protect her. People, Woods’s Papa tells Louise, “who can’t see that a coin has two sides” are not to be trusted, and they make equally lousy writers, thinkers, and artists.

Although Woods puts this worldwise observation in Hemingway’s mouth and Louise’s heart, it underlies her novel as a whole, shining a light into dark corners, standing up for the innocent, stubbornly choosing what’s right.

—CELIA MCGEE

HOLLYWOOD ENDING

by Ken Auletta (Penguin Press)

Harvey Weinstein was a college dropout and budding concert promoter in Buffalo, New York, when, it seems, he first sexually assaulted a woman. By the time the Miramax cofounder was led away in handcuffs in 2020, almost 100 women had come forward to accuse him.

In an unsparing account of the fall of Weinstein, author Ken Auletta details his many offenses. Included are avarice, indiscipline, corporate mismanagement, infidelity, aggression, and violence. But it’s the instances of sexual trespass that are astonishing and abhorrent.

How could he have gotten away with it for so long?

With Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, Auletta documents two kinds of silence that shaped such behavior.

The “casting couch” has long represented the tacit and egregious understanding in entertainment allowing powerful men to sexually harass women seeking work there.

The second is the silence of the

assaulted themselves. Victims of sexual abuse often stay mute about it.

On the list of red-carpet names victimized by Weinstein were Annabella Sciorra, Mira Sorvino, Lupita Nyong’o, Rosanna Arquette, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Although none spoke up, what happened between them and Weinstein, Auletta writes, was an open secret.

Miramax and Weinstein Company board members, staff, and Weinstein’s brother, Bob, covered up, ignored, or otherwise enabled him. “I did get warned,” one anonymous former employee tells Auletta, “about him going into the bathroom and masturbating” when he summoned women to his hotel room for purported business meetings. He thought nothing of parading around naked. He also spread nondisclosure agreements far and wide. Don’t be surprised if, in the wake of Hollywood Ending, the concept of an “erection injection” passes into popular culture.

This was the same man who lured Tina Brown from Condé Nast to launch Talk Media.

Starting an affair with an unknown British designer named Georgina Chapman, he divorced his first wife, Eve Chilton, and poured millions into Chapman’s label, Marchesa. Needless to say, he also pressured the same stars he compromised to wear the label when they stepped out.

Rumors of Weinstein’s abuse of women started piercing the surface of entertainment gossip as early as 2002, when Auletta, a longtime New Yorker writer, published an investigative report, but he failed to uncover direct evidence of Weinstein’s criminal acts. It took until 2017 for both the magazine’s Ronan Farrow and the New York Times duo of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to be able to finally get women to speak on the record.

In 2020 Weinstein was found guilty, though only of two charges brought against him, and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Harvey Weinstein was brought to justice against the unspooling backdrop of the #MeToo movement, which his misdeeds helped kick start. That it took dozens of women coming forward, considerable star power, and mighty media platforms to bring him to justice, Auletta makes clear, was terribly and sorrowfully wrong.

—CONSTANCE C.R. WHITE

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The Road

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BEST OF SHOW, AUTHENTICITY IS EVERYTHING, WRITES ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

Beach

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OPENING SPREAD: KIMBALL STUDIOS/COURTESY PEBBLE BEACH CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE; THIS PAGE: COURTESY © MERCEDES-BENZ AG; AT RIGHT: KIMBALL STUDIOS/COURTESY PEBBLE BEACH CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE

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here may have been a collective gasp on May 5, when Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker gaveled in a record-shattering bid of €135 million ($142.4 million) for a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé— one of just two prototypes built by the Mercedes-Benz racing department.

But it came as no surprise to automotive insiders.

That figure, they say, is merely a testament to the passion and financial commitment of the most ardent classic cars collectors. After all, what is $142 million for what has been hailed as “the most beautiful car in the world”?

The 300 SLR belongs to a class of car that can only be seen up close at a select few events around the globe, among them the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, held each August in that sunny northern California locale. Talk to any collector in the classic car universe and they will tell you that the vaunted and highly competitive Concours—as well as the the action-packed calendar of Monterey Car Week exhibitions, rallies, concours, and auctions leading up to it—is an absolute must-attend. The Concours d’Elegance is the premier event of its kind in North America, comparable only to the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este, held at the palatial property on the shores of Lake Como each May. At Pebble Beach, fewer than a dozen international collectors in each of some 20 classes showcase more than a century’s worth of automotive excellence at the invitation-only event. Each competitor on the field hopes to snag the Best in Class award though only one entrant will be awarded Best of Show.

So how does a collector of classic cars enter this demimonde? Avenue caught up with several behind-the-scenes players who share their insights on what it takes to make the winner’s circle and, ultimately, Best of Show.

“Just being invited to show at Pebble Beach is a significant accomplishment, reserved for the best of the best,” says Donovan Leyden, an International Ferrari chief class judge who has been taking measure of that marque at Pebble Beach for more than two decades. As Leyden explains it, contenders for Best of Show tend to be the only one or one of a very few of their kind. They have been extremely special cars from their conception—built to high standards to be shown at major salons in Geneva, Paris, London, Turin, or New York—or they were originally produced for royalty, celebrities, or the most exclusive of customers. Some may have been forerunners of a new direction in design, technology, or technique, or they may have had a successful history of winning major international races that cemented their place and value.

“For the best chance to win, however, a car must be very rare and significant. It must have been historically well-documented at the time of its creation so it can be determined within reason how it appeared when it left the factory or appeared it its most significant early configuration.”

At Pebble Beach, returning a car to that “original factory state” has become the gold

BEST OF SHOW Previous spread: A 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahn Kurier restored by Paul Russell and owned by the Keller Collection took top honors at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance last year. Above: Master restorer Russell and a pair of Pebble Beach judges examine a 1935 Delahaye 135 M F&F Cabriolet at the 2016 event. Opposite: A 1955 MercedesBenz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé became the most expensive car ever sold when it commanded $142.4 million at Sotheby’s this past May.

“JUST BEING INVITED TO SHOW AT PEBBLE BEACH IS A SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENT, RESERVED FOR THE BEST OF THE BEST.”

DONOVAN LEYDEN

standard. Yet, that has not always been the case.

As recently as a decade or so ago, winning was largely about luxe and looks, with many Best of Show honorees exhibiting a host of “upgrades”— from original upholstery being replaced with the finest Italian leather to wire wheels being rebuilt with durable stainless-steel spokes, not to mention the untold tweaks under the hood. But there has been a decisive shift from prizing the most dazzling entrants to those far more faithful to original design and factory spec. To accomplish this, Leyden explains, owners and restorers work from original documents, be they owner’s manuals, archival photographs, or even sales brochures. “The goal,” he says, “is not to improve on the original but to preserve and restore its the original character.”

Take, for instance, a 1954 Ferrari 375 MM Scaglietti Coupé owned by Microsoft executive Jon Shirley and restored by Butch Dennison that, in 2014, become the first postwar car to be named Best of Show since the first edition of the Concours in 1950.

The car started life as a Pininfarina-bodied competition Spyder (0402AM), commissioned by Roberto Rossellini, one of Ferrari’s best customers. The film director had driven the car just a few times before it was in an accident, which damaged

its original body beyond repair. Rather than engaging Pininfarina to replace the body, Rossellini had the chassis sent to coach builder Carrozzeria Scaglietti, a company conveniently located across the street from the Ferrari factory in Maranello, on the outskirts of Modena. The result: Scaglietti’s first passenger car design for Ferrari, a unique and finely sculpted Coupé Speciate. After passing through several hands, the car was discovered some three decades ago in a forlorn state in an underground garage in a Paris suburb.

Following Shirley’s first restoration car in 1995, the car won numerous awards, including a First in Class at Pebble Beach in 1998. But subsequent research turned up details of the car that were previously unknown, including details regarding its original vinyl upholstery, which had been replaced by fine Italian leather. He decided to rip out the leather and other chronological inaccuracies and enhancements, and restore the car again before bringing it back to Pebble Beach in 2014, when it took top honors.

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“SOME PEOPLE BUY CARS BECAUSE THEY JUST WANT TO BE IN THE WINNER’S CIRCLE. I DO IT BECAUSE I JUST HAPPEN TO LOVE BEAUTIFUL CARS.”

RALPH LAUREN

be nixed as visual distractions. The car went on to place Best of Show.

“Paul is a true master when it comes to the art of restoration,” Lauren tells Avenue, fondly recalling his first encounter with Russell, whom he calls “the professor,” back in 1983. “I had just purchased a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Coupé, a ‘Gullwing,’ from the pre-owned department at Mercedes in Manhattan. When I asked what it would take to put this classic in tip-top shape, I was handed a copy of the Mercedes quarterly, which had an article on Paul and his dedication to automotive craftsmanship. He sounded so great and so tuned in. And he is such a great historian when it comes to cars. So, I called him and said, ‘Would you restore my Gullwing?’”

As Russell says, “The rest is history.”

In commenting on the Pebble Beach wins, says Lauren, “I don’t go [to Pebble Beach] thinking I am

going to win. If I go, I go. Some people buy cars because they just want to be in the winner’s circle.

I do it because I just happen to love beautiful cars.”

As for what Russell has in store for this year’s show: “We have a 1959 Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France that we will be presenting for a good client from California, which we acquired on his behalf from an owner in Chicago. We are completing its restoration as we speak, and it will be on the field in August.”

It is worth noting that in recognition of Russell’s talent, the Kansas-based McPherson College Automotive Restoration dedicated a new research center in his honor this past May. For those on a quest for the most original of cars, it might be worthwhile pursuing ones known by that less-than-glamorous moniker, a “barn find”—that is, a ride that has been warehoused, if not altogether forgotten, often found in

STEVE W. GRAYSON/ONLINE USA/GETTY IMAGES

Autobahn Kurier. Two other wins were notched with cars owned by designer Ralph Lauren, for whom he has restored 16 classic rides. (As of this writing, Lauren’s collection of classic and exotic cars numbers nearly 100.)

“It was back in 1988 that Lauren, who had been a good client of mine for some time, first asked me if I would take on a project outside of our shop’s normal specialty—Mercedes-Benz—that being the restoration of a beautiful black teardrop-shaped 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupé. Our collaboration with him on the restoration led to Best of Show honors at Pebble Beach in 1990.” (The car, now worth an estimated $40 million, would go on to take the prestigious Coppa d’Oro at the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este in 2013.)

“That Pebble Beach win led to Lauren to ask us to restore his 1930 Mercedes-Benz ‘Count Trossi’ SSK for the 1993 event,” says Russell, chuckling as he recounts the all-nighter his team pulled on the eve of the competition—burnishing the car’s fully spun aluminum wheel covers in a hotel kitchen. “We had photographs of its first owner, Count Carlo Felice Trossi, and the car both with and without the wheel covers. As we proceeded with the restoration, I thought that the car’s wire wheels looked far better without them. Mr. Lauren, however, thought that the car might look better with them, so we were determined to give him that option.” Shortly after daybreak, says Russell, the polished wheel covers were installed only to

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FERRARI: STEVE BURTON; RESTORATION IMAGES: COURTESY PAUL RUSSELL

ART OF RESTORATION Above: In 2014, a 1954 Ferrari 375 MM Scaglietti Coupé, owned by Microsoft executive Jon Shirley, became the first postwar car to be named Best of Show since the first edition of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 1950. At left (from top): A 1962 Ferrari 250 GT SWB California Spyder undergoes a complete mechanical and cosmetic restoration in Paul Russell’s workshop, while imported lizard skin upholstery is sewn on the seat of a 1928 Mercedes-Benz 680S Saoutchik Torpedo Roadster, also under restoration. Opposite: Russell with Ralph Lauren in the designer’s 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupé, which took top honors at Pebble Beach in 1990.

a semi-fossilized state. Several notable barn finds have come on the block in recent years, including a 1969 Lamborghini Miura P400 S, which sold for $1.6 million at RM Sotheby’s in October 2018.

“The beauty of a barn find is that the car may be far less likely to have been subjected to insensitive restoration,” says noted automotive writer and collector Robert Ross, who for more than two decades has covered the classic car market for Robb Report.

“As a result, taking it back to its bones presents a far simpler proposition.” However, he explains, such a restoration could hardly be less expensive.

“It entails the faithful replication of original parts.

Add to this, the challenge often presented by the rarest cars—one-offs of which only a couple were ever made—where original documentation may be scant at best, making the determination of original paint colors and the like dependent on careful investigation.”

“In even the most faithful restorations, one often winds up with a certain anonymization,

an archetype of a make and marque rather than a portrait of an individual work of art,” says former race car driver, collector, preservation advocate, and honorary Pebble Beach judge Miles Collier, founder of the Naples, Florida–based Revs Institute and author of the recently released volume The Archaeological Automobile. It is the pursuit of that unique portrait that has guided Collier’s recent restoration of a 1962 Lotus Elite SE, one of the first monolithic unibody automobiles ever made with a composite material—in this case, fiberglass.

“With the car mounted on a rotisserie that allows it to be spun 360 degrees around its longitudinal axis, my colleague Tim Blair and I were able to finally inspect its unseen parts, where one finds evidence of a car’s history—layer upon layer of fillers, primers, and coats of paint. Each of these uncovered strata spoke to misadventures and accidents, to the various owners who had left their mark, having painted the car five different colors, and surely performed other unknowable work. With each JULY—AUGUST 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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ONE FOR THE ROAD Right and opposite: A 1938 Bugatti Type 57C Atalante, of which just 16 were made, will be offered

by Bonhams at its Quail Lodge sale during Monterey Car Week. The car carries an estimate of $2.8 to $3.4 million.

intervention, the car was reimagined, corrected, and enhanced, as its historical past continued to be destroyed in favor of a new and evolving present.

While others may burn up cubic money in pursuit of lapidary perfection, my goal has always been to go back in time—to the car’s birth and place of origin, to find its unique personality.”

“Finding that car’s personality really is the ultimate OCD activity, and hardly one for the shallow pocketed,” says Ross, adding that a restoration back to factory spec can out-cost even the most lavish appointments. And he would know, having himself restored several barn finds, including a 1965 Shelby GT350 and a 1966 Lamborghini 400 GT Interim, which had been squirreled away in a dark garage for many years. “Not only was the Lamborghini complete and intact, it’s a rare ‘Interim’ model, featuring a 4-liter V-12 with Lamborghini’s own transmission and differential, in contrast to most of the two-seat GTs that use a 3.5-liter engine.” Ross has restored that car not once but twice, the current restoration being undertaken by Santa Monica– based Joseph DeMeo with the aim of correcting “anachronistic details,” among them restoring the car’s original braided steel fuel lines and machining correct fittings from scratch.

Despite all the perceived “flaws” now being righted, the car, which Ross acquired in 2002, did win the 2018 Hillsborough Best of Show, and took first at two collateral events leading up to the Concours during the Monterey Car Week of that year—the Carmel Mission Classic and at the Quail.

“The best part of bringing a car like the 400 GT to a concours is surprising the visitors, most of whom have never seen such an early Lamborghini.

It’s so elegant and soft. It doesn’t look like a Lamborghini at all!” When queried whether the car might have a chance at Pebble Beach once the current restoration is complete, Ross pauses

for a moment. “Anticipating the recognition at Pebble Beach of Lamborghini’s 60th anniversary celebration in 2023, the car has been restored in order to establish a reference standard for the first of Lamborghini’s GTs. For that reason alone, we might warrant a place on the field.”

“The interesting thing about adhering to such faithful restoration,” says Russell, “is that a lot of these projects take two years, especially on a pre– World War II car. And then, when bringing the car to Pebble Beach to be judged by three marque experts, it’s all over in 20 minutes. In a lot of ways, the presentation of a car on the judging field is like an attorney’s closing argument after a very long case.”

“When it comes to taking Best in Show at Pebble Beach,” says Leyden, “the bottom line is you start with the best car you can possibly get.

You do the deepest research you can possibly do.

And then you restore the car sympathetically in accordance with this research. You have, in a sense, all the special factors that set a car apart: historical importance, rarity, design, and engineering. And, hopefully, it’s an elegant car as well. That’s how you get to the winner’s circle.”

For those looking to get into the race, some of the most coveted classic cars in the world come on the auction block during Monterey Car Week— presented by Bonhams, RM Sotheby’s, Gooding & Company, Russo and Steele, and newcomer Broad Arrow Group. Among the most highly anticipated lots this year is a 1938 Bugatti Type 57C Atalante, of which just 16 were made. “It is a stunningly original car, with great measures taken to preserve its original finishes, and has outstanding provenance, including a 1938 Paris Salon exhibition and 60 years in singular ownership,” says Jakob Greisen, vice president and head of US Motoring for Bonhams.

The house is offering the car during its Quail Lodge sale, tagged at $2.8 to $3.4 million.

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ENCHANTING, AND SEXY SINGLES. ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOOEUN BAE

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Joanna Gong Absolute Gem You won’t get far with moissanite here—as a private sales director specialist in the jewelry department at Sotheby’s, Gong knows a thing or two about expensive stones. Known for her impeccable sense of style, this jetsetter is often found between New York, Palm Beach, Geneva, and Hong Kong, scouring the globe for the best of the best jewels for her clients.

GONG, FINNEGAN: BFA; COHEN, RABIL: GETTY

Samantha Cohen Daddy Issues We first met the daughter of Donald Trump’s disgraced former lawyer Michael Cohen when she treated Daddy’s legal woes as a debutante moment, granting interviews to the press and attending a New York Botanical Garden gala just days after his sentencing. With scandal hopefully far behind her, Miss Cohen is now working on strategy for start-up investment platform Alao Invest.

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Patrick Finnegan Wunderkid At 11, he was fundraising for Obama. By 14, he had founded his own company. Now in his midtwenties, Finnegan, alongside internet personality Cameron Dallas, founded TGZ Capital, an early stage investor in companies like Lyft and Hims. If a relationship is an investment, think of the ROI on this one.

Paul Rabil Sporty Spice A lax bro with a do-gooder streak? Sounds like a winning combination to us. This newly single New York–based former professional lacrosse player is using his nonprofit Goals for Greatness to increase children’s access to the stick and ball sport in all 50 states.

Shanika Hillocks Winer Diner With an infectious smile and warm personality, this wine-and-spirits consultant proves that NYC’s food and wine scene is no longer just a boys’ club. As a social media influencer in her own right, Hillocks isn’t one to merely follow trends about who is eating and drinking what and where–she’s setting the trends and leading the way.

Jack Brinkley-Cook Model Citizen When Jack, the son of Christie Brinkley, isn’t working on running his Hamptons rideshare company Rove, he can be found busting a move at Surf Lodge or hanging ten on Ditch Plains Beach. After he split with longtime girlfriend Nina Agdal last fall, there is little doubt that this Montauk fixture is in for what some would call “hot boy summer.”

Cory Booker Jersey Boy Having split from his girlfriend, Rosario Dawson, in February, this clean-living Democratic senator is officially back on the market. You’d just have to be okay jet-setting to D.C. (and Newark).

HILLOCKS, BRINKLEY-COOK: BFA, BOOKER: GETTY; COURTESY GREENE; BARNETT: LISABARNETT.NET

Harrison Greene III Free Spirit Greene isn’t your typical finance guy. He can crunch numbers, sure, but his heart is in spirits.

This Renaissance man is an avid connoisseur of fine and rare mezcal and amaro from around the world, and plans to open a bar in SoHo this summer to show off his impressive collection.

Lisa Barnett Hot Mama The founder of fast-growing baby food company Little Spoon, this Nolita resident and former venture capitalist is leading the conversation around modern parenting—although not (yet) a parent herself.

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Kathy Kuo Design Doyenne A booming design business that counts Halle Berry and Robert Redford as clients, an eponymous furniture line with a byappointment showroom in Harlem and a store in Southampton, a killer Manhattan apartment, and an eye for serene interiors? By every measure, this former-model-turned-interiorsguru is a force to be reckoned with.

Hari Nef Starlet She captured the world’s attention as Rabbi Jen on And Just Like That, but New Yorkers first came to know this unforgettable beauty when she was a student at Columbia by day and working her way through the party circuits at night.

Bryan Ludwig Health Warrior A red carpet habitué, the cofounder of NuView Health has a healthy social life as well. An avid philanthropist and art collector, Ludwig serves on a number of committees in support of New York’s buzziest social events, including Save Venice, the Museum of Art and Design, the Parrish Art Museum, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and the Aspen Art Museum.

Noreen Ahmad The Art Whisperer She’s served on countless committees. She’s a regular fixture at museum fundraisers and gallery openings across the city. She’s a mother of two, and she runs communications for the Morgan Library? If you’re looking for the scoop on what’s happening in the art world these days, chances are Noreen first heard about it six months ago.

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KUO: WWW.KATHYKUOHOME.COM; NEF, LUDWIG: BFA; OGLANDER, AHMAD: GETTY

Daniel Oglander Art Czar Oglander grew up in art school in Tennessee.

His mother’s a potter, his father an abstract artist. Now the prodigal son and self-proclaimed “connector of dots” advises a range of elite clients on how to build meaningful collections.

Finding his muse, however, is another matter altogether.

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Igee Okafor Mr. Dapper The name’s Okafor. Igee Okafor. And as the founder of modern men’s lifestyle website Bond Official, the Nigerian-born bon vivant and entrepreneur has a 007-level sense of style.

Lionel Cipriano Creative Whiz This Chelsea resident and creative director is society’s Zelig. The polymath is seen flitting from one party to another, knowing everyone and everywhere, from flying off to Rio de Janeiro to flaunting his six-pack on Fire Island.

OKAFOR, MOORKAMP: BFA; COURTESY CIPRIANO, FINDLAY, IREDALE

Sarah Findlay La Francophone A Québec City native who now divides her time between Manhattan and Palm Beach, this retail planner cut her teeth at Ralph Lauren and Chanel before venturing out as a high-powered consultant for global retail brands.

Sam Moorkamp Tastemaker This St. Louis native left the interior design world to help his sister, Molly Moorkamp, cofound her eponymous fashion brand. Now, the pair dress the likes of Ariana Rockefeller, Nicky Hilton Rothschild, and a host of young and fabulous ladies who lunch. An invite to one of Sam’s regular Sunday dinner parties is one of the Upper East Side’s most coveted invitations.

Jessica Iredale Style Scribe When this former WWD fashion critic and current pen-for-hire writes, stylish women everywhere listen. But she’s not just watching from the sidelines—this glamorous downtown denizen is often spotted rubbing elbows with A-list fashion types like Joseph Altuzarra and Gabriela Hearst.

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Gimme Quieter than the Hamptons but just as beautiful, Shelter Island is the East End’s low-key, no-drama, secluded slice of heaven.

Heather Hodson gets away from it all

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COURTESY THE PRIDWIN

e COME ON IN, THE WATER’S LOVELY A vintage postcard of the Pridwin Hotel shows the water sports options in 1958.

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ERIC STRIFFLER; NICOLE FRANZEN/COURTESY SUNSET BEACH

CLOSE TO THE WIND Left: sailing regattas and races feature large in a Shelter Island summer; above: the view from a seafood platter at Sunset Beach.

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very summer the hamlets of Long Island’s East End swell to almost four times their winter size as New Yorkers seek out their pristine beaches, gray-shingle mansions, verdant lawns, and the shimmering, silver light. And so lines form, traffic slows, and the mania of Manhattan takes over. And yet, one of its most beautiful corners, Shelter Island, remains barely touched by the gilded seasonal migration. Instead this sedate summer colony, a ten-minute ferry ride from Sag Harbor, resounds to not much more than birdsong and the odd thwack of a tennis ball, while its bucolic lanes and sandy shores remain, even in August, largely empty.

In attitude and aspect, Shelter Island is decidedly—and strategically—not the Hamptons.

Accessible only by ferry, seaplane, or private boat (unless you count the odd twin engine plane that lands on the unpaved, privately owned airstrip), it has no train stations or Jitney stops, no traffic lights, no traffic jams or limousines disgorging day-trippers. “The world gets very small on Shelter Island,” says Aandrea Carter, owner of the iconic Ram’s Head Inn, which has its own harbormaster for guests who prefer to arrive by boat. “To come to Shelter Island is an expedition.

That mentality of ‘We’re going on a journey’ sets the stage for a different attitude.”

But Shelter Island is not all languishing in hammocks and raising ensigns. This summer sees the reopening of a trifecta of century-old grande dame hotels after years-long renovations, properties that have historically been among the East End’s greatest destinations. With the return of the Pridwin, with its signature white exterior and window casements painted hunter green, the legendary Chequit, in Shelter Island Heights, and the beautiful Ram’s Head Inn on Ram Island, New Yorkers more used to the tony environs of the Hamptons are beginning to switch allegiance.

As one Southampton resident who will be renting out his home this summer to stay on Shelter Island tells Avenue, “I’m looking forward to leaving as few times as I have to.”

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RAM’S HEAD INN “Guests tell me all the time, ‘This is just like the family resort in Dirty Dancing,’ ” quips Aandrea Carter, who took over as the owner of the Ram’s Head Inn last year. “It’s like a movie, with a number of different scenes going on at any one time.”

The four-and-a-half acre Colonial-style property with its wraparound porch and wide lawn with magnificent views across Coecles Harbor was built in the 1920s by Joan Covey of Great Neck, who ran it as an inn for a smart Gold Coast set, and possibly as a speakeasy. Since Carter bought the inn, she has overseen a careful refurbishment—“I wanted to keep the antique iconic feel; I didn’t want to lose the charisma of this iconic old lady,” she explains—with the restaurant and bar area, along with the 17 guest rooms, restored to their former glory, while the newly built organic garden supplies many of the dishes created by chef Joe Smith and the cocktails of mixologist Krista Porreca. Wellness is also on the menu, with innovations such as the “Retox to Detox” program led by wellness guru Troy Mills, with weekly classes of meditation and movement and three-day retreats. There is only one road in, along a narrow spit of land that can connects Shelter to Ram Island. An even more scenic route is to arrive by boat, radioing to Captain Graham, the inn’s English harbormaster, who will help you moor and take you to shore by launch.

COURTESY RAM’S HEAD INN

ISLAND RECORD Below: the Ram’s Head Inn and the great lawn; bottom: one of the inn’s newly refurbished guest rooms.

Opposite: The Pridwin Hotel.

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COURTESY THE PRIDWIN

THE PRIDWIN HOTEL “Time stands still here. It’s where people come to escape,” says Glenn Petry of The Pridwin Hotel, the property he grew up in and which is reopening on July 15 on its 95th anniversary after a total rehaul. Everybody knows the Pridwin, which occupies one of the most beautiful settings on Shelter Island, stretching across seven acres overlooking Peconic Bay. The Petrys have owned and run the 30-room, four-floor hotel and its 16 cottages for six decades; now it has undergone a two-year renovation with the help of Cape Resorts, and the family is operating and running it in partnership with the investment and management company. “Every bit of plumbing and every electrical wire has been replaced,” says Petry. “It’s been an epic journey.”

LÉON 1909 But if everything is now state-of-the-art and super-high-end it remains very much the Pridwin in attitude and spirit. “It hasn’t turned into something else,” says Petry, whose grandfather bought the property in 1961 after vacationing there with his family repeatedly. A lot of previous material has been salvaged and repurposed including the original wainscoting, three chandeliers from the 1920s dining room, and the original wicker furniture and china, while the original hotel fireplace is now surrounded by books and vintage ship models rescued from a former estate on Shelter. Meanwhile the restaurant will serve fresh, locally caught fish and shellfish, locally farmed organic produce, and wines from East End vineyards.

“It was something about the water everywhere which reminded us of the Riviera,” says Valerie Mnuchin of why she and her father, the bankerturned-art-dealer Robert Mnuchin, chose Shelter to launch their new restaurant, Léon 1909. Named after Valerie’s Belgian paternal grandfather, and inspired by her father’s travels in Europe, the farm-to-table restaurant is, says Valerie, “a little bit of French Riviera, a little bit of Italy,” with a chic and cozy interior and a central wood-burning open hearth which they built in homage to La Chaumière in France. The unfussy menu features the freshest local ingredients and one of the best burgers on the East End. JULY—AUGUST 2022 | AVENUE MAGAZINE

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THE CHEQUIT Built in 1872 as a Methodist retreat that by 1909 had turned into an inn, The Chequit is a landmark of Shelter Island Heights and one of the first sights you see as you drive off the ferry from the North Fork. This summer, which marks its 150th anniversary, the iconic hotel, which once played host to Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, as well as members of the Kennedy clan when they sailed down from Massachusetts, reopens after a two-year restoration. It now has 19 guest rooms, a further 16 in two additional buildings, and three new restaurants run by Noah Schwartz— Weakfish Sushi & Noodle, including a sushi bar; Heights Cafe and Wine Bar, with a morning coffee shop; and The Tavern, with a farm-to-table menu created by the chef.

SUNSET BEACH HOTEL SALT

MARINA: COURTESY SALT; RESTAURANT: SUNSET BEACH HOTEL

SHELTER IN PLACE Cocktail hour at Sunset Beach; above, a favorite taverna by the sea, SALT.

A favorite place for casual dining, SALT is a waterfront seafood restaurant converted from a vacant boatyard. The Shipwreck Bar, which sits on a converted 1928 scalloping ship, is a fiesta with live music and games. The restaurant is accessible by boat, with dock slips available on a first come, first served basis, and a ship-to-shore service available for yachties who wish to drop anchor and be motored in for lunch or dinner.

When Sunset Beach opened in 2014, it was greeted with hand-wringing from the old guard summer residents, who worried that the owner, Mercer Hotel founder André Balazs, would spoil the Shelter Island vibe. It’s true it’s now a destination restaurant for socials and celebrities, but that may not be a bad thing. The scene is lively, the food is great, the view is sublime, and if you want to show off, you can arrive by seaplane and walk straight onto the beach and up to the bar, where your martini will be waiting, shaken, not stirred.

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VINE STREET CAFÉ Fine dining enthusiasts on both the North and South Forks regularly beat a path to the doorway of Vine Street, such is the deliciousness of the food and rustic coziness of the atmosphere. The husband and wife team of chef Terry Harwood and pastry chef Lisa Murphy-Harwood, owners since 2003, use local farmers, fishermen, and winemakers to create a menu that includes bouillabaisse, steak frites, and an incredible strawberry cheesecake. Happily, it is open throughout the winter months, when the beams and classic wood bar bring to mind a Hornblower novel and locals such as Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan can be spotted having dinner à deux. There is also a little shop, VSC Market, where you can buy edibles like a pint of chilled asparagus soup, herb vinaigrette, and country fried chicken.

MARIE EIFFEL MARKET The organic market and restaurant owned and run by the beloved Marie Eiffel, formerly of Paris, is a social hub for the the East End’s French diaspora and anyone who appreciates good conversation and the perfect croque monsieur in the morning. People motor over from Orient and Greenport to enjoy breakfast at the tables overlooking Dering Harbor.

INTERIOR: COURTESY MARIE EIFFEL MARKET; YACHT: COURTESY CH MARINE

MASHOMACK PRESERVE Known as the “jewel of the Peconic,” Shelter Island’s cherished nature preserve is a 2,300-acre Eden of tidal creeks, salt marshes, meadows, pine swamps, mature oak and beech forests, rare plants, and coastal birds including ospreys and, since two summers ago, a pair of bald eagles. The preserve, which was first home to the Manhansett people (Mashomack means “where they go by water”), has had many owners and incarnations: like the island’s 17th-century Sylvester Manor and farmland, now run as a nonprofit educational farm, it was at one time owned by Nathaniel Sylvester, a sugar merchant from Barbados. Mashomack has been farmed, fished, used as a hunting lodge, and has twice come within a hairbreadth of being turned into a housing development. In 1979, in a triumph of foresight and fundraising, the Nature Conservancy purchased the site, and today Mashomack has one of the most diverse habitats in the Northeast.

FORKS AND ANCHORS The 38-foot Shelter Island Runabout, custom-made on Shelter Island; above left, the Marie Eiffel Market.

SHELTER ISLAND YACHT CLUB

CH MARINE

Located in Dering Harbor, the SIYC, founded in 1886, is among the dozen oldest members-only clubs in America, and stepping into its elegant rooms has a time-bending quality; every day at sunset the naval tradition of evening colors is observed with the ringing of a bell. A member of the National Sailing Hall of Fame, it has a world-class junior sailing program, while some of the most beautiful yachts known to man—Hinckleys—as well as racing sloops and keelboats, can be seen here. An invitation to dine on the deck should be accepted immediately; the food deserves its reputation, and you will enjoy one of the prettiest harbor views of anywhere on the New England coast.

In the boating universe, the custom yachts that come out of the boatbuilding workshop CH Marine and the adjoining Coecles Harbor Boatyard are legendary. The handcrafted boats have the refined beauty of traditional yachts (think Jack and Jackie sailing in Hyannis Port), but are built for speed. Billy Joel famously commissioned the prototype Shelter Island Runabout here, a 38-footer built by CH Marine’s Peter Needham, a former spacecraft engineer, and designed by naval architect Doug Zurn. (The singer had stipulated that he wanted a “Newport-for-lunch” boat.) Be prepared to wait: CH Marine’s team of craftsmen produce about one boat a year.

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AVENUE’S

FARMERS’ ALMANAC The East End teems not just with high culture and conspicuous consumption but with a new generation of chefs, farmers, and oystermen carrying on the long Long Island history of agriculture. Here, a portfolio of this season’s most interesting stewards of land and sea.

BY NA NC Y K A NE

Photography by James Wojcik for Avenue

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CHARLES SPENCER ANDERSON/CSA IMAGES

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THERE IS A

LONGSTANDING R I VA L RY between the South Fork’s Southampton and the North Fork’s Southold. Each claims to be the oldest English settlement in New York State. In actuality, records show that Gardiners Island in Long Island Sound, diplomatically located between the two forks of the peninsula, was settled months before either one.

Still, if you have a drink at a local bar, you might hear old-timers arguing about it. Listen longer and you’ll also hear fascinating stories about generations of family farmers and fishermen on both forks, like the baymen of East Hampton, who have been fishing the waters for 400 years, or the potato farmers Martin and Anna Wesnofske, who came from Poland in the 1800s and would list the days they plowed so kids could show up and pick enough potatoes from the fields to feed their families for months.

Today, farmers and fishermen are still on the East End and flourishing thanks to a new group of visionaries who are using organic and regenerative methods of agriculture to harvest the land and the waters, bolstering food security and protecting the island for generations to come.

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Peter Stein Aqua farmer, Peeko Oysters, New Suffolk When Peter Stein was a teenager, his father would take him to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station as a special treat. Little did he know back then that oysters would become his life’s work and passion. “I always had an affinity for the water,” says Stein, who started his own oyster farm, Peeko Oysters, six years ago, and harvests daily out of Little Peconic Bay. A day’s haul of oysters can yield 3,000 oysters, and this year Peeko will bring a million oysters to many of the best restaurants in New York City. Stein calls what he does “mariculture,” but it’s more commonly known as aquaculture, and he cannot overemphasize its importance.

“This is a cultural renaissance, working waterfront farms. This is regenerative ocean farming.” Unlike land farms, mariculture does not introduce anything into the process. “We just tend to the oysters in a self-contained ecosystem. We are nurturers.”

“WE ARE NURTURERS.”

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Maria Rivero González Owner and wine grower, RGNY vineyard, Riverhead Born in the Parras region of Mexico, Maria Rivero González was 16 when her father first planted a vineyard.

“He just wanted some wine to drink with his buddies,” she laughs. But Rivero González had found her calling. The family bottled their first vintage in 2003 for family con-

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sumption, but by 2007 they had built a winery, RGMX, and she was part of it. What she didn’t know, she learned, at both the International Wine Center in New York City, where she became a sommelier, and the French Culinary Institute, where she specialized in wine pairing. Rivero González discovered the North Fork by accident, and when she found a vineyard for sale she jumped in.

She opened RGNY in 2019 and calls

her vineyard part of the “new” North Fork, asserting that it is important to “do things in ways that affect the environment as little as possible and create a minimal impact.” That even includes the labels on the bottles.

“Every day, we do more to enhance and build a healthy environment, even creating our own labels. We are looking to hand-print them because that’s more sustainable.”

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“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, INTERACTIVE INTERDEPENDENT COMMUNITY.”

Stephan Bogardus and Allegra Borghese executive Chef, the Halyard, Greenport, and co-owner, borghese vineyard Stephan Bogardus and Allegra Borghese first met as students at Mattituck High School. Years later, after working as a chef with Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, Bogardus came back to the North Fork to run the highly regarded North Fork Table and Inn, while Borghese, whose family has roots dating back to ninth-century Italy, returned to manage her parents’ vineyard in Cutchogue, Castello di Borghese Vineyard. “We went on walks and did yoga together, and as fate would have it, a friendship turned to romance,” says Bogardus. Today Allegra’s brother runs the vineyard while she focuses full time on her clinical psychology practice but, she says, “The vineyard will always be a big part of me.” For his part, Bogardus is now the executive chef at The Halyard restaurant at the Sound View hotel, and as such is a player in the burgeoning farm-to-table movement on the North Fork. “It’s ingrained in the culture here,” he says “It’s a beautiful, interactive, interdependent community who are always looking out for one another.” He adds, “Sometimes, you have to leave to come back. This place is just magic.”

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Ülfet Özyabasligil Ralph Head Chef, Canoe Place Inn, Hampton Bays Ülfet Özyabasligil Ralph, known simply as Chef Ülfet, will talk to you at length about her love of food. Raised in Istanbul in a family of cooks, food was a constant in her life growing up. “Do you know that movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding?” she asks. “Well, that was my family, only Turkish.” After studying at the Culinary Institute of Charleston, she formed a relationship with the prestigious Relais & Châteaux association of landmark hotels, where she honed her craft at several of their restaurants, including The Ordinary and Brush Creek Ranch.

When the opportunity arose to become head chef at the new Canoe Place Inn, a treasured Long Island landmark founded in the 17th century, she jumped at it. “I came out to the East End and fell in love,” she said. “This is a place where I can find what I am looking for and put it on the table. It’s a giving land.”

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“FARMING IS MORE THAN A JOB, IT’S A LIFESTYLE THAT IS DEEPROOTED IN OUR SOULS.”

Johanna Halsey and Family Owner, Green Thumb Organic Farm, Water Mill It was not a given that the Halsey kids would take over the Hamptons farm that has been in their family for 11 generations. “My siblings and I all left when we were in our twenties,” says Johanna Halsey.

But they returned and now Johanna owns, manages, and operates Green Thumb Organic Farm and

its beloved farmstand, along with her siblings William, Lawrence, Patricia, her daughter Madeline, her nephews Ray and Jesse, and her niece Samantha. Green Thumb has been certified as a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm since 1989 and has been at the forefront of organic farming methods long before they became popular.

“My brothers wanted to farm organically starting in the ’70s. They bought 100,000 earthworms to be-

gin enriching the soil.” Now, Green Thumb grows more than 300 types of non-hybrid vegetable crops, fruits, flowers, and herbs, as well as practicing many of the methods of biodynamic farming. “Farming is more than a job, it’s a lifestyle that is deep-rooted in our souls,” Johanna says. “​I believe my grandparents and dad are smiling down upon u ​ s.”

Above (from left): Madeline and baby Hazel Claire, grandmother Madeline, Johanna and Jesse.

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Dean Foster Owner, Sagaponack Farm Distillery, Sagaponack Captain Josiah Foster founded the Foster family farm in 1870, and on the very same land he and his sister, Marilee, now work as farmers and distillers, six generations later. The spirited siblings opened the Distillery in 2016 and the Tasting Room in 2020. Why diversify? “One factor was the free trade agreement that put small farms on notice—now we were competing with foreign nations for our food,” he says. He credits their survival to good stewardship, proper farm management, and creative innovation. The Distillery is housed in a 100-year-old retired dairy barn, the top of which was built in part from a centuries-old mammoth tree. Rye seeds are grown biodynamically with no synthetic fertilizer. Potato vodkas are made from white, blue, and red potatoes.

Wheat vodkas, barrel-aged gin, and rhubarb liqueur are flavored with herbs that Marilee grows. “We make our spirits with produce that grows on our farm—nothing is brought in,” Dean explains.

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Katie Baldwin and Amanda Merrow Cofounders, Amber Waves Farm, Amagansett In 2008, Katie Baldwin [left] and Amanda Merrow met as apprentices at Quail Hill, the community farm in Amagansett run by poet farmer Scott Chaskey. “It felt like falling in love…with the craft, with the land,” says Baldwin. The pair arrived as strangers but left as best friends, and together they bid on a lease of 7.7 acres of newly conserved farmland in Amagansett. “We had the audacity to go out on our own,” Merrow says. So began the story of Amber Waves, a nonprofit working farm now in its 14th season as a CSA-certified farm. Since 2009, Amber Waves Farm has grown to encompass a market, a café, a bakery, and even an apprentice program of its own. Says Baldwin, “We believe that these beginning farmers are the most important crop we grow.”

“WE BELIEVE THAT THESE BEGINNING FARMERS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT CROP WE GROW.”

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Daniel Kim Private Chef, Ten Homakase The most in-demand personal chef in the Hamptons this summer is Daniel Kim, a master sushi chef who trained under the legendary Shinji Nakamura at Sushi Zo, and was later head chef at New York’s Sushi by Bou before joining Ten Homakase. A rarefied sushi dining experience, Ten Homakase’s name is a portmanteau of “home” and “omakase.” Kim sees no challenge in preparing his soigné creations in strangers’ kitchens. “The preparation is not so different. Omakase doesn’t require heat from the kitchen, so it’s very easy to provide our offerings to a private home or event setting.” Kim uses only the very freshest of ingredients, with much of the fish from the East End waters, such as fluke and tuna from Montauk and uni from Maine. “The ideal meal is the one that’s made from the freshest ingredients.” Guests can choose from menus of 10, 12, 15 or 17 courses of uniquely curated fish, sake, and Japanese appetizers.

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Where to Eat, Drink, and People Watch This Summer

TO DINE FOR Trust the Hamptons to consistently provide new and novel places to dine and drink. In time for the summer season, entrepreneur Heath Freeman opens Sunset Harbor in East Hampton, offering seafood fra diavolo— along with drop-dead views of Three Mile Harbor (313 Three Mile Harbor– Hog Creek Road, East Hampton). Freeman also bought the beloved former Red Bar Brasserie in Southampton and has plans to open a French bistro there called Enchanté—think Gallic classics, including a Hamptons version of steak frites but with lobster—with Dane Sayles, formerly of Gurney’s, as head chef (210 Hampton Road, Southampton). Famous for its pivotal role on Showtime’s The Affair and its eponymous sandwich (hot or cold, both delicious), Amagansett’s Lobster Roll, known simply as LUNCH, opens in Southampton (32 Montauk Highway, Southampton). Meanwhile, chef Andrew Doran (formerly of SALT and Inlet) joins the Maidstone hotel, bringing a modern American seafood concept to the restaurant with a highly seasonal “catch of the day” (207 Main St., East Hampton). Restaurateur Maurizio Marfoglia of East Hampton’s Dopo La Spiaggia fame, has taken over the former World Pie space for Dopo Il Ponte and will use a wood-burning oven to turn out pizzas (and classic Italian dishes) to a chic crowd (2402 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton). Sant Ambroeus opens in East Hampton, promising Milanese fare for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in addition to people watching at the former Babette’s space (66 Newtown Lane, East Hampton). Little Ruby’s Montauk takes over Ruschmeyers, where Le Bernardin veteran Jon Meragiglia will serve up local dishes and a unique pizza program (161 Second House Road, Montauk). Beloved Bushwick pizzeria brand Roberta’s opens in the space formerly occupied by Arbor in Montauk, with popular Neapolitan pies paired with pastas and whole fish cooked in a wood-fired oven (240 Fort Pond Road, Montauk). Gabby Karan de Felice’s Tutto Il Giorno opens Tutto Caffé, a casual place for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus there’s a coffee and wine bar (55 Main Street, East Hampton). Rooted Café serves up couscous, charcuterie boards, and other shareable finger food. Oh, and there’s caviar (440 West Lake Drive, Montauk). Root Hospitality (of Rumba and Cowfish in Hampton Bays) have opened Fauna in the former Starr Boggs space, with entrees such as cumin-dusted salmon and steaks for two (6 Parlato Drive, Westhampton Beach).

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NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

The Bold Types In New York’s Gilded Age, James Gordon Bennett Sr. made newspapers while, as Aria Darcella reports, his profligate son Junior made the news

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GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY

I

t’s a father-son dynamic that fans of Succession will find strikingly familiar: a Scottish immigrant who rose from humble beginnings becomes an unsavory media tyrant, the heir of whom, born into great wealth and destined to take over the family business, is waylaid by the high life and goes off the rails.

But you don’t need an HBO Max subscription to catch this almost Shakespearean play. Just follow the life story of James Gordon Bennett Sr., the Gilded Age newspaper baron, and his socialite son, James Gordon Bennett Jr. For a time, the pair controlled the New York Herald, which in the 19th century had one of the highest circulations in the country. And just like the Roys, neither Bennett père or fils was particularly pleasant.

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SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY

LEGACY MEDIA Opposite: James Gordon Bennett Sr., who founded the New York Herald.

Right: Herald Square, named after the paper, in 1893.

Bennett Sr. was born in Scotland in 1795. The severely cross-eyed son of a farmer, he nearly became a priest before abruptly leaving the seminary to travel the world. In 1819 he sailed to North America. After brief stints in Canada, Maine, Boston, and South Carolina, he finally made his way to New York in 1823. Having developed an interest in journalism, for more than a decade he took on various reporting and editing jobs. After multiple (failed) attempts to launch his own newspaper, he finally found success with the Herald, which launched in 1835.

Not only did Bennett guide the Herald to becoming one of the biggest papers in the country, he also changed the newspaper industry forever for better, or for worse. On the positive side, he translated complex subjects, such as finance and the ins and outs of Wall Street, into layman’s terms. He is credited with publishing the first-ever newspaper interview, modifying the advertising payment system, and scoring the first exclusive interview with a sitting president (Martin van Buren).

But the Herald was not a paragon of journalism by any means. Bennett was abhorrently racist, using his paper to trumpet secession for the South and filling its pages with racist slurs and attacks on Abraham Lincoln, before abruptly changing gears and backing the Union when the war actually started. He leaned into sensationalism, trading in takedowns and gossip so vicious that Benjamin Day, publisher of the rival New York Sun, once quipped that “[Bennett’s] only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly from a rope.”

Contrary to Day’s prognostication, Bennett Sr. died in 1872, relatively upright. But he left the paper in the hands of his profligate son. In contrast to his father, the most interesting—and infamous—stories about Jr. happened outside the newsroom.

NOT ONLY DID BENNETT GUIDE THE HER ALD TO BECOMING ONE OF THE BIGGEST PAPERS

IN THE COUNTRY, HE ALSO CHANGED THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY FOREVER FOR BETTER, OR FOR WORSE.

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NOTORIOUS NEW YORKERS

Bennett Jr., who was born in New York in 1841, took over the paper when he was only 25 years old.

After years of being educated in France and partying in Europe, he bore little of his father’s business acumen. That is not to say that Bennett Jr. was unambitious. He, too, was credited with a number of major “firsts.” Junior organized the first polo match and founded the first polo club in the United States. He was the New York Yacht Club’s youngest-ever commodore, and won the world’s first transatlantic yacht race. He was also the first person to bring a car to Bermuda (much to the displeasure of Mark Twain, of all people).

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HISTORY AND ART COLLECTION/ALAMY

HE WON THE WORLD’S FIRST

TRANSATLANTIC YACHT RACE, AND WAS ALSO THE FIRST PERSON TO BRING A CAR TO BERMUDA (MUCH TO THE DISPLEASURE OF MARK TWAIN).

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HISTORIC COLLECTION, AGEFOTOSTOCK/ALAMY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PAPER BOY Opposite: James Gordon Bennett Jr., who took over his father’s paper in 1866. Below: pages from the Herald, including its coverage of the Titanic disaster.

But his biggest claim to fame came from his drunken behavior at the home of his then-fiancée, Caroline May, in 1877. At some point during one evening Junior urinated into the fireplace (or possibly a piano). The scandal not only ended his engagement but also sparked a duel with his former future brother-in-law. Though no one was harmed, the aftermath prompted Junior to flee the country to Europe.

Somehow, Bennett Jr. found time to still run the Herald—and even expand it to include international editions. But despite his best efforts, Bennett Jr. couldn’t maintain his father’s success.

The latter half of the 19th century saw the introduction and rise of papers like the New York Times,

not to mention publications from Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Only a few years after Bennett Jr. died in 1918, the Herald was sold, and in 1924 it merged with the New York Tribune, becoming the New York Herald-Tribune, which ran until 1966, when it finally shuttered for good.

Since then, the Bennetts’ notoriety in the public eye grew dim. Perhaps the most lasting monument to the men is Herald Square, which still features a statue dedicated to the father and son.

Though, as any New Yorker will tell you, the chaos of the area is little monument to anyone.

Meanwhile, other aspects of their legacy have been reexamined in light of Bennett Sr.’s virulent racism. For more than a century, the New York

Fire Department’s highest honor was the James Gordon Bennett Medal, named for Senior after he endowed it to the department for saving his home from a fire. But in 2020, the prize was renamed after Chief Peter J. Ganci, the highest ranking officer to die in 9/11, after a yearslong push from the Vulcan Society, an organization which represents Black firefighters.

Whether they intended to or not, the Bennetts set the blueprint for media family relationships for decades to come. One generation builds an empire at the cost of their personality, while the other is stunted by their privilege. One generation wants to control the news, while the other rebels by being the news themselves.

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ON THE

Gillian Miniter and Fe Fendi

FLOWER POWER

Maureen Chilton

Di Mondo

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Millie Peartree and John Goodman

6/23/22 2:21 PM

Rebecca Vanyo

Colleen Crivello and Sai De Silva

The New York Botanical Garden hosted its annual Conservatory Ball among its summer exhibition, “Around the Table: Stories of the Foods We Love.”

The black-tie affair featured cocktails, dinner, and dancing, all in support of the Botanical Garden’s preeminent botanical research, horticulture, and children’s education programs.

PHOTOS BY BFA

Jun Ge and Vlad Philips

Lili Buffett, Ivy Getty, Candice Lupton, and Chloe Rubenstein

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Barclay Collins, Jennifer Bernstein and Isaac Thweatt

SPRING 2020Hilton | AVENUE MAGAZINE Olivia Palermo and Nicky Rothschild

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Muffie Potter Aston and Dr. Sherrell Aston

Hannah Gershenson and Patrick Giordano

CALL OF THE WILD The Wildlife Conservation Society’s annual gala was held at the Central Park Zoo—meaning guests were not only treated to champagne but got to hang out with sea lions. The evening honored Jeff Bezos and his work with the Bezos Earth Fund. After dinner, and some passionate speeches about nature, the crowd hit the dancefloor.

Gillian Hearst

Suriya Khan and Trevor Philips

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Alejandro Santo Domingo, Jeff Bezos, and Cristián Samper

Mary Bryant McCourt

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Silvio Gonzato and Alexandre Stutzmann

PHOTOS BY BFA

Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie

Kitty Sherrill and Ana Laffont

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Samantha Sorbaro and Kam Chauhan

6/23/22 2:21 PM

Amy Fine Collins

Olga Sorokina, Danielle Hankin, and Polina Proshkina

ART OF THE CITY

PHOTOS BY BFA

The Frick held a spring garden party for its supporters at its temporary Madison Avenue location. Guests were given the opportunity to wander the galleries and sit in on art talks, as well as sip drinks and enjoy live jazz.

Malcolm Roesser and Connie Zhang

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Chuck Royce and Deborah Royce

Marina Press Granger

6/23/22 2:21 PM

Penelope Cruz and Robert De Niro

Vanessa Traina, Sarah Hoover, and Lauren Santo Domingo

BISTRO BUSTLE Starlets and artists collided at Chanel’s 15th annual Artists Dinner during the Tribeca Film Festival. The luxury house took over Balthazar for a private dinner honoring the artists who donated works to the festival as prizes for the winning filmmakers.

PHOTOS BY BFA

Genesis Tramaine and Ashley Dennis

Cleo Wade, Derek Blasberg, and Rebecca Dayan

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Racquel Chevremont and Thelma Golden

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SOCIAL SKILLS

Suntan Semaphore Reading between the (tan) lines

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RASH

COMMITMENT ISSUES

CREATURE OF HABIT

OVERDRESSED

LONELY

SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICT

AVENUE MAGAZINE | JULY—AUGUST 2022

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY ZIPENG ZHU

6/23/22 2:31 PM

LOT 2

LOT 1

SCAN FOR FULL LISTING

350’ of Soundfront on 12+/- Acres Fits House, Pool & Tennis on Each Gary R. DePersia Licensed A s sociate Real Es t ate Broker m 516.380.0538 | gdp@corcor an.com

North Fork | East Marion. You remember the feeling. You’re on holiday on the coast of some Caribbean isle or on the cliff of a European town overlooking the Mediterranean. Each morning when your head leaves the pillow you know you are on vacation with broad expanses of water dotted with boats and vistas of other shores. Much closer to home, only 100 miles from Manhattan, you can recreate that feeling each and every day when you develop this very private, nearly 12 acre waterfront, meadow-like parcel composed of two 5.7 acres lots spanning 350’ along the North Fork’s Long Island Sound. With permits pending, a savvy buyer would save hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of waiting to begin construction of a significant house, waterside pool, tennis court and even a guest house for those who would undoubtedly flock to help you enjoy your grand, new estate. The low, but stable bluff, provides easy access down a gentle pebbled path to the beach from where you’ll enjoy an abundance of aquatic activities while conversation and laughter will resound around the inevitable nighttime beach fires. The property affords ample opportunity to create your own vineyard, apple orchard or a field of wildflowers through which your driveway will meander right to your front door. Only a few miles from both the ferries of Greenport and Orient Point, this well positioned property provides easy access to everything that has made the North Fork the new sought after destination. At night, go into town for dinner at one of the waterfront restaurants overlooking Shelter Island or head to one of the many vineyards for a wine tasting.

But on clear evenings, eat early as you might want to get back for some of the most beautiful sunsets anywhere, as the sun seems to disappear somewhere into the Sound leaving the horizon a purplish haze.

Exclusive. $7.65M WEB# 888798 | Lot 1 $3.825M WEB# 888799 | Lot 2 $3.825M WEB# 888847 Real estate agents affiliated with The Corcoran Group are independent contractors and are not employees of The Corcoran Group. Equal Housing Opportunity. The Corcoran Group is a licensed real estate broker located at 660 Madison Ave, N Y, N Y 10065. All listing phone numbers indicate listing agent direct line unless otherwise noted.

All information furnished regarding property for sale or rent or regarding financing is from sources deemed reliable, but Corcoran makes no warranty or representation as to the accuracy thereof. All property information is presented subject to errors, omissions, price changes, changed property conditions, and withdrawal of the property from the market, without notice. All dimensions provided are approximate. To obtain exact dimensions, Corcoran advises you to hire a qualified architect or engineer.

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Trust is a beautiful thing

fiduciarytrust.com/avenue

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