URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE
The magic of abc carpet & home Estée Lauder | Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Ailyn Pérez | Baseball and Brooklyn | Country Club Chefs
H O L I DAY 2015
Holiday 2015
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CONTENTS
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Home as a Sacred Space: The magic of abc carpet & home I NTERVI EW BY LYNN ADAMS SMI TH
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The Queen of Corona Estée Lauder’s Magic Touch BY ELLEN GI LBERT
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10
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In Plain Sight: Coffee Table B ooks With B eauty And Brains BY STUART MI TCHNER
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Country Club Chefs: A Legacy of Fine Dining P HOTOGR APHY BY THOMAS R OBERT CLAR KE
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Charles and Anne Morrow Lind bergh: Couple of an Age
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Breakout: Opera Singer Ailyn Pérez BY TAYLOR SMI TH
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Basebal l and Brooklyn BY MORT ZACHTER
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Recycling the Past BY ANNE LEVI N
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Urban/Suburban Gift Guide 24
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A Wel l-Designed Life 52
Calendar 28
Cover Image: abc carpet & home, photographed by Joe Garrad.
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holiday 2015 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Lynn Adams Smith CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jorge Naranjo art DIRECTOR Jeffrey Edward Tryon GRAPHIC DESIGNers Matthew DiFalco Erica Cardenas CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Ellen Gilbert Linda Arntzenius Ilene Dube Anne Levin Mort Zachter Sarah Emily Gilbert Stuart Mitchner Taylor Smith photographers Joe Garrad Sivan Askayo Thomas Robert Clarke ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Robin Broomer ACCOUNT MANAGERS Jennifer Covill Cheri Mutchler Kendra Russell Monica Sankey Erin Toto OPERATIONS MANAGER Melissa Bilyeu URBAN AGENDA magazine Witherspoon Media Group 4438 Route 27 North Kingston, NJ 08528-0125 P: 609.924.5400 F: 609.924.8818 urbanagendamagazine.com Advertising opportunities: 609.924.5400 Media Kit available on urbanagendamagazine.com Subscription information: 609.924.5400 Editorial suggestions: editor@witherspoonmediagroup.com
Urban Agenda Magazine All rights reserved. Nothing herein may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher. To purchase PDF files or reprints, please call 609.924.5400 or e-mail melissa.bilyeu@witherspoonmediagroup.com. Š2015 Witherspoon Media Group
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Home as a Sacred Space the magic of abc carpet & home
Interview by Lynn Adams Smith | photography by Joe Garrad
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“ Our windows reflect the soul of our collective abc odyssey. Peeking in through the abc eye, one captures a mobile moment of our essence...as transient as a sand mandala.”
a
—Paulette Cole, CEO & Creative Director, abc carpet & home
bc carpet & home has been described as the magic carpet store. The flagship store windows are pure theater and act as the magnet that pulls shoppers in, for a full sensory experience. Once inside, the exploration begins, and be prepared for an inspirational visit. There are six cavernous floors with a rustic warehouse atmosphere, filled with home furnishings, decor, chandeliers, pillows, jewelry, rugs, and much more. As you meander through the store and admire the creative selection of products, you will be immersed into the textures, colors, drama, and love of it all. Manena Frazier is the abc Visual Director and has shared insight into their aesthetic and vision.
We aspire to manifest a holistic sensory experience where spirit, cultural design dna and eco-intelligence and the intelligence of color co-exist. We are deeply informed by nature, including biomimicry and color sources from the earth and combine this inspiration with a balance of clean articulate lines with timeless antiques, soulful patinas and carefully made textures and patterns. Through these we look at all the beautiful ways to realize home as our mirror. UA Do you consider yourself more of a merchandiser, set designer, visual artist, painter or sculptor? abc: We are storytellers, documentarians, poets, and creators of sacred space. We use color texture, space and objects to bring light to environmental and global issues, while telling stories of our artisans and the larger collective issues. UA: What kind of experience are you trying to create for the viewer of an ABC window display?
UA: Describe the abc design philosophy and the attention to sustainability. abc: Our commitment is to using beauty plus commerce as a tool for change.
abc: We work to create a portal to understanding the infinite possibilities. This is where the magic lies.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY SIVAN ASKAYO
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UA: Your window displays have a global appeal. What cultures are you most attracted to visually?
UA: How frequently do you change the window displays and how many people make up your team?
abc: Thailand, India, Morocco, Turkey, Vietnam, Italy, France, Germany, Iceland, Spain.
abc: Windows are changed seasonally with a couple of additional changes. The visual team itself is a core of eight people all of whom also make special contributions. In general everyone who works here has a certain degree of creativity and this energy combined is what pushes the ideas forward. An accurate answer would have to be vague...Anywhere between seven to 27 people are plugged in and pushing forward to bring the vision to scale.
UA: Talk about the process of how you develop displays. Do you sketch or work on the computer? abc: We use computers, pencils, watercolors, microscopes, wires, plaster, found objects. UA: Describe the physical aspect of creating and maintaining the displays. abc: We have crafters and dreamers as well as movers, painters and hangers. The whole thing unfolds naturally. Maintaining is done by visual support leads who take pride in keeping our vision alive. UA: What are some of the most frequently used tools in your toolbox to construct displays?
UA: What special preparations are needed for the huge holiday crowds and the Victorian Santa that visits abc every Christmas? abc: Our elves create a magical area for him to sit to make him feel at home. They know what he likes...and an extra dose of magic is added to welcome the little ones. Every year we present Santa with an offering of chairs to select from. He participates by picking the one he feels the most at home in. We like for our beloved Santa to feel honored, comfortable and cozy.
abc: Wire creates the thin connectivity which represents all the delicate connections between things. Branches are a direct link to Mother Nature.
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Members of abc carpet & home visual team (from left to right) Manena Frazier, Visual Director; Paulette Cole, ceo & Creative Director; Colleen Newell, Senior Director of Design & Merchandising; Amy Ilias, EVP Art + Design.
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THE QUEEN OF CORONA
ESTÉE LAUDER’S MAGIC TOUCH BY ELLEN
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Estée Lauder, the American businesswoman, along with her husband, Joseph Lauter (later Lauder).
W
hen Calvin Klein introduced “Obsession” in 1985, it was swooningly described as a “compelling, potent, powerful and intensely provocative scent.” Christian Dior’s “Poison,” which also came out that year, was no less effusively hailed as a “true magical formula...an irresistibly seductive fragrance, characterized by spectacular appeal.” Clearly, Yves St. Laurent’s “Opium,” an earlier (1977) entrant in the fragrance competition, hadn’t cornered the market on rave reviews: “rarely in the history of fragrance has a creation embodied such enchantment, mystery, magic, and exoticism,” said one reviewer. Although they may have had the lead on overheated names and descriptions of their products, the truly “obsessed” in the world of fragrance and cosmetics was, many believe, one Josephine Esther Mentzer (19082004), a.k.a. Estée Lauder, the American businesswoman who, along with her husband, Joseph Lauter (later Lauder), founded her eponymous cosmetics company in 1946. “Without a beauty business as an alibi, Estée (pronounced ‘Esty’) Lauder might well have gone to jail for aggravated assault with deadly face powder or lipstick,” writes author Joshua Kendall in America’s Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy that Built a Nation, his examination of driven personalities who made it big (Steve Jobs, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry J. Heinz are
among his subjects). His chapter on Lauder contends that “for this cosmetics tycoon, putting makeup on women’s faces was not a chore; it was all that she ever cared about.”
“YOU HAVE ONLY ONE FACE SO YOU BETTER TAKE CARE OF IT.” —ESTÉE LAUDER For doing the only thing she cared about, Lauder racked up some impressive achievements: inducted into to the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1988, she was the only woman on Time magazine's 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century. In 2004 George W. Bush posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She hobnobbed with world leaders and counted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor among her good friends.
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ONCE UPON A TIME...
“A CRAZY AMERICAN LADY”
Josephine Esther Mentzer was born in Corona, Queens, Lauder’s autobiography, Estée: A Success Story, published by Random House in 1985, is divided into three sections: “Dreaming the Dream,” “Making the Dream Come True,” and “Living the Dream,” and reads, not surprisingly, like a fairy tale. She was the “cherished, rather fragile, coddled baby” of the family, whose “very first memory” was “of my mother’s scent, her aura of freshness, the perfume of her presence.” Little Estée got her first taste of business by helping out in her family’s hardware store where she created window displays that would attract customers. Her affinity for making things beautiful found its ultimate outlet during a visit from “Uncle John Schotz,” a Hungarian “skin specialist” who “also loved touching faces.” Enchanted, she watched as he “produced miracles” from “a magic cream potion with which he filled vials and jars and flagons and any other handy container.” This fabulous elixir “magically made you sweetly scented, made your face feel like spun silk, made any passing imperfection be gone by evening.” She was, in short, “irrevocably bewitched by the power to create beauty.” “Deep inside,” she writes, “I knew I had found something that mattered much more than popularity...my future was being written in a jar of snow crème.” With Uncle John as a mentor, young Estée used a retrofitted “stable behind the house” as a “sort of laboratory” for creating ever-larger batches of her uncle’s “Super-Rich All Purpose Crème.” She began by giving “away gallons of cream to friends.”
Brilliant? Pushy? Arguments could be made for both. In her dedication of Estée, Lauder thanks (“most especially”) the “women of the world who have allowed me to reach out and touch them with beauty.” To hear some of the stories, “the women of the world” didn’t have much choice. The title of Kendall’s chapter on Lauder, “The Woman Who Couldn’t Stop Touching Faces,” is wonderfully apt. On a train to Salt Lake City where she hoped to drum up business in Auerbach’s Department Store in the early 1950s, for example, Kendall describes Lauder spotting a young woman wearing a Salvation Army dress. “Just because you’re in the service of the Lord, doesn’t mean you can’t be beautiful,” Kendall reports Lauder thinking. The hapless young lady did not want to be made up at first, but Lauder eventually prevailed, whisking her “into a roomette, where she dabbed on some cream a drop of Honey Glow face powder, and a hint of turquoise eye shadow.” Unfortunately, we aren’t told about the consequences of this particular makeover, if any.
GIFT-WITH-PURCHASE Lauder’s habit of giving away her products, she believes, helped pave the way to success. Calling it her “big secret,” Lauder routinely made a point of giving a woman a sample of whatever she had not bought as a gift. “Perhaps I’d shave a bit off the tip of a lipstick and tell her to apply with her fingers. Perhaps, in still another envelope, give her a bit of glow. The point was this: a woman would never leave empty-handed.” Lauder’s do-it-yourself work ethic and uncanny merchandising sensibility enabled her to move from giving touch-ups to women sitting under the hairdryers in the local beauty parlor, to working larger groups at Long Island hotels, and finally becoming, by the 1960s, a mainstay in high-end department stores where salespeople were duly trained in her give-them-something-freeto-take-home merchandising technique.
Mrs. Lauder showing her collection at Neiman Marcus in Dallas.
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“EVERY WOMAN CAN BE BEAUTIFUL.” —ESTÉE LAUDER “Estée Lauder rarely took no for an answer as she sought to break into exclusive stores,” agrees writer Geoffrey Jones in Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. When the cosmetics buyer at Galeries Lafayette in Paris refused to meet her, Lauder befriended a salesperson there instead. Introducing her to Youth Dew, Lauder “accidentally” spilled “a good bit of” it on the floor. “As shoppers began to ask the saleswomen where they could buy the product,” Jones reports, “the buyer relented, and within a few weeks Lauder opened her first counter at Galeries Lafayette.” Pierre Robert makeup creator Knut Wulff described another act of Lauder bravado when he recalled how his father, German hairdresser and perfumer Gustav Wulff, came home from work one day in the 1960s and complained that “a crazy American lady is here giving away lipsticks for free!” Note that Wulff was not referring to just any “crazy American”; it was a crazy American lady who was getting his father’s customers’ attention. In the 2011 book, Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good, Ruth Brandon points out the paucity of men involved in the
With First Lady Nancy Reagan.
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Lauder routinely made a point of giving a woman a sample of whatever she had not bought as a gift. She believed a woman would never leave empty-handed.
early years of the cosmetics industry. “Even when everyone knew that women did use rice powder, or face cream, or rouge, or whitened their skins with the notorious and poisonous ceruse made from white lead, these preparations still had to be obtained discreetly and applied in strict privacy. Men averted their eyes from such arrangements...long after Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder had all made millions out of cosmetics, men remained noticeably absent from the beauty business.” She concludes that Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Lauder, “the great names in twentieth-century cosmetics, got where they did because men hadn’t yet cottoned on to beauty’s commercial possibilities.” By now, of course, they have, and Lauder’s two sons, Leonard (b. 1933) and Ronald (b. 1944), are A-list businessmen, philanthropists, and political activists. Their interest in art collecting is particularly noteworthy: in 2001 Ronald founded The Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in Manhattan featuring works from the early 20th century, and in 2013, Leonard donated a cubist art collection worth $1 billion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH DEW The real turning point for the company was Youth Dew, a bath oil that doubled as fragrance, introduced in 1953. It was priced at just $5 a bottle, an affordable luxury for most women at the time. “Sales zoomed from a few hundred dollars a week to several thousand,” writes one observer, and “by the mid-1950s, Youth Dew accounted for 80 percent of Estee Lauder's sales and had transformed the fledgling company into a multimillion-dollar business.” Lauder’s passion for improving women’s faces apparently knew few, if any, bounds. In one frequently repeated story (originally told by Lauder herself, although in her version she refrained from identifying her subject), the legendary designer Sister Parish was surveying Lauder’s Manhattan apartment when she muttered, “Oh, what I could do with this house.” Lauder patted her guest’s sagging cheeks and didn’t miss a beat: “Oh, what I could do with that face.” Lauder’s impulse to improve a face was still going strong in the 1980s when she attended a school conference for a granddaughter and couldn’t resist whipping out some products during the parent-teacher discussion. Perhaps one of the most withering profiles of Lauder was “As Gorgeous as it Gets,” written by Kennedy Fraser for the September 15, 1982 issue of The New Yorker. Following Lauder on a tour to promote the company’s new scent, “Beautiful,” Fraser observed Lauder working a room: “Estée Lauder understood the Ceremonial; you’d think she had watched the Monarchy at work. She lifted one arm and moved her hand back and forth, in her own
version of the Royal Wave.” Stopping to talk about the fabulous attributes of the new scent, “Lauder’s “monologue gathered momentum as it rolled along, a stream-of-consciousness performance incorporating slogans, exhortations, memories, tales of glows natural or artificial.” When it was all over, reports Fraser, Lauder “left word that waiters clearing the fast-emptying tables might keep some of the uncollected free samples for their girlfriends and their wives...not for nothing,” concludes Fraser, “was Upstairs, Downstairs one of her favorite television programs.” In another New Yorker piece almost 20 years later, New York Times scent critic Chandler Burr also dished about Lauder, claiming that although Estée Lauder had long been celebrated for her perfumes (she was supposed to have had a proverbial “nose” for great perfume), the truth is “she did not create them—they were created by professional perfumers. (White Linen, for example, was created by Sophia Grosjman, a senior perfumer at International Flavors & Fragrances, a company based in New York.) Lauder was a discerning and involved client, but saying that she created her own scents is like saying that Pope Julius II painted the Sistine Chapel.” Whatever the case, Estée Lauder Cosmetics continues to thrive. Youth Dew still sells, but so do the myriad other products the firm has developed. In Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me (2012), writer Paula Begoun devotes 27 pages to Estée Lauder merchandise that includes cleansers; toners; scrubs; sun care; foundations and primers; powders; and concealers. The longest list includes daytime and nighttime moisturizers, eye creams and serums. Potential customers may be interested to know that Ms. Begoun finds “strengths” in the company’s “state-of-the art moisturizers and serums; excellent sunscreens; some good cleansers.” It is reassuring to know that their “long-wearing lip color and some of the lipsticks (including DoubleWear) are supremely good.” It may come as a surprise to some that product “weaknesses” include several “highly fragranced” items; incomplete and/or problematic products for anyone battling blemishes,” and “some superfluous specialty products.” “Weaknesses” notwithstanding, the company reportedly earns over $9 billion a year. “Let’s face it, we all want to look good,” ad executive Alvin Chereskin (Lauder was his client) told Kennedy Fraser in 1986. “Old means ugly. It means depending on other people. It means losing control...Staying young is going to stay with us, believe me.” With millions of baby boomers turning 60, he’s probably still on the money. U
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URBAN BOOKS
In Plain Sight: Coffee Table Books with Beauty and Brains by Stuart Mitchner
T
he accepted wisdom is that books from academic publishers are too learned and weighty (in the wrong way) to be displayed on a certain piece of living room furniture. Two exceptions to the seasonal rule of show over substance, as wise as they are bold and beautiful, come from university presses: Stacey Sell and Hugo Chapman’s Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns ($49.95) from Princeton, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee ($34.95) from Rutgers. Compared to the lavishly costumed usual suspects appearing just in time for holiday buyers, the tomes featured here can be seen as tributes to the taste and intelligence of both the giver and the receiver. Rather than associating yourself with the glamour buzz of some trendy subject, you can make known, in plain sight, your acquaintance with Leonardo and Jasper Johns, Walden Pond and Wounded Knee. Look inside Drawing in Silver and Gold and you find images of almost unreal beauty from the Middle Ages to the present created by master draftsmen using a
rarely appreciated medium central to the history of drawing. Look inside Writing America and you find a scholar who, according to Erica Jong, “writes like an angel” about the “diversity and humor of the American spirit,” including not only familiar figures like Whitman and Twain, but Jewish, Mexican and Asian American writers, and luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
CHOOSING A COVER One of the most visually stunning, elegantly packaged books of the season, Drawing in Silver and Gold balances its elite production values with the companionable appeal of its cover image, a detail from Albrecht Dürer’s silverpoint print, A Dog Resting (1520). There are other drawings throughout the text that might have served as well, including Joseph Edward Southall’s lovely Head of a Girl (1899), with its pre-Raphaelite glamour, and Leonardo’s Bust of a Warrior, “one of the most widely admired drawings in the history of art,” which was “executed in the late 1470s in Florence,” according to Stacey Sell’s introduction. Facing the introduction— haunting it, you could say —is another Head of a Girl, this one by Alphonse Legros (1885), after Raphael. John Woodworth’s cover photo for Writing America draws you into the deep perspective of a luxuriant view reflecting David Bradley’s claim that Fisher-Fishkin “takes American literature out of the library” and Hal Holbrook’s celebration of a book
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that “cuts straight to the soul of America in all its shades and colors.” Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary year of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing America covers over 150 National Register historic sites, from plantations to immigration stations; from theaters to internment camps; from the New York tenements of Abraham Cahan’s fiction to the fields of the farm workers central to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry.
HUMAN NATURE No less a figure than Michel de Montaigne (15331592) understood the importance of keeping works of intellectual and aesthetic merit in plain sight, thus dispensing with the stigma that can be traced all the way back to a 1580 piece, “Upon the Verses of Virgil,” in which he’s vexed to think that his Essays may “only serve the ladies for a common movable, a book to lay in the parlor window.” Any observer of human nature, from Montaigne to the late Oliver Sacks, would understand the holiday appeal of Charlotte Mullins’s Picturing People: The New State of the Art (Thames & Hudson $40) and Humans of New York: Stories (St. Martin’s $29.99) by photographer Brandon Stanton, whose project to create a photographic cross-section of New York City, with accompanying interviews, evolved into the blog Humans of New York, which grew from a few hundred followers to over fifteen million. In an effort to understand what drives artists
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to represent people as they do, Charlotte Mullins provides profiles of nearly sixty creative figures, from Kara Walker and Grayson Perry to Cindy Sherman and Kehinde Wiley. Picturing People is organized into five thematic sections that reflect motivations ranging from the investigation of the history of art itself to exploring interpersonal relationships. According to Publishers Weekly, “Mullins’s astute overview pairs powerfully with the selected images, offering a perceptive argument for the enduring range and power of figuration into the 21st century.” It’s impossible to simply browse through the picture stories in Stanton’s newly published sequel to Humans of New York, where the comments of the people in the photos can be as compelling as the photos themselves: “I hated God for a long time,” “I kissed a woman yesterday,” “This is getting too personal,” “I don’t believe in anything,” and from the male half of an old couple, “She still gets giddy when she sees a firefly.” Clearly, this is not a book to consign to a parlor window or leave unopened on a coffee table. If anything, this slice of urban humanity circa 2015 covers a range Montaigne himself (“A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband”) would appreciate. No wonder the first published incarnation of Stanton’s blog landed on the 2013 NY Times Bestseller list and stayed there for 45 weeks. A graphic work with similar
ambitions is Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York (Chronicle Books $24.95), in which the artist draws people eating at Taco Bell, admiring paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, and sleeping on the subway. Says New York Magazine, “Thumb through a copy to find sketches and scrawled captions of New Yorkers waiting in line, subway riders, famous faces, and, if you’ve been to New York City in the last seven years, maybe even yourself.” Another book on New York, an all but inevitable subject during the holiday season, is Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks (Monicelli Press $50), which could be an companion volume to Writing America, with essays from prominent New York figures, preservationists, and architects, and imagery by architectural photographer Iwan Baan.
THE EDGE OF EXILE Ai Weiwei would be a human subject of great interest even if he were not also an artist, designer, architect, author, publisher, curator, and dissident. He and his family were exiled to a remote region of China for 16 years. Following the death of Chairman Mao, he studied his craft in Beijing and New York. With works that touch on topics such as imprisonment, borders, and disaster, he has often found himself in conflict with the Chinese authorities. Ai Weiwei (Royal Academy $75) is published to coincide with this fall’s major exhibition at the Royal Academy in London—the largest showing of his work to date. Edited by Tim Marlow, John Tancock, Daniel Rosbottom, and Adrian Locke, the volume
includes installations and artworks specially created for the exhibition, an interview with Ai Weiwei by Tim Marlow, and contributions from a team of scholars.
DÜRER’S DOG I keep coming back to Dürer’s drawing, A Dog Resting. While the images of people in Drawings in Silver and Gold are dressed in the fashion or habit of the period, Dürer’s dog could be sitting by a Christmas hearth in 2015 or 1315. Its dignity is for the ages, beyond human notions of giving and receiving elegant books for special occasions. In his Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne, who was born thirteen years after the date assigned to Dürer’s dog, considers “presumption ...our natural and original disease. The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest,” for he “withdraws and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures, cuts out the shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and distributes to them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit. How does he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal motions of animals?—from what comparison betwixt them and us does he conclude the stupidity he attributes to them? When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin or to refuse, she also has hers.” And so we humans mutually divert one another with our gifts and our occasions and our displays.
S T O N E H A R B O R ’ S O N LY Y E A R - R O U N D , L U X U R Y B O U T I Q U E H O T E L
Stone Harbor, NJ | 609.368.0100 | reedsatshelterhaven.com
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Urban Agenda
Shop Urban/ Suburban Gifts
Besame Cosmetics Lipstick in Cherry Red 1935, $22; Sephora, The Mall at Short Hills, Short Hills, NJ www.shopshorthills.com
Ross Simon Coral Evil Eye Bracelet, $45; Sidney Thomas Jewelry Store, The Mall at Short Hills, Short Hills, NJ www.shopshorthills.com
Rebecca Puig ‘Every Day I Love You’ Small Framed Quote, Price Upon Request; The Farmhouse Store, Westfield, NJ 908.654.0444
Great Notch Artisan Distillery Moonshine, Dry Gin, and Vodka, Prices Vary; Great Notch Distillery, Wycoff, NJ 551.427.6674
Alo Goddess Ribbed Legging, $94; South Moon Under, Tice’s Corner, Woodcliff Lake, NJ www. southmoonunder.com
Poco Dolce Chocolate 3-Pack Bittersweet Tiles Gift Pack, $60; Gallery of Bliss, Basking Ridge, NJ 908.696.1088
Patagonia Women’s Downtown Loft Jacket, $279; The Outdoor Store, Montclair, NJ www.outdoornj.com
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PRODUCT SELECTION BY TAYLOR SMITH
Giuseppe Zanotti Crocodile-Embossed High-Top Sneaker, $695; Neiman Marcus, The Mall at Short Hills, Short Hills, NJ www.shopshorthills.com
HOLIDAY 2015
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SHOP SUBURBAN GIFTS Rifle Paper Co. Leopard Notebook Set, Garance Dore Collection, $15; Cambridge Street Papers, Madison, NJ www. cambridgestreetpapers.com
Cle de Peau Beaute Limited Edition Nail Lacquer Trio in Bal Masque, $75; Neiman Marcus, Garden State Plaza, Paramus, NJ www.westfield.com/ gardenstateplaza
Calypso St. Barth Kefia Fox Trimmed Scarf, $595; Calypso St. Barth, The Mall at Short Hills, Short Hills, NJ www. shopshorthills.com
Hermes Heure H Watch, Price Upon Request; The Timepiece Collection, Englewood, NJ 877.678.8463
Victoria Beckham Aviator Style Gold-Tone Mirrored Sunglasses, Price Upon Request; Neiman Marcus, Garden State Plaza, Paramus, NJ
PRODUCT SELECTION BY TAYLOR SMITH
Alexander McQueen Padlock Mini Studded Leather Shoulder Bag, Price Upon Request; Neiman Marcus, The Mall at Short Hills, Short Hills, NJ www.shopshorthills.com
Yanina & Company Black and White Diamond Cluster Ring, Price Upon Request; Yanina & Company, Cedar Grove, NJ www. yanina-co.com
Peloton Cycle Bike, $1,995; Peloton Boutique, Garden State Plaza, Paramus, NJ www.westfield.com/gardenstateplaza HOLIDAY 2015
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SHOP URBAN GIFTS
The Onyx Athena Earring, Castor & Pollux, $588; castorandpolluxstore.com
Turquoise and Black Diamond Fringe Ring, Mociun, $3,454; store.mociun.com
Prismatic Rope Leash, Adjustable, Found My Animal, $64; foundmyanimal.com
Signature Strip Bone-China Mug, Paul Smith for Thomas Goode, $115; paulsmith.co.uk
The Abas Wallet for Castor & Pollux, Castor & Pollux, $95; castorandpolluxstore.com
BeoPlay H2, BeoPlay, $199; bang-olufsen.com
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6 Piece Macaron Box, Francois Payard, $16; payard.com
Multi-Color Canvas Backpack for Kids, STATE, $55; teichdesign.com
PRODUCT SELECTION BY SARAH EMILY GILBERT
Art of the 20th Century, TASCHEN, $39.99; taschen.com
HOLIDAY 2015
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PRODUCT SELECTION BY SARAH EMILY GILBERT
SHOP URBAN GIFTS
Chai Gift Set, Bellocq Tea Atelier, $75; bellocq.com
Black Eau De Toilette, Commes Des Garcons Play, $110; stevealan.com
Wool Felt Pom Pom Baseball Cap, Tracy Watts, $165; scoopnyc.com
Cedarwood & Vanilla Glycerin Soap, Wary Meyers, $15; adhocnyc.com
Jean Postal Clutch, Edie Parker, $1,295; fivestoryny.com
Marled Lines Socks, Marcomonde, $35; otteny.com
Men’s Hand Sewn High Leather Cuoio, FEIT, $580; feitdirect.com
Push Toy Taxi Yellow, Manny and Simon, $36; minijake.com
Terra-Time Watch, PROJECTS, $145; acgears.com
Ash Wireless Double Speaker, Vers, $210; teichdesign.com
Pilgrim’s Classic Hair and Beard Tonic, Brooklyn Grooming, $29; brooklyngrooming.com
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CALENDAR HIGHLIGHTS November
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November
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December
New York Knicks vs. Miami Heat at Madison Square Garden. www.thegarden. com
Enjoy cookies and cocoa with Santa at the Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit, NJ. www.reeves-reedarboretum.org
Grand Central Holiday Fair at Grand Central Terminal (through December 24). www.grandcentralterminal.com
George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at the David H. Koch Theater (through January 3). www.newyorkcitytheatre.com
Bring your appetite and your walking shoes to Mangia Hoboken, a behindthe-scenes food tour of Hoboken’s most authentic Italian restuarants (tour repeats weekly). www.hobokenfoodtour.com
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Brooklyn Holiday Bazaar at 501 Union Street in Brooklyn (also on November 29). www.brooklynholidaybazaar.com Singer-songwriter Carly Simon reads from and signs copies of her new memoir, Boys in the Trees at Barnes & Noble in Union Square. www.barnesandnoble.com
December
Hanukkah Menorah Lighting at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. www. chabadparkslope.com 2015 Park Avenue Tree Lighting at Park Avenue and 91st Street. www. fundforparkavenue.org
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NOVEMBER
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December
8
The 40th Annual Children’s Holiday Party at the Museum of the City of New York. www.mcny.org
December
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ELF The Musical at The Theater at Madison Square Garden (through December 27). www.theateratmsg.com
December
11
Progressive International Motorcycle Show at the Javits Center (through December 13). www.motorcycleshow.com Christmas With The Celts, a theatrical mix of music, vocals, Irish dance, and humor at the Newton Theatre in Newton, NJ. www.thenewtowntheatre.com
Photo © Paul Kolnik
Pilobolus and NYU Skirball present the North American premiere of “Shadowland,” a mix of shadow theater, dance, circus, and concert (through December 6). www.nyuskirball.org
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December
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November
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Dora & Diego: Let’s Explore exhibit at The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City (through January 24). www.lsc.org
November
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Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from Central Park West & W. 77th St. to Seventh Ave. and W. 34th Street. www. social.macys.com
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Radio City Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall (through January 3). www.radiocitychristmas.com
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UNICEF Snowflake Ball at Cipriani Wall Street. Orlando Bloom will be recognized with the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award and PINK will perform. www.unicefsnowflake.org
December
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Rocker Grace Potter performs at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, NJ. www.bergenpac.org
December
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Comedian Jerry Seinfeld performs at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. www.njpac.org
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December
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January
Kenny G – The Holiday Show at The Wellmont Theatre in Montclair, NJ. www. thewellmonttheater.com
December
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January
Something Merry This Way Comes at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Madison. www.shakespearenj.org
December
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New York Philharmonic performs Handel’s Messiah at Lincoln Center (through December 19). www.nyphil.org
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January
Hoda Kotb and Andy Cohen in conversation at the 92nd Street Y. www.92y.org
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Art Exhibitions:
Holistic health advocate and best selling author Deepak Chopra leads a discussion on “The Future of Wellbeing” at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown, NJ. www. mayoarts.org
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Lin-Manuel Miranda stars in the popular hip hop musical Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre (through Spring 2016). www.broadway.com
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January
“Girolamo dai Libri and Veronese Art of the Sixteenth Century”; The Metropolitan Museum of Art “Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action”; The Frick Collection “Frank Stella: A Retrospective”; Whitney Museum of American Art
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62nd Annual Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory. Shop for art and decorative objects dating from antiquity through the 1960s, all vetted for authenticity (through January 31). www. winterantiquesshow.com
“Kandinsky Gallery”; Guggenheim Museum “The Secret World Inside You”; American Museum of Natural History “Pixar: The Design of Story”; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum “Fairy Tale Fashion”; The Museum at FIT “The Television Project: Picturing a People”; The Jewish Museum
Seussical The Musical at The Summit Playhouse in Summit, NJ (through December 20). www. thesummitplayhouse.org
“Sacred Spaces”; Rubin Museum
Theatre Performances:
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Hamilton; Richard Rodgers Theatre The Book of Mormon; Eugene O’Neill Theatre An American in Paris; Palace Theatre School of Rock – The Musical; Winter Garden Theatre Fiddler on the Roof; Broadway Theatre Therese Raquin; Studio 54 Old Times; American Airlines Theatre Fool For Love; Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
12/6
The Gin Game; John Golden Theatre Sylvia; Cort Theatre
December
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Winter Solstice Celebration at Cathedral of St. John the Divine (through December 19). www.paulwinter.com
December
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New Year’s Eve in Times Square. www. timessquarenyc.org
January
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Last day to view the “Eric Carle: Animals and Friends” exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ. www. montclairartmuseum.org
January
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New Jersey Devils vs. Boston Bruins at the Prudential Center in Newark. www. prucenter.com August Wilson’s ten-cycle play The Piano Lesson opens at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ (through February 7). www.mccarter.org
January
January
The Trisha Brown Dance Company performs at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). www.bam.org
January
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Dancing with the Stars Live! at Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ. www. countbasietheatre.org
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Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky stars in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda at the Metropolitan Opera (through February 20). www.metopera.org
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PHOTO COURTESY OF BALTUSROL GOLF CLUB
Baltusrol Golf Club
C untry Club Chefs: A Legacy of Fine Dining PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS ROBERT CLARKE For this year’s Holiday Chef Series, Urban Agenda Magazine wanted to spotlight the Executive Chefs from some of New Jersey’s best-known country clubs and golf clubs. Synonymous with fine dining and a rich heritage of championship golf, these chefs are used to cooking for weddings, special events, and momentous holiday occasions. Each chef has provided a sample of the holiday menu offerings at a particular club. Thoughtfully prepared and perfected for the season, these menus are cause for celebration.
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Chef
Ed Stone
Baltusrol Golf Club
Springfield Township, NJ
Annual Christmas Dinner Dance Dinner Menu:
Slow Roasted Chilean Sea Bass Nantucket Bay scallops, shiitake mushroom, roasted peppers, leek and watercress sauce Prime Beef Tenderloin
lobster potato purée, apple wood smoked bacon, brussels sprouts, carrots, demi glace
Chocolate Pistachio Crémeux
red velvet sponge, white and dark chocolate mousse,
black raspberry coulis
Coffees and Teas Served
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Chef
Chris Carpenter
Cherry Valley Country Club Skillman, NJ
Starters:
Asian Calamari
Wild Mushroom Flatbread Salads:
360 Salad
Greek Salad Large Plates:
Crusted Angus New York Strip Steak
Pecan Crusted Rack of Lamb Thai Red Snapper
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Chef
Mark Silverman Bedens Brook Club Skillman, NJ
Soups/Salad:
Vichyssoise/Butternut Squash Puree Bedens Brook Caesar Salad
Mesclun, Pear, Goat Cheese,
Dried Cherries, Toasted Walnuts, Balsamic Vinaigrette Entrees:
Beef Tournedos, Gorgonzola, Shiitake Mushroom
Braised Beef Short Rib
Prime Cut N.Y. Sirloin Steak
Herb Roasted Norwegian Salmon Pan Seared Dayboat Sea Scallops Roasted Long Island Duck, Orange Glaze
House Made Desserts:
Apple Crisp With Vanilla Ice Cream Pumpkin Cupcake
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Chef
John Zaren
The Ridge at Back Brook Ringoes, NJ
Soups/Salad:
Wild Mushroom and Leek Soup drizzled with a roasted garlic and thyme crema
Red Grapefruit, Shaved Fennel and Gold Beet Salad Entrees:
Coee-dusted Filet Mignon
with Frangelico demi-glace Potato-Parsnip Pierogies tossed with sage butter
Roasted Brussel Sprouts and Cranberries
House Made Desserts:
Warm Pear Tart with
an almond Chantilly cream
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He was America’s most eligible bachelor. She was an ambassador’s daughter born to privilege. Tall, slim and boyishly handsome, he swept her off her feet and into the clouds. Literally. Before long they were flying together, exploring together. They were golden and the tabloi ds couldn’t get enough of them. But when tragedy struck and the paparazzi became an intrusive burden on their personal lives, they fled to Europe in search of peace. It was bad timing to say the least. Europe in the 1930s was readying for war. The expert aviator was drawn into a mire from which he would never fully emerge.
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Associated Press Keystone- France / Contributor
(LEFT) Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh leaving Roosevelt Field, Long Island, 1929. (ABOVE) Charles Lindbergh with the Spirit of St. Louis 1927.
nne Mo Morrow met Charles Lindbergh just seven months after the young aviator had la landed at Le Bourget airfield near Paris at the end of his astonishing 1927 non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic. He was the most famous person on the planet, the first modern superstar, an overnight celebrity welcomed into the most exalted of circles. She was a top Smith College student visiting her parents in Mexico, where her father, Dwight Whitney Morrow, a former partner at J.P. Morgan & Co., was U.S. Ambassador. Lindbergh was on a goodwill tour. After just four dates they were engaged and, following their marriage on May 27, 1929, they took to the air together, Anne having quickly learned to fly and act as radio-operator. A formidable team, they opened up new routes for commercial airlines. The bride was small, shy, sensitive, and bookish—an award-winning college graduate from a warm loving family. The groom was tall, deeply reserved, and independent—an outdoorsman from the mid-West whose parents had led separate lives; he grew up a lonely child and dropped out of college to become a pilot. “Unlike most brides-to-be, it was I who was congratulated, not he,” said Anne at the time of their engagement. “He opened the door to ‘real life’ and although it frightened me, it also beckoned. I had to go.” Anne would develop into a bestselling author and one of the 20th century’s leading feminist voices. As a woman, wife and mother of five, she sought a philosophy that would embrace both new and traditional roles for women. Charles would go on to make contributions to
medical research, rocketry, anthropology, and conservation. In the heyday of tabloid journalism, crime syndicates, police corruption, poverty and desperation, their lives collided with their times to disastrous effect more than once and at great personal cost. Their story encompasses the highs and lows of 20th century history, from the early days of aviation to the first moon walk, from a time when the forward push of scientific progress was unquestioned to a time when technology’s impact on man and on the natural world was acknowledged as not all good. The couple was hounded by the press, first for their accomplishments and then for the headline –capturing kidnapping and death of their toddler son. The crime and subsequent trial kept them in the public eye. And even though they fled to Europe to escape media attention, Charles Lindbergh’s fascination with Hitler’s Germany and his role in the isolationist America First movement before the nation’s entry into World War II ensured their place on the front page.
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Couple of an Age at Morven Museum & Garden tells their story anew in a year-long exhibition that not only relates the infamous kidnapping of their firstborn, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. and the subsequent “Trial of the Century” in the Flemington, New Jersey, court house; it yields a portrait of the Lindbergh’s 45-year marriage. The exhibition expands both of their received images beyond the early years to show them raising five more children and supporting each other as writers. Nor does the exhibition shy away from Lindbergh’s fascination with the Third Reich and the run-ins with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over his isolationist stance during the run up to the Second World War. The story of the Spirit of St. Louis is present here, but so is Anne’s Gift from the Sea and Lindbergh as the “tree hugger” he became in later life. Anne’s affair with physician Dana W. Atchley, whom she first met in 1946 when she suffered a miscarriage, is acknowledged, as is the 2003 revelation of Lindbergh’s secret life in Germany and the three families he kept there.
COUPLE OF AN AGE
CHARLES A. LINDBERGH
There have been numerous exhibitions, books, documentaries and magazine articles on Charles A. Lindbergh and his accomplishments. The Lindbergh kidnapping is a familiar trope in the cultural imagination. But while many biographers have been drawn to Charles A. Lindbergh and to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, few have focused on their lifelong partnership that survived tragedy, loss, and controversy.
Born of independent Swedes, Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974) was raised with a frontier mentality, driven, stubborn, forthright and earnest. His father Charles August Lindbergh (1859-1924) was a lawyer known for his “straightforward, uncompromising honesty.” As Congressman for Minnesota (1907-1917), he strenuously campaigned against America’s entry into World War I,
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believing that “the trouble with war is that it kills off the best men a country has.” Lindbergh would express similar views with respect to World War II. Lindbergh’s maternal grandfather, Charles H. Land (1847-1919), “the father of porcelain dentistry,” taught his grandson that “Science is the key to all mystery.” Lindbergh would later channel grandfather’s teachings into independent studies in biology and work with the pioneering French-born surgeon Alexis Carrel, the first surgeon to win a Nobel Prize (in 1912). With Carrel, Lindbergh developed the precursor to an artificial heart, The Lindbergh Pump, in 1935, and co-wrote the 1937 bestseller, The Culture of Organs. Their collaboration helped pave the way for later successful organ transplants.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Reeve, born in 1945, became accomplished writers. Originally overshadowed by her husband’s fame, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, found her voice as a poet and diarist. Her first book, North to the Orient, published in 1935, won a National Book Award and was the top New York Times 1936 nonfiction bestseller. Her second book, Listen! The Wind, won the same award in 1938; her War Without and War Within, the last of her published diaries, won the Christopher Award. Among her thirteen other titles: The Steep Ascent; The Unicorn and Other Poem; Earth Shine; Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead; and The Flower and the Nettle. Anne struck a chord with women everywhere with a slim volume published in 1955 that became a classic of its genre. In Gift from the Sea, she wrote about youth, age, love, marriage, friendship and the need for women to carve out spiritually nourishing time for themselves. The book was on The New York Times bestseller list for two years; a fiftieth anniversary edition was published in 2005 with a foreword by the Lindberghs’ youngest daughter, Reeve.
Lindbergh picture collection, 1860-1980 (inclusive). Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University
After her marriage, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) became the first women in America to earn a first-class glider pilot’s license. In 1934, she was the first woman to win the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal for serving
as radio operator and copilot to her husband Charles on two flights totaling 40,000 miles and spanning five continents. Charles won the same medal in 1927 for his transatlantic flight. She set a new long-distance wireless communications record of 3,000 miles, for which she received the female Harmon Trophy and the Veteran Wireless Operators Association Gold Medal, the first woman to do so. She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1979 and the International Women in Aviation Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1999. Anne was seven months pregnant with her first child in 1930 when she broke the transcontinental speed record by 3 hours, flying as co-pilot and radio-operator with Charles in a Lockheed Sirius low-wing monoplane from Los Angeles to New York in 14 hours and 45 minutes. She was pregnant with her second child at the time of their firstborn son’s kidnapping. After the loss of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the Lindberghs went on to have five more children: Jon, born in 1932, became a marine biologist; Land, born in 1937, became a cattle rancher; Scott, born in 1942, became a zoologist; Anne (1940-1993) and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh at Long Barn, England.
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Lindbergh picture collection, 1860-1980 (inclusive). Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University
Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. at his first birthday party. 1931.
Charles A. Lindbergh playing with son Jon, Long Barn, England, May 1937.
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By the time the kidnapper was found guilty and sent to the electric chair in 1935, the Lindberghs had been dogged by sensation-hungry reporters and besieged by public hysteria, demands for money and kidnapping threats. A photographer broke into the Trenton morgue and snapped a picture of the Lindbergh baby’s badly decomposed corpse; copies sold for five dollars each. And even though their son’s body was identified by family members and authorities,
hundreds of individuals claiming to be the Lindbergh Baby contacted the Lindberghs over the decades. To escape the barrage, the Lindberghs moved to Europe in late December 1935. They first rented Long Barn, a cottage in Kent, belonging to Dwight Morrow’s biographer Harold Nicolson and his wife Vita Sackville West and then moved to Illiec, a tiny island off the coast of Brittanny. The British press left them alone as they made their way into British society, attending dinners as Lady Astor’s guests at Cliveden, mingling with
the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, and attending a ball at Buckingham Palace at the request of Queen Elizabeth II. An invitation from the military attaché to the American Embassy in Berlin, to report on the state of Germany’s aviation, would ultimately shatter the Lindberghs’ quiet idyll. The world-famous aviator was given unprecedented opportunities to view Germany’s advances in technology and preparations for war. He was entranced by what he observed of Hitler’s Third Reich and warned the United States of Germany’s insuperable strength in an impending European war. What he saw fueled his view that America should stay out of it. On his return to the United States, he became the leading spokesman for the American isolationist movement and the controversial organization America First. Lindbergh believed Nazi Germany to be less of a threat to world peace than Communist Russia. But in the run up to the War, with America divided between isolationists and interventionists, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was struggling to marshal support for Churchill’s Britain and did not appreciate America’s number one hero championing the isolationist cause. While her husband locked horns with Roosevelt, Anne, pregnant again, struggled to reconcile her husband’s views with those of her family and friends. In a small book, hurried into press in the fall of 1940, she stated her belief that Europe was undergoing a period of revolutionary change with totalitarian regimes such as Nazism appearing as a “scum” on top of an inexorable “wave of the future.” Her forty-one page volume of that title quickly became the most despised book in America. Seen as defeatist, it served to further erode the Lindbergh reputation. “I am now the bubonic plague among writers and C. is the anti-Christ!” she confided to her diary. “My marriage has stretched me out of my world, changed me so it is no longer possible to change back.” By December 7, 1941, many Americans regarded their former hero as an anti-Semite, pro-Nazi traitor. Anne later regretted writing The Wave of the Future. “I didn’t have the right to write that because I didn’t know enough,” she told one interviewer. Her husband, however, stubbornly refused to admit any mistake in judgment. In 1970, he published The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, edited to remove anti-Semitic statements and claiming that he had championed non-interventionism to preserve civilization. He equated the Nazi’s calculated genocide with the warring activities of other nations, including the United States, on the ground that all war deaths are atrocities. During his lifetime, Lindbergh saw the science and technology he worshipped in his youth contribute to the ruin of the natural world he loved; he came to deplore the march of technology and civilization. In later years, he turned from aviation and technology toward more philosophical inquiries about the nature of man. He spent time with the Masai tribe in Africa and battled to save whales off the coasts of Japan and Peru and other endangered species. “If I had to choose,” he said shortly before he died, “I’d rather have birds than airplanes.” Lindbergh traveled constantly, often missing
Lindbergh picture collection, 1860-1980 (inclusive). Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University
INTERTWINED LIVES
Charles A. Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh a few weeks after their marriage in 1929.
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Christmas and other celebrations with Anne and the children. Those absences would take on a startling significance some thirty years after his death when it was revealed that he had other families besides his American one.
TRUTH WILL OUT
Lindbergh picture collection, 1860-1980 (inclusive). Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University
In 2003, just shy of thirty years after Lindbergh’s death and two years after Anne’s, it came to light that Lindbergh had led a double life from 1957 until his death in 1974. He fathered seven children by three German women, two of them sisters more than twenty years his junior (hatmaker Brigitte Hesshaimer and her younger sister Marietta; and Valeska, the private secretary who helped him with his business affairs in Germany and whose last name has never been revealed publicly). He provided homes for his other families in Germany and Switzerland and visited them regularly, taking enormous care that his alter ego remain secret, his European children were told that their father was a famous American writer named Careu Kent who was on a secret mission they must never divulge. The children—two sons and a daugher by Brigitte, two sons by Marietta, and a son and a daughter by Valeska—were born between 1958 and 1967. Brigitte’s children, Astrid, Dyrk and David, discovered their father’s true identity and made it public after their mother’s death. DNA analysis later confirmed their claims. They described Lindbergh’s visits about four times a year; he made them pancakes and took them to the park. “We were always very happy when he came,” said one son. “He really gave us the feeling he was there for us.” The disclosure came as a shock to Lindbergh’s American children. “Being in my family is like a melodrama sometimes, with a storyline that is simultaneously powerfully compelling and utterly baffling,” noted Reeve Lindbergh. In her 1999 memoir, Under a Wing, Reeve Lindbergh described her parents. “In some ways my parents were very different. But I have always believed it was their similarities rather than their differences that brought them together and kept them together for so many years: certain shared independencies of character and of spirit that each knew in himself or herself from earliest childhood, and recognized instinctively, immediately, in the other when they first met; certain qualities of solitude and stamina, of reflection and determination.” U Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Couple of an Age will run at Morven Museum & Garden through October 23, 2016. For more information, visit www.morven.org.
FURTHER READING A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh, Berkeley Books, 1998 Reeve Lindbergh, Under a Wing, Delta, 1999 Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, Random House, New York, 2013
Ticker tape parade honoring Charles A. Lindbergh. New York City. June 13, 1927.
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Violetta in “La Traviata” at Royal Opera House, Photo by Neil Gillespie
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Breakout: Opera Singer Ailyn Pérez “When I look back at my life, it almost seems like I was destined to become an opera singer.” by taylor smith
Soprano Ailyn Pérez made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Micaela in Carmen. She won both the 15th Annual Plácido Domingo Award and the 2012 Richard Tucker Award, making her the only Hispanic recipient in the award’s 35-year history.
photo courtesy of ailyn perez
A
ilyn Pérez will return to The Met stage in Spring 2016 as Musetta in Zeffirelli’s La Boheme. This summer, she will perform as Juliette in The Santa Fe Opera Festival’s production of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliette. Other recent performances include Jake Heggie’s Great Scott at The Dallas Opera and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at The Houston Grand Opera. Pérez studied Vocal Performance at Indiana University in Bloomington and received her Artist Diploma from The Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. “I would say the first four years spent at Indiana were completely mind blowing to me in terms of how much repertoire and different niches of music one could dedicate their life’s work to. It was a paradise of so many talented musicians interested in not only completing the course work, but also in working creatively and seeking performance opportunities every week.” Growing up bilingual and bicultural also aided in Pérez’s musical training. “I grew up speaking Spanish at home and was comfortable going back and forth between English and Spanish. In a way, I believe that my language background has played a major part in how I learn music.” “I grew up listening to my parents record collection which ranged from popular American music and Romantic Spanish music, to Mariachi, and traditional folkloric Mexican music and dance,” she adds. In light of all of her success, Pérez never forgets to thank the influence and support of her own family. “My family is there for me in a heartbeat. I am so grateful that my cousins, aunts, uncles, godparents, neighbors, family and friends have frequently driven more than 4 hours to hear me sing.” The process of preparing for an operatic role is intensive and timeconsuming. “We are expected to arrive on the first day of rehearsal with our role completely memorized and ready to stage.” Pérez is currently learning Russian for her role as Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Props and costuming can also pose a challenge. “Walking around furniture without knocking things over in a petticoat is something to be learned and practiced.” Most performance days consist of two six-hour time blocks with a piano rehearsal in between. “Time rehearsing onstage is pretty expensive and difficult to organize due to availability while productions are playing every evening. So usually, there is a room where the dimensions are
marked with different colored tape on the floor corresponding to the acts and scenes of the opera.” When asked to pick a favorite character that she has played, Pérez says, “Every role has its very own life, however I definitely gravitate to the tragic heroines in Italian opera. I would say my favorite role to sing has been Violetta in La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi. It’s an incredibly satisfying role to play for its beauty and dramatic intensity.” Significantly, each singer brings their own element of artistic interpretation to the role. “Singing and performing allows you to interpret each musical line through phrasing, recreating and relating to the character. Opera is a wonderful place to pour your heart into and gain perspective on the human condition. I think that is what I love most about being an opera singer, that it allows me to use my life experience in my artistry.”
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URBAN AGENDA New York City
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BASEBALL
& BR
KLYN BY MORT
ZACHTER
Baseball stadium Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1913 to 1957. It was located in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York.
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The Brooklyn Dodgers celebrate after clinching the 1958 National League Pennant.
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ixty years ago this month, the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees to win their first and only World Series. Less than two years later, the Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles. For Brooklyn, the loss was immeasurable. The Dodgers were a source of civic pride—a final link to a time, before 1898, when Brooklyn was an independent city. Especially when it came to baseball, Brooklyn had always been cutting-edge, as well as quirky. In 1862, the first enclosed baseball field ever built, the Union Grounds, opened in Williamsburg. A Brooklyn writer, Henry Chadwick, invented the box score. A Brooklyn pitcher, Candy Cummings, threw the first curve. A Brooklyn player, Dickey Pierce, laid down the first bunt. A Brooklyn manager, Wilbert Robinson, was the first, and probably the only person to try catching a grapefruit dropped from an airplane. And a courageous Brooklyn player, Jackie Robinson, became the first black man to play in the major leagues in the 20th century. The Dodgers were also the first team to travel by plane, and in 1958 they
flew off to California never to return. But they left behind a memorable history which began in the 19th century, when the Bridegrooms, a predecessor team to the Dodgers played at Washington Park, a wooden structure located near the Gowanus Canal. There, in 1912, legendary Yankee manager Casey Stengel began his playing career as a Brooklyn outfielder. Stengel never forgot the stench emanating from the Gowanus. “The mosquitos,” Stengel noted, “was something fierce.” In 1913, the Dodgers moved to Ebbets Field, where, in 1939, a sweet-talking southerner named Red Barber became the Dodgers’ radio announcer. With his mellifluous voice and his idiosyncratic vernacular, Barber brought Dodgers games alive: fly balls were caught like an easy can of corn; fights between the Dodgers and their opponents were rhubarbs; and blow-outs produced victories sewn up in a croaker sack. Ebbets Field never sat more than 35,000, but millions of fans listened to Barber on the radio. In the summer, before air conditioning, you could walk for blocks in Bay Ridge, Coney Island, or Flatbush and listen to a Dodgers game through the open windows without missing a pitch.
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Long before radios existed, Charley Ebbets was the central figure in the history of Brooklyn baseball. Ebbets was one of the first employees of the team that began playing at Washington Park in 1883 and that would eventually become the Dodgers. He started as ticket seller, clerk, and scorecard salesman and ended up owning the team. Ebbets’ love for Brooklyn baseball transcended profits. “A man shouldn’t get in this business,” Ebbets once said, “if he’s solely interested in receipts.” Ebbets also had a sense of humor. When asked by a Brooklyn Eagle reporter to define his responsibilities as team President, Ebbets said, “The first is to dodge people who want passes to baseball games. The next is to look pleasant and say agreeable things when I am cornered by such persons that I’ve been unable to dodge. And the third is to restrain myself from giving the requested passes. The rest of my duties are merely perfunctory. They give me no trouble whatever.” Whatever Ebbets did, it worked. Brooklyn won the National League pennant in 1899 and 1900. The press deemed the team so good, they stopped calling them the Bridegrooms and renamed them the Superbas. Later, when the team’s manager, Ned Hanlon, attempted to gain financial control of the team and move them to Baltimore, Ebbets refused to consider taking the team out of Brooklyn. Instead, he bought out Hanlon. A few years later, Ebbets began buying land in an area of Brooklyn bound by Bedford Avenue, Cedar Place, Montgomery Place, and Sullivan Place to build a new steel-reinforced concrete stadium. Ebbets had to sell half his interest in the team to complete the project. After the Dodgers began playing at Ebbets Field, his players rewarded Ebbets with pennants in 1916 and 1920. But Ebbets died in 1925, and by the mid-1930s, with no one person owning a majority interest in the team, the rudderless Dodgers were bankrupt and the brunt of New York Giants manager Bill Terry’s sarcastic comment, “Is Brooklyn still in the league?” If Ebbets helped Brooklyn baseball move into the 20th century, Branch Rickey guided the team back to consistent success in the years following World War II. As general manager, Rickey was a brilliant innovator, as well as a man with a strong will. His players called him the Mahatma (after Mahatma Gandhi), “an incredible mix of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father.”
Hall of Famer Leo Ernest Durocher.
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But Rickey was a man at cross-purposes. His compensation as Dodgers general manager was tied into the team’s profitability. The less Rickey paid his players, the more money he made. “The only way to get the best of Rickey,” Casey Stengel once said, “is to listen to him talk for three hours, then when he asked, ‘Is it a deal? Yell, ‘No’ and walk out.” Despite his penny-pinching, Rickey was at the forefront of the integration of major league baseball. The Mahatma knew that racially mixed Brooklyn was the right venue for his plan to integrate major league baseball, which he did by signing Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, two of the Negro Leagues’ best players. In his induction speech at the baseball Hall of Fame, Jackie Robinson said the honor “could never have happened without three people—Branch Rickey, who was like a father to me; my wife, and my mother.”
“
…a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the quasi. —BRANCH RICKEY
”
Another memorable figure in Brooklyn baseball history was Leo Durocher who was the team’s manager when Branch Rickey joined the Dodgers in 1943. Durocher would do anything to win. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I never had a boss call me upstairs so that he could congratulate me for losing like a gentleman. ‘How you play the game’ is for college boys. When you’re playing for money, winning is the only thing that matters. Show me a good loser…and I’ll show you an idiot.”
Stengel wearing sunglasses while playing outfield for the Dodgers, ca. 1915.
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Brooklyn Dodgers Chris Van Cuyk, Chuck Dressen, Bobby Morgan and George Shuba set record with 15 runs in first inning vs. Cincinnati Reds on May 21, 1952.
To win, Durocher schooled his pitchers in the art of throwing at opposition batters, not just to back them off the plate, but to hit them. When one opposition manager screamed at Durocher after a Brooklyn pitcher hit his player in the wrist, Durocher screamed right back, “What are you crying about? It’s lucky it didn’t hit him in the head.” Durocher once assaulted a fan named John Christian, who had been heckling him. After a security guard brought Christian behind the stands at Ebbets Field, Durocher hit him with a blackjack. Christian was hospitalized with a broken jaw and Durocher was charged with second-degree assault. Durocher testified that Christian’s broken jaw was the result of his slipping and falling down. A loyal but misguided, Brooklyn jury acquitted Durocher. Appropriately, Durocher is best remembered for saying, “Nice guys finish last.” When I was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, Gil Hodges was the only Dodgers star player who still called Brooklyn home. He lived on Bedford Avenue just a few blocks from where I grew up. You could see him buying groceries on Nostrand Avenue or picking up his kids at Our Lady Help of Christians parochial school at Avenue M. During his playing career, Hodges was a terrific fielding first baseman, an outstanding power hitter, but also a nice guy, the type Durocher assumed would finish last. Hodges played an integral part not only in Brooklyn’s 1955 World Series victory and also in the 1959 World Series, the first won by the Los Angeles Dodgers. When Hodges died in 1972, he left a rich legacy to baseball and to Brooklyn. In May of 1963, a little league ballpark opened on McDonald Avenue. It was a tiny jewel with concrete stands that could seat 1,250, a clubhouse with showers, and a playing field with sprinklers and a drainage system. Hodges was instrumental in getting it built. “Nothing,” he wrote, “has given me the same degree of pride that I get every time I see that field.” Opening day was memorialized in a photo that appeared in in the NY Times showing an amused
Hodges reaching down to shake hands with one of the little leaguers, seven-year old Nicky Lipariti. Nicky stares up at Hodges open-mouthed, revealing several missing teeth. Decades later, when Lipariti grew up and had his own family, his son Ciro also played his little league ball there. Back then the sign overlooking the ballpark still read “Gil Hodges Field.” Today, that sign is gone, replaced with a sign advertising the field’s current sponsors. But unlike the Union Grounds, Washington Park, or Ebbets Field, that little league park remains. And on warm summer days, beneath the roar and clatter of the F train on the elevated subway line above McDonald Avenue, you can still hear the sound of children playing baseball. Indeed, Brooklyn has long been as a haven for amateur baseball. In 1868, the Parade Grounds, a 40-acre plot adjacent to Prospect Park, was set-aside as a public area for Civil War Veterans to conduct military exercises. Afterwards, it became a place for recreational pursuits. By the end of the 19th century, baseball was the sport most often played there. “It is a glorious sight to see the hundreds of young men and boys enjoying themselves to their hearts content as they do at the Prospect Park Parade Grounds every afternoon during the summer,” wrote Henry Chadwick. Playing at one of the 13 diamonds at the Parade Grounds became a right of passage for talented baseball players growing up in Brooklyn. In the 1950s, Sandy Koufax and Joe Torre played there. But players of all ages utilized the Parade Grounds. As Vincent “Cookie” Lorence, the director of the Parade Grounds League for over 60 years, was fond of saying, “They come to us as kids and stay with us until their wives tell them to quit.” The Dodgers are gone, but the Brooklyn Cyclones, the class A minor league affiliate of the Mets, now play their home games in Coney Island. And when you walk into their ballpark on Surf Avenue, you pass a statue depicting Pee Wee Reese, a white man from Kentucky, embracing his Dodgers’ teammate Jackie Robinson, a symbol of humanity for future generations of Brooklyn residents. U
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BY ANNE LEVIN
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IMAGE COURTESY OF YELP (MATT E.) IMAGES COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
t New York Old Iron in Brooklyn’s Gowanus section, under the F and G subway train tracks, rows of reclaimed clawfoot tubs and old pedestal sinks are piled end to end. Some are chipped. Some are yellowing. Others are encrusted with decades of grime. But to the homeowners and apartment dwellers who roam the cluttered aisles of this and other architectural salvage outlets in New York, New Jersey, and beyond, those blemishes are hardly a deterrent. Their nicks, dents, and age spots are seen as signs of character — especially if they fit into a design scheme that calls for styles of an earlier era rather than new furnishings made of modern materials. The stacks of old doors and mantels at Philly Provenance, the ornate chandeliers at Philadelphia Salvage, and the reclaimed beams and flooring at Recycling the Past in Barnegat all represent a growing trend in reusing and reclaiming articles from the past to furnish homes of the present. But not all salvage is vintage. At Green Demolitions’ locations throughout the tri-state area, whole
kitchens that are nearly new and completely functional sit waiting to be reclaimed. And they can represent considerable cost savings. Following is a sampling of some area architectural salvage operations. Some are new; others have been around for decades. Many have a particular area of expertise. All offer a range of items, from intricate door hardware to imposing wrought iron gates. Amighini Architectural, Jersey City: Need a mahogany entrance door for that brownstone you just purchased? How about some stained glass windows? Amighini Architectural might be your go-to place. The salvage yard, in operation since 1945, has a huge supply of doors and also sells wood paneling, restored columns, iron gates, outdoor furnishings, and much more. The company also offers rentals of how-to videos and movies for do-it-yourselfers. Find them at 246 Beacon Avenue, Jersey City. 201.222.6367 or info@amighini.net. Recycling the Past, Barnegat: This is one of the largest salvage companies around. The more than 80,000 square feet of space is home to a revolving collection of doors, windows, lumber, stone, tubs,
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Images courtesy of shutterstock.com
industrial salvage, and vintage artifacts from residences and industrial buildings. A particular niche is aircraft and marine salvage. And don’t forget to check out the huge selection of garden antiques. 381 North Main Street, Barnegat. 609.660.9790 or recyclingthepast.com. Philly Provenance in Philadelphia, subtitles Architectural Salvage.” Their unique inventory comes from some of the city’s most historic landmarks. A recent scan of the company’s website revealed pressed tin ceilings, reclaimed wood, brick, and stone, an old Horn & Hardart Retail Shop neon sign, staircases, and much more. They boast an in-house crew trained in the safe removal of valuable and reusable materials. 912 Canal Street, Philadelphia. 215.925.2002 or info@phillyprovenance.com.
itself
“Old
Soul
New York Old Iron is along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and has salvage that comes mostly from Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Everything is negotiable here, from hardware to clawfoot tubs to stained glass windows. Scrap metal and iron are the specialty, but there is much more to this yard located across from Lowe’s. You might find some old mannequins propped up among the pillars and sinks and chairs awaiting their new owners. 118 2nd Avenue, Gowanus. 917.837.3039. Hobensack & Keller in New Hope, Pa. is the place for unique antiques including iron gates, Oriental rugs, and vintage garden statuary. Local architects and designers swear by this treasure trove, which has been around since 1957 and is old-school, which means no website. Visit them at 57 Old York Road, New Hope, Pa. 215.862.2406.
Philadelphia Salvage Company’s salvage, refinishing and restoration operation spans 25,000 square feet at two locations, one of which serves as a reclaimed lumberyard. New inventory comes in every day. In addition to the furniture, flooring, shutters, sinks, lighting, doors, hardware, cabinets, and all manner of antique knick-knacks, the four-year-old company offers deconstruction and demolition services with a goal of zero waste; dipping and stripping of doors and trims, and more. There is even a “Thirsty Thursdays” event from 4-7pm each Thursday where beer and bourbon are on the house, at the main location, 542 Carpenter Lane, in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia. 215.843.3074 or philadelphiasalvage.com.
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Green Demolitions specializes in recycled, high-end kitchen and overstock items rather than architectural salvage. The nearest showroom is at 275 Route 46, West Fairfield. 862.210.8332 or greendemolitions.com.
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A WELL-DESIGNED LIFE Ralph Lauren Cannes Pendant in polished nickel; $3,000 ralphlaurenhome.com
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HOLIDAY 2015
11/12/15 12:02:44 PM
Jean-François Larrieu THE PASTEL WORKS OF
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HOLIDAY 2015
11/12/15 12:02:09 PM
Somerset Hills Holiday House Tour Sunday, December 13, 2015 • Noon to 5 PM Advance Tickets $30
Somerset Hills most celebrated house tour returns this holiday season on Sunday, December 13, 2015 from noon to 5 pm. For over a quarter of a century, the Somerset Hills Holiday House Tour, sponsored by The Historical Society of the Somerset Hills (THSSH), has been a tradition enjoyed by thousands. This one of a kind, signature event will include six distinct residences showcasing historic preservation, custom interior design, and creative holiday décor. Among those featured is a late 19th Century carriage house designed by the noted architect, Henry Janeway Hardenberg. Hardenburg designed the Plaza Hotel and the Dakota Apartments in New York City, as well as the Olcott Building in the Bernardsville Olcott Avenue Historic District. Also on the tour is a classic farmhouse style contemporary home built with eco-friendly materials, as well as a charming 1920s Tudor in Basking Ridge built with puddingstone, wonderful barge board trim and other period details. The Brick Academy, an 1809 historic landmark, will serve as the hospitality center. For more information about the tour, visit www.thssh.org. This event may not be appropriate for children under 12 years of age. Ticket cost for this event is $30 per person. The deadline to purchase tickets is December 4, 2015. Tickets are not sold the day of the event. You can purchase tickets online at www.thssh.org, or by check payable to: THSSH, P.O. Box 136, Basking Ridge, NJ 07920. NOTE: You must include a self-addressed, LEGAL SIZE, stamped envelope with your check. Make certain your check includes your name, address, and a phone number where you can be reached. This event will be held regardless of weather conditions. Tickets are non-refundable. For further information, call (908) 221-1770. The Historical Society of the Somerset Hills (THSSH), a 501c3 nonprofit organization, includes the communities of Bedminster Township; Bernards Township; Bernardsville; Far Hills; and Peapack-Gladstone. The funds raised by this event will help THSSH continue to provide a community resource, and deliver engaging interactive programs and exhibits. For more information about THSSH and volunteer opportunities, please visit our website www.thssh.org.
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PRODUCT SELECTION BY LYNN ADAMS SMITH
A WELL-DESIGNED LIFE
Roberto Cavalli heroine blossom velvet & nappa bag; $1,695 luisviaroma.com Givenchy glass pearl earrings; $1,075 bergdorfgoodman.com
HOLIDAY 2015
11/12/15 12:03:33 PM
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