Urban Agenda New York City

Holiday 2012

Bergdorf Goodman Through a Glass, Brightly

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The Perfect Pied-à-Terre • Best Apps for NYC • Buy & Sell at Sotheby’s & Christie’s • Museum Cafés • Holiday Markets Famous New York Christmas Trees

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contributors linda arntzenius

Freelance writer and aspiring anthropologist Dilshanie Perera is a native of Princeton who has lived in Chicago, Manhattan, and Sri Lanka.

Now a Brooklyn resident, Dilshanie studies cities, both colonial and contemporary.

While riding the subway, she often thinks about writing a book of short stories.

ellen gilbert

Ingrid W. Reed lives in Princeton N.J. and shares a pied-à-terre in NYC with her husband and another couple.

She has had a long career in academic administration including conducting research, writing and commenting on New Jersey politics and public affairs.

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paul grimes

dilshanie perera

Contributing writer and Urban Agenda story editor Linda Arntzenius is also an oral historian, award-winning poet, and the author of a pictorial history, Images of America: Institute for Advanced Study.

She regularly negotiates the NJ Transit system for visits to favorite museums, galleries, and midtown Manhattan muncheries, or simply to capture the revitalizing energy that is New York City.

Contributing editor Ellen Gilbert is a New York City native. She has a doctorate in library science from Columbia University, and has published books and articles on American publishing history, librarianship, and intellectual freedom.

ingrid w. reed

Paul Grimes says that food styling is about storytelling (“you eat with your eyes first”) and he has been creating beautiful “stories” in cookbooks, magazines, advertising, and television for over 20 years. A former food editor and senior stylist at Gourmet magazine, Paul’s experiences include a stint as an assistant to Julia Child’s longtime-collaborator, the late Simone “Simca” Beck.

Israeli-born Ricky Zehavi fell in love with fine art photography when she came to New York City to study the harp with New York Philharmonic first harpist, Myor Rosen. During her nineyear stint with Ralph Lauren, she and her partner, John Cordes, launched Zehavi and Cordes Photography. Their clients include Bergdorf Goodman, Tiffany, Burberry, and Cartier.

anne levin

Jessica Gross is a writer based in New York City. She’s contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, and The Atlantic Cities, among other places.

jessica gross

ricky zehavi

Anne Levin writes about arts, culture, and other topics for Princeton Magazine. She also contributes regularly to WHERE GuestBook New York, Playbill, and other publications. She worked as Associate Editor at Cue Magazine for seven years before it merged with New York Magazine.

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ART SCENE

CONTENTS

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B ergdorf Goodman: Through a Glass, Brightly

BY DILSHA N IE P ERERA P HOTO GRA P HY BY RICKY ZEHAVI A N D J O HN COR DES

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S OLD to the Highest Bidder!

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BY ELLEN GILB ERT

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For a Back Stage View of the Big Parade, Try the Night Before Thanksgiving

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BY LIN DA A RN TZEN IU S

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Museum Cafés: Make an Art of Eating

BY A N N E LEVIN

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NYC, App -Land

BY J ESSICA GROSS

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A Place in the City: The Allure of the Pied-à-Terre

BY INGRID W. REED

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Key Lime Pie with the “Queen of Quips”

BY LIN DA A RN TZEN IU S

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Escape the Madding (Holiday) Crowd

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BY PAU L GRIMES

54 B est Dressed C hristm as Trees

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Pour Homme

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C reative Gift- Giving

Pour Fe mme

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Hanukkah in S tyle

C alen d a r

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holiday 2012 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Lynn Adams Smith CREATIVE DIRECTOR Jorge Naranjo ART DIRECTOR Jeffrey Edward Tryon GRAPHIC DESIGNERS Matthew DiFalco Ken Palmer CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Linda Arntzenius Ellen Gilbert Anne Levin Dilshanie Perera Jessica Gross Ingrid W. Reed Paul Grimes Gina Hookey Taylor Smith ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Robin Broomer ACCOUNT MANAGERS Lindsey Melenick Bozena Bannett Sophia Kokkinos Kristin McGeeney Robert Warne ADVERTISING ASSISTANTS Jennifer Covill Mollie Morgan OPERATIONS MANAGER Melissa Bilyeu PHOTOGRAPHERS Ricky Zehavi and John Cordes

At Gloria Nilson REALTORS® Real Living® we help our clients find the perfect home. Our reputation for professional personal service has made us one of the leading sources for distinctive real estate throughout New Jersey. And as an affiliate of Elegant Homes International, we are also a link to an incredible worldwide network of premier properties.

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IllUSTRATIONS Ruth Strohl-Palmer

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Urban agenda: New york City is published 6 times a year with a circulation of 50,000. 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.

www.glorianilson.com © Gloria Nilson, REALTORS®, Real Living® An ndependently owned and operated firm

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THR UGH A GLASS,

BRIGHTLY {BY DILSHANIE PERERA} Photography by Ricky Zehavi and John Cordes

What do taxidermied polar bears, millions of sea shells and a Naeem Khan-designed sailor suit have in common? They've all been featured in the holiday windows at Bergdorf Goodman where the yuletide displays get more spectacular every year.

The windows defy reason, existing somewhere between performance, diorama, high fashion and high concept.

And that’s no accident.

David Hoey, the man behind the glass, is part artist, part magician.

He brings the astonishing to life.

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We love maximalism," says David Hoey, who refers to himself as a window dresser even though his title at Bergdorf Goodman is Senior Director of Visual Presentation. For Hoey, the holiday displays exude a "madcap opulence," embodying the "character of a hallucination." Hoey’s inspiration for dressing up the store’s 35 street-level windows comes from everywhere: “High culture, low culture, dreams, chance happenings, museum outings, gallery-going,” he lists without pause. The results showcase elegance and luxury without ever straying into the realm of the vulgar. This is dignified ostentation.

Hoey’s designs always intimate a story. Take for instance, one of the show-stopping displays from last year’s holiday series. The overarching theme was “Carnival of the Animals” and this particular window was overstuffed with antique wooden animals and artists’ models, all breathlessly gathered around the scene’s protagonist, a mannequin clad in vestments by Valentino, Celine, and Pringle of Scotland. At the center of this menagerie, she’s feeding her wooden horse a wooden apple while wielding a wooden mallet. And looking damn fine meanwhile.

“We don’t tell a literal story. It’s more a matter of suggestion,” Hoey laughs, “We don’t give it all up verbally.” On the other side of the glass, our interest is piqued by the gorgeous clothes, the meticulous stage set, the sheer amount of stuff, much of which takes years to collect and source.

There’s a symbiotic relationship between the couture and the sumptuous displays. “The fashion is as important as the environment that we put it in,” acknowledges Hoey. “The fashion we put in our holiday windows is always over the top, highly theatrical pieces.” He and his collaborator Linda Fargo, Senior Vice President of Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion office and store presentation, have developed strong relationships with fashion designers, to the point where the industry’s big names will sometimes custom create a piece or two specially for a window to complement the season’s theme.

The Naeem Khan-designed stylized sailor suit is one such example. One year, Hoey and his team were developing plans for a nautical window when they realized that this story’s lead would need to be sporting a jaunty ensemble reminiscent of the seafarers of yore. “We wanted it to look a little bit like the outfit Barbra Streisand wore to the 1969 Academy Awards,” Hoey said.

So they explained their idea to the Indian-born American fashion designer Khan, and subsequently delighted in the centerpiece look he created.

THREE-SECOND RULE In the city’s hectic bustle, it’s sometimes difficult to catch someone’s eye even with a 14-foot tall display window in which the entire landscape is made out of finely cut paper or bedecked with mirrors. “The windows have to be designed so that they make sense in 3 seconds,” explains Hoey. The fast-walking passerby needs to be able to understand some of that unfolding story with a quick glance. But those who want to stop and stare are in for even more of a treat. The windows are so packed that you could look for a while and still discover new details and previously unseen corners.

The window dressers at Bergdorf Goodman shy away from controversy, but are not opposed to startling people. Hoey reports that the scenes on display never relate to current events.

This is in keeping with the timeless quality that the holiday windows exude. “They’re not nostalgic, but there’s a nod to the past in a very contemporary way,” he says. The visual presentation team hunts for old collectibles, they only occasionally use computers to assist in modeling their plans, they work primarily by hand, they build things from scratch, and last year they learned an Italian mosaic tesserae technique that hearkens back to the ancient Romans. “This is an old-fashioned profession. There is little that we do that is very modern in terms of technique. We’re not high tech ever.” It’s always a balance, according to Hoey. “We use antiques, but we’re never stuffy about the way we use them.”

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IN TOUCH WITH THE ZEITGEIST Hoey and his staff have a retinue of specialists on call and together they begin designing and collecting materials for the holiday windows sometimes years in advance.

The task requires planning as much as imagination. While readying the spectacular scenes reserved for the holidays, Hoey and his designers are also working on the store's other window displays, which change every two weeks. In the course of a year, they produce over 250 unique windows. Most are installed within hours overnight. Compared to a museum or gallery, which Hoey points out have the luxury of weeks or sometimes months to mount an exhibition, window dressers work at a breakneck pace.

The constant turnaround during the year is “a chance for the store to be in touch with the zeitgeist up to the split second.”

The reason the window displays can be so grand is in part because of Bergdorf Goodman’s flagship store. There’s just one.

The window designers can allow their creativity to roam without having the additional burden of making the concept as well as the content reproducible for hundreds of stores nationwide. As a result, Hoey and his crew put themselves under constant pressure to outdo each previous holiday window display they’ve created.

It’s a job in which you “want to astonish people” but also surprise yourself. After innovating at Bergdorf for 16 years, as Hoey has, one might suspect that new ideas and new themes become harder to come by, but the tireless artists find a way. Every year there is also a holiday window that features one kind of material,

which ends up covering most surfaces. The substances have been as diverse as seashells, paper, wood and hair. This year it’s feathers.

Because it is Bergdorf Goodman’s 111th anniversary this year, Hoey and the window dressers have been working overtime, particularly this autumn when the store’s anniversary celebration kicked off. They thoroughly researched the history of the department store by combing through archives of old photos, blueprints and advertisements with over a century’s worth of material for the birthday tribute. The level of detail showcased in each display has a very holiday window-like feel.

Hoey characterizes his job as having two separate workloads: holiday and non-holiday (that is, the rest of the year), both of which occur simultaneously. About 60 percent of the department’s yearly resources in terms of budget and labor go into the holiday windows.

This year’s theme, which was specially disclosed to Urban Agenda, is “Bergdorf Goodman Follies of 2012,” a 1920s and 1930s-inspired tribute to vaudeville. Think Ziegfeld Follies in high fashion. Hoey assures us that there will be “surprises galore.”

Asked whether it will be a relief when the holiday windows are finally installed and in place for the season, Hoey laughs. “We allow ourselves to be dazzled by them for a couple of minutes, and then it’s on to next year!” U

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{BY ELLEN GILBERT}

SOLD to the Highest Bidder!

M

any of us have probably had a similar fantasy: a beloved older member of the family passes away and it is time to dismantle and sell the old house where aunts, uncles, and grandparents lived for years and years.

In May of this year, a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream fetched $120 million, the most ever paid for an artwork at auction.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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ost of the paintings, rugs, silverware, and memorabilia (remember Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation? The 1964 World’s fair?) are, presumably, junk, and in such disrepair that getting rid of them seems like a thankless task. But look: the back is coming away from that terrible picture that hung forever in Aunt Tillie’s room.

Wait a second; there’s something behind the picture. . . it’s an oil. . . ballerinas. . . says D-E-G-A-S in the corner. Or perhaps you imagine coming upon what seems to be an unassuming piece of jewelry from your great-grandmother that turns out to have the inscription, “de Napoleon a Josephine avec amour”?

Keep dreaming.

While there may not be any EUREKA! items in the lot, there just may be, however, some things that are intriguing enough to have appraised for their sale potential. Auction houses cast a wide net.

Christie’s, the granddaddy of auction houses, has departments for 19th Century European Art, 19th Century Furniture and Sculpture, 20th Century Decorative Art and Design, African and Oceanic Art, American Furniture and Decorative Arts, Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art, Musical Instruments, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Watches and Wristwatches—you get the idea.

AUCTION TRADITIONS Auctions are documented to have taken place as early as 500 B.C., when women were routinely auctioned off as brides.

While their matrimonial function has long since ceased to exist, auctions continue to be a popular method for selling property.

While Antiques Roadshow is good entertainment and eBay fills a practical niche, there’s nothing like an old-fashioned, classy auction where the ambience is hushed, participants demurely hold up numbered paddles to signal a bid, and the promise of an unexpected bidding war adds to the genteel excitement.

Among New York City auction-houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s rule; Doyle also commands respect, and websites for the three

are replete with information about the process of having an item appraised and entered into an auction. Christie’s, for example, reports that it “is pleased to provide, at no charge, auction estimates for items that are of a type and value typically sold at Christie’s.” You are asked to complete an online request form and are promised a response within four to six weeks. The process is, obviously not meant for those who need immediate gratification, and a cautionary note lets potential sellers know “that all estimates are provisional and subject to revision on personal examination by a specialist.”

Sotheby’s promises to “assist you through the entire auction process.” Once a property has been deemed appropriate for sale at auction, their “specialists will orchestrate every detail, from setting estimates to cataloguing your property and marketing it to prospective buyers worldwide.”

AUTHENTICITY Supporting documentation is usually required with each submission. In addition to the dimensions of an item, you may be asked for front and back color images of it; a close-up of the signature or maker’s mark; the item’s provenance (i.e., when, where, and how it was acquired); certificates of authenticity; and copies of appraisals or any literature relating to it.

A charming video created by Sotheby’s, narrated by an Englishman with a plummy voice, walks you through all the steps, and makes it look easy: http://www.sothebys.com/en/buysell/sell. html.

In what may be something of an understatement, Sotheby’s notes that they have “a proven track record in achieving prices that meet or exceed pre-sale estimates.” In May of this year, a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream fetched $120 million, the most ever paid for an artwork at auction. Five bidders competed for what is one of four versions created by Munch; a telephone bidder prevailed.

Sotheby’s New York Important Jewels 20 September 2012 Lot 490 Property of a Lady Fancy Light Pink Diamond The round brilliant-cut Fancy Light Pink Diamond weighing 5.08 carats.

Est. $500/700,000 Sold for $1,426,500

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Official White House portrait.

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Images Courtesy Sotheby’s New York; Wikimedia Commons.

Sotheby’s New York American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture 28 September 2012 Karl Albert Buehr Young Woman on a Porch oil on canvas 45 by 37 in.

Est. $30,000/50,000 Sold for $188,500

Name recognition doesn’t hurt, of course. The sale of Elizabeth Taylor’s collected bijoux was a “landmark” auction for Christie’s, realizing a combined total of $156,756,576, with every item sold. It was reported that “the sale drew unprecedented interest from bidders throughout the world” vying for one or more of the collection’s 1,778 lots of jewelry, fashion, decorative arts and film memorabilia. The total far exceeded Christie’s pre-sale expectations for the sale as a whole, and individual items “were frequently hammered down for five, ten, or even 50 times their estimate in some cases.”

Anything remotely associated with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is likely to draw a good price. Such was the demand for tickets to the 1996 Sotheby’s sale of her estate that a lottery was needed. Items on the block were not necessarily the best of their kind, and included “a faded kilim from the living room, with threadbare patches on its grape pattern” and “frivolous bibelots.”

What was described as a “feeding frenzy on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ estate” added up to a four-day total of $34.5 million, exceeding Sotheby’s expectations by 750 percent. The auction house’s most optimistic projection had been $4.6 million.

In England, a 2010 sale of jewelry that once belonged to Wallis Simpson that was expected to net £5million, raised more than £30 million for Mrs. Simpson’s charity, the Pasteur Institute for Medical Research. The story of the king who relinquished his throne for the love of a woman is, apparently, still compelling. This second sale of the Duchess’s brooches, necklaces and more was breathlessly described in the London press as the “jewels that charted her romance with King Edward VIII.” It included a diamond charm bracelet with nine inscribed crosses that Mrs. Simpson wore on her wedding day. Writer Adrian Woodhouse is quoted as saying that the atmosphere at the event “was electric” as “the bidding just went wild.” He suggested that “because it was all for charity, people seemed to feel there was no need to hold back.” Whatever the reason, it seemed that “everyone wanted a piece of this love story.”

Catalogs of auctions of possessions once owned by the glitterati are considered valuable in and of themselves. The $45 catalogue of the Onassis sale sold more than 18,000 copies.

Doyle does some not-too-shabby name-dropping as well.

“Through the years,” they report, “Doyle New York has auctioned the estates of Hollywood legends James Cagney, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Rock Hudson, Rex Harrison and Ruth Gordon.” Other estates proudly handled by Doyle include those of “legendary New York City Opera soprano Beverly Sills and musicians Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie.” Doyle also auctioned the estate of Lady Sarah Consuelo Spencer-Churchill, sister of the Duke of Marlborough and granddaughter of American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt. Restaurant goers who remember mid-and late 20th century New York mainstays may be interested to know that Doyle did on-site auctions for Maxwell’s Plum and the Russian Tea Room.

Like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Doyle is an international operation with “marketing alliances” in Europe and Asia.

Swann Auction Gallery, which started in 1941 with a focus on rare books, has expanded its purview in recent years with events like this fall’s sale of “19th and 20th Century Prints and Drawings.”

Its forte, though, may still be books and anything having to do with the written word. This year’s fall season, for example, kicked off with a sale “Fine and Vintage Writing Instruments” that featured “limited edition and luxury pens from the most respected manufacturers as well as historical rarities.” Be sure to check the drawers in Uncle Joe’s old desk.

Christie’s New York location is at 20 Rockefeller Plaza; telephone (212) 636-2000. Sotheby’s is at 1334 York Avenue; telephone (212) 606-7000. Doyle’s main office is at 175 East 87th Street; telephone (212)-427-2730; and Swann requires a trip downtown to 104 East 25th Street; telephone (212) 254-4710.

Sotheby’s New York Important Jewels 20 September 2012 Lot 391 Property of a Gentleman Gold and Fancy Intense Orangy-Pink Diamond Pendant Set with a pear-shaped fancy intense orangy-pink diamond weighing 3.09 carats, together with a 10 karat gold chain, length 18Ð inches.

Est. $350/450,000 Sold for $770,500

Sotheby’s New York American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture 28 September 2012 Lot 123 Norman Rockwell Is He Coming? signed Norman Rockwell, l.r. oil on canvas 31 1/4 by 27 in.

79.4 by 68.6 cm.

Painted in 1919.

Est. $200/300,000 Sold for $602,500

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Sotheby’s New York Important Americana 27 September 2012 Lot 205 Property from a Connecticut Estate The Huntington Family Chippendale Carved and Figured Mahogany Chest-on-Chest, Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1770 Appears to retains its original ornate cast brass hardware.

Height 89 1/2 in. by Width 42 1/2 in.

by Depth 20 1/2 in.

Est. $25/50,000

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Memorable Holiday Shopping With over 45 stores and restaurants, plus holiday fun, it’s the most wonderful time of the year to discover all that Palmer Square has to offer.

Gift Giving

Memories in the making

Santa’s Coming

Delicious Dining

New Stores

Opening!

Late Shopping!

Music

Playing

Free Parking

in our garages

Be sure to visit us online for a complete list of details regarding dates & times for free parking, late hours and entertainment schedule.

www.palmersquare.com

Rated #1 Princeton Attraction by TripAdvisor and AAA Magazine HAMILTON JEWELERS PRESENTS

Visit Hamilton Jewelers to join in our Beginning November 24th through December 29th, weekend-long celebration of new timepieces from notable brands, such as Rolex, Cartier, we offer one hour trolley rides of Princeton!

Patek Philippe, Breitling and Chanel.

609-902-3637

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We’ll introduce you to the dynamic history of Princeton while This event is a distinctive opportunity watch connoisseurs to view the latest in seeing the homes and hangouts of for Albert Einstein, Robert timepiece design and function.

Oppenheimer, Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, TS Eliot, F Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, Robert Wood EXCLUSIVE TWO-DAY EVENT. Johnson, William Bristol, J Seward Johnson, Michael Graves, the REAL Indiana Jones and MORE! FRIDAY, MAY 27TH. LAWRENCEVILLE. ALT. ROUTE ONE, LAWRENCEVILLE • NOON-8PM $15 Per Person FOR INFO, PLEASE CALL 609.771.9400 Includes $25 Gift Certificate to Hamilton Jewelers SATURDAY, MAY 28TH. PRINCETON. 92 NASSAU STREET, PRINCETON • 10AM-6PM

Many thanks to the generous sponsors Palmer Square and Callaway Henderson Sotheby’s International Realty for FOR bringing these tours Princeton!

INFO, PLEASE CALL to 609.683.4200

hamiltonjew

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Holidays at the Morgan Holiday Americana and A Christmas Carol Through January 13

Beatrix Potter: The Picture Letters Through January 27

Winter Family Day December 2, 2−5 pm

Caroling at the Morgan

Friday, December 14 & 21, 6:30−8:30 pm

Holiday Shopping Hours

Mondays from November 26–December 24, 10:30 am−5 pm.

The Shop will also be open during regular museum hours.

The Morgan Library& Museum themorgan.org

225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), Autograph letter to Noel Moore, February 4, 1895; p. 2 and 3, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. MA 2009.2. Gift of Colonel David McC. McKell, 1959. Pierpont Morgan’s 1906 Library. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2010. The Morgan Shop. Photography by Michel Denancé. Charles Dickens (1812–1870), A Christmas Carol in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, London: Chapman and Hall, 1843, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Photography: Graham S. Haber.

FOR A BACK STAGE VIEW

OF THE BIG PARADE,

TRY THE NIGHT

BEFORE THANKSGIVING {BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS}

Ask anyone about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the first thing they are likely to tell you is to get there early. This year, why not think about going a whole day early to watch the big balloons being inflated. One of the best kept secrets of the Parade is seeing Snoopy and Mickey Mouse taking shape the night before Thanksgiving.

It’s been a popular family event for New Yorkers since 1927, almost as far back as the first parade in 1924.

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Balloon photos: Shutterstock.com

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CHARACTER BALLOONS Today’s balloons are the results of high tech work by a team of artists, engineers, animators and crafts-people. An initial two-dimensional color sketch is evaluated by engineers for the required aerodynamic properties. Successful balloons must not only look good, they must fly and maintain the right mix of artistic personality, size and volume. When a design has been approved scientifically and artistically, it is made at the Macy’s Parade Studio which moved last year from Hoboken to a new 72,000-square-foot facility in Moonachie, New Jersey. Animators then give life to wood, steel, fiberglass, foam and fabric. Once assembled, balloons are tested for leaks. Each balloon is made up of zippered chambers, each with its own inflation device and high pressure valve.

In 2006, a world-wide shortage of helium led to fewer balloons. Organizers considered using no balloons at all, but the public outcry led them to reconsider. In the earliest years, Macy’s employees and professional entertainers dressed up to march with floats and live animals on loan from the Central Park Zoo. Since 1927, the zoo animals have been replaced by animal-shaped balloons, first made by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Felix the Cat was the first and he was filled with air rather than the helium used today. At the end of the 1928 parade, the helium-filled balloons were released. When they burst unexpectedly, designers added safety valves that allowed them to float for a few days before deflating. Store employees sewed labels onto the balloons and Macy’s sent a gift to anyone who found one and mailed it back to the store.

Although Mickey Mouse was introduced in 1934, Donald Duck had to wait until 1962. Olive Oyl with her baby Sweetpea was the first female character introduced in 1982. Betty Boop came along in 1985. The dates of introduction of characters reads like a cultural history of sorts: Uncle Sam in 1938, Superman in 1939; Kermit the Frog in 1977; Bugs Bunny in 1989; Clifford the Big Red Dog and Bart Simpson in 1990; Barney the Dinosaur in 1994; Scooby-Doo in 2005; Shrek in 2007; and the Pillsbury Doughboy in 2009.

Balloon photos: Shutterstock.com

alloon characters are blown up and brought to life in the streets around the American Museum of Natural History, where they are secured overnight with nets and sandbags just so they don’t take flight too soon.

Visitors with young kids might prefer this event, scheduled to begin at 3PM and end at 8PM on 77th & 81st Streets between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. By about 5PM the balloons have started to look like their characters.

“It’s very well organized and lots of families show up,” says Ingrid W. Reed (see her story, page 38). “The police do an amazing job of informing the crowd of where to go and while you have to stand in line, you really get an appreciation of all that goes into the parade backstage: the number of people it takes, the trucks, the electrical wires, the lighting. It’s amazing. The crews seem to work as if they are in a dance performance, a ballet of sorts.”

Reed’s tip for getting the most out of the event on Parade Day itself is, of course, to get there as early as you can. “That’s a must,” says Reed, “but even if you don’t, the balloons are so high up that you can get a view of them from any of the side streets along the route that are closed to automobile traffic.” Reed has seen people even bring ladders out onto the street!

For this year’s 86th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a new route promises to make the event accessible to more New Yorkers and visitors than ever before. On Thursday, November 22, at 9AM, dozens of floats, balloons, clowns, cheerleaders, dancers and marching bands will set off from 77th Street and Central Park West on their way to Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square. But instead of traveling down Seventh Avenue, the Parade will take Sixth Avenue, cutting out Times Square entirely.

Around three million people are expected to line the streets for the free three-hour event that involves more than 10,000 participants, giant character balloons: and old favorites like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Snoopy, Kermit the Frog, Spider-Man, SpongeBob SquarePants and Buzz Lightyear, as well as more recent additions like Hello Kitty, Kung Fu Panda, Julius the Sock Monkey and the Aflac Duck. Another 50 million are expected to watch it live on NBC TV from 9PM to 12 NOON.

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Balloon photos: Shutterstock.com

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Miracle on 34th Street: left: mythicalmonkey.blogspot.com, right: johnkmcewen.wordpress.com

BEST SPOTS ON PARADE DAY

AN AMERICAN TRADITION

Organizers say the best views are to be had on Central Park West between 61st and 72nd Streets. According to the Parade website, (http://social.macys.com/parade2012_kaws/#/home) the best public viewing areas are on a 2.5 mile route on the West side of Central Park West from 70th Street to Columbus Circle and on the East side of Central Park West from 70th to 65th Street. Around Columbus Circle, the West side of the street is your best bet. On Sixth Avenue, the best spots are between 58th and 34th Streets; and on 34th Street you should stay on the South side of the street between Broadway & Seventh Avenue. Places to avoid are Columbus Circle, as balloon teams tend to go more quickly here because of higher winds in this flat area and Herald Square & Sixth Avenue between 34th and 38th Streets, where the national television broadcast causes restricted access.

If you plan to be there in person, it’s advisable to arrive early, pick your spot carefully and dress for changing weather.

Some people stake out their spots as early as 5AM but 7AM should be a good bet. The Parade starts at 9AM and finishes at noon. Many people bring stools, folding chairs or milk crates for sitting or standing on but Macy’s advises leaving such items at home as they become cumbersome as the crowds fill up the sidewalk. The same is said of strollers, but that’s a tough choice to make with younger kids. Keep in mind that you can easily be outside for four or five hours if you arrive early and stay for the whole parade, so approach it as you would a street party and enjoy an al fresco breakfast while you wait. Being near a restaurant or café is a good idea for bathroom breaks and snacks.

Lots of people swear by a spot on the Upper West Side where the Parade starts and “ends” after about 1.5 hours. You’ll have longer to wait if you are closer to Herald Square. The square itself should be avoided since this area gets super-crowded unless, of course, you are one of the lucky few to receive bandstand tickets (which are not on sale to the public).

November in New York City can be pretty chilly and temperatures can change from early morning through mid-day, so dressing in layers with warm footwear, gloves and a hat is advisable.

The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade started in 1924, which makes it the second oldest Thanksgiving Day parade in the United States, four years younger than the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia.

What started out as an expression of pride by store employees, many of whom were the children of European immigrants wanting to celebrate the holiday season with festivities like their parents remembered from the old country, has evolved into an American tradition. First it was Macy’s Christmas Parade, then Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Christmas Parade and then simply Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The tradition of welcoming the arrival of Santa Claus at the end of the Parade remains. Each year, cast members from a number of the latest Broadway shows perform either in the parade, or immediately preceding the parade in front of Macy’s. Since 1957, the famed Radio City Rockettes have been the last of the pre-parade acts to perform.

In 1932, the festivities were broadcast on local New York radio stations and the following year, over a million people took to the streets to watch the parade. During the World War II years the parade was suspended because of the need to conserve rubber and helium for the war effort. Until 1951, most Americans listened to the event on their radios. The first network television broadcast was in 1948, on CBS, but the parade really became a part of American culture after it took center stage in the classic 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street, with Maureen O’Hara, Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. The film featured footage of the 1946 festivities.

The parade route has changed several times over the years. Originally the route to Herald Square was much longer, six miles from 145th Street in Harlem. In 1945, the route was shortened and stayed pretty much the same until 2008. In 2009, it was moved to Seventh Avenue from Broadway.

Today’s two and a half mile route promises to allow for more viewing spots than ever before. U

For more on the Parade’s history, see the book, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by Robert M. Grippo and the illustrated pop-up book for kids, Macy’s on Parade! by Pamela Pease. For the latest updates on the line-up for the 2012 parade, visit the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade website: social.macys.com/parade2012_kaws/#/games or call the Parade hotline at (212) 494-4495.

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CALL: (609) 497-0020 CALL: CALL:(609) (609)497-0020 497-0020 Visit: www.princetonsymphony.org Visit: Visit:www.princetonsymphony.org www.princetonsymphony.org

City of Gold Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus through

free and open to the public

january 20, 2013

artmuseum.princeton.edu

Dancing into Dreams Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom through

february 17, 2013

top: Cypriot, late 6th century b.c.: Head from a colossal male statue. Polis Chrysochous, Local Museum of Marion and Arsinoe. Courtesy of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus center, left to right: Roman, Antonine: Colossal bust of a goddess or personification, ca. 160–190 a.d. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund, in acknowledgment of the dedicated service, to the Advisory Council of the Princeton University Art Museum, of Kathleen Compton Sherrerd, Barry Munitz, Graduate School Class of 1968, Duane E. Wilder, Class of 1951, and Stuart P. Feld, Class of 1957 / Ugo da Carpi, after Parmigianino, Diogenes, ca. 1524–27. Museum purchase, gift of the Friends of the Art Museum in honor of Barbara T. Ross on her retirement / Claude Monet, Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, 1899. From the Collection of William Church Osborn, Class of 1883, trustee of Princeton University (1914–1951), president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1941–1947); given by his family / Baule artist: Kpre Kpre mask, after 1910. Gift of Mr. Charles Biddle, Class of 1947, and Mrs. Biddle / Lewis W. Hine, Adolescent Girl, a Spinner, in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908. Anonymous gift / Late Postclassic, Maya: Lidded effigy container in the form of a diving god, ca. a.d. 1500. Museum purchase with funds given by an anonymous foundation / Chinese, Southern Song dynasty, 1127–1279: Guanyin seated in Royal-ease pose, ca. 1250. Museum purchase, Carl Otto von Kienbusch Jr., Memorial Collection / Andy Warhol, Blue Marilyn, 1962. Gift of Alfred H. Barr Jr., Class of 1922, and Mrs. Barr. Photos: Bruce M. White. bottom: Maya: Vase with seated lord with rattle, ca. 725–735. bamw photography

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MUSEUM CAFES

ART SCENE

N

Make an

of Eating {BY ANNE LEVIN}

ot so long ago, a meal at a museum meant cafeteria cuisine taken in nondescript surroundings. Patrons in search of a snack, or something more substantial, usually found it in a steamy basement dining hall, served by ladies of a certain age wearing white uniforms and hairnets.

But that was in the twentieth century. Here in the twenty-first, eating, or rather, dining, has become as much a part of the museum experience as viewing the exhibits. Especially in New York City, museum eateries have become destinations in themselves. You don’t have to view the walls of Klimts at the Neue Gallery to indulge in Café Sabarsky’s apple strudel, with a generous dollop of schlag (whipped cream). The Himalayan art at the Rubin Museum of Art is inspiring, but more than one foodie has been known to skip the galleries and head straight to the restaurant Serai to sample fresh baked samosas and dumplings.

Serai (the Rubin, 150 West 17th Street) takes its name from the overnight stopovers for caravans along trade routes like the Silk Road, where travelers could eat, drink and purchase or trade goods for their journeys. The same team that started Buddakan and Morimoto, the Starr Group, came up with the concept and the menu for this unique museum restaurant. Chef Ali Loukzada offers Indian wraps, sausage bao bu, and his own take on macand-cheese, among numerous other specialties inspired by the Himalayan region. On Wednesday nights when the museum stays open until 7 p.m., Serai has a happy hour with live music and special programs starting at 5 p.m. On Friday nights, the restaurant becomes the K-2 Lounge, with a special Pan-Asian

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tapas menu and a martini and wine bar. For more information, visit www.rmanyc.org or call (212) 620-5000 ext. 345.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s groundbreaking vision for the Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue) was the inspiration for The Wright, which serves lunch and brunch (with special extended hours for the “Picasso Black and White” exhibit October 6-January 21). Taking a visual cue from the sleek, iconic design of the museum’s exterior, the restaurant has clean lines and a colorful installation by British conceptual artist Liam Gillick. All of this is a backdrop for modern American fare that includes prix fixe offerings as well as a bar menu with regular à la carte items and an imaginative line-up of cocktails. Chef Rodolfo Contreras is planning a special dessert and a Spanish-themed bar menu for the Picasso exhibit. For lighter offerings, there is Café 3, an espresso and snack bar serving sandwiches, pastries, coffee, tea, wine and beer, overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Visit www. guggenheim.org or call (212) 427-5690.

The museum dining room with the most spectacular view is Robert atop the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle.

The eatery won the 2012 Open Table Diners Choice Award for Best Scenic View Restaurant. Patrons lounge on sofas or sit at tables by the windows while working their way through lunch, brunch, cocktails, desserts or dinner. The décor is starkly modern, with sculptural, steel cocktail tables and illuminated pink and orange Lucite light fixtures that look like mobiles. Chef Leo Forneas creates modern American specialties such as charred octopus, chilled corn soup with avocado and cilantro, and cheesecake with huckleberry compote and lychee foam. Visit www.robertnyc.com or call (212) 299-7730.

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Chef Rodolfo Contreras at THE WRIGHT, Located at the Guggenhiem Museum, Fifth Avenue and 88th Street. Photography courtesy of Restaurant Associates. (bottom) Guggenhiem Museum, Fifth Avenue and 88th Street. Photography courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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View from Robert, atop the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle. Photography courtesy of Restaurant Associates.

Interior at Robert, atop the Museum of Arts and Design. Photography courtesy of Restaurant Associates.

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Morgan Dining Room in the Morgan Library and Museum (225 Madison Avenue) Photography courtesy of Restaurant Associates.

It is likely that the Morgan family would still recognize the staid Morgan Dining Room in the Morgan Library and Museum (225 Madison Avenue), where they once took their meals. But though the chef for this celebrated lunch and brunch spot is said to take inspiration from early 20th century menus, it’s doubtful that financier J.P. Morgan and his family dined on such dishes as yellowfin tuna tartare with taro chips and lime emulsion. The elegant mansion that houses the original section of this museum is only part of the story. A modern addition, designed by architect Renzo Piano, is home to the more casual Morgan Café, where lunch, afternoon tea, cocktails and wine, and a special Friday night menu, are available. The Morgan frequently offers menu items that match the themes of the exhibits. A recent show on Winston Churchill was accompanied by “Tastes of Britain,” including English cheeses and “Threakston Old Peculier Ale.” Visit www.themorgan. org or call (212) 685-0008.

A review of Caffe Storico in The New Yorker last spring helped put the restaurant at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library (170 Central Park West) on the food-lovers’ map. Locals pushing strollers are regulars, along with history buffs in search of refreshment after hours of perusing the art and objects that tell the story of the city’s history. The Starr Group, designer of Serai, also came up with the concept for this Italian-themed café, which features small plates, artisanal pasta, and more than 50 labels on its wine list. The high, white shelves that line the walls showcase 19th century china from the museum’s collection. There is a Sunday evening three-course prix fixe menu at $28, and the lunch offerings range from fava bean and walnut crostini to gnocchi with black truffle fonduta. Visit www.nyhistory.org or call (212) 873-3400.

The light-filled Garden Court Café at the Asia Society (725 Park Avenue) is airy and tranquil, with a ribbed, greenhouse ceiling over flowering trees. Sip Mao Jian, sweet Chinese green tea with hints of fruit, to go along with a Bento Box, a traditional Japanesestyle lunch box, starring chicken curry salad and jasmine rice, or a green apple and Thai curry crab cake, followed perhaps by orange cardamom panna cotta. The café is open only for lunch, but chef Mark Cummings’ menu is extensive with obvious Asian inspirations. Yet Cummings isn’t afraid to step outside the (Bento) box. Warm caramel pecan cake topped with homemade vanilla ice cream? Hardly what you’d expect in an Asian-themed café. As one diner was heard to say, “This place is East meets the Upper East Side.” Visit www.asiasociety.org or call (212) 288-6400.

A visit to Cafe Sabarsky on the first floor of the Neue Galerie (1048 Fifth Avenue) is a trip back in time to the famous coffee houses of early 20th century Vienna. The Beaux Arts mansion built for William Starr Miller and now devoted to German and Austrian art serves classic Austrian cuisine in what was once the dining room. Large windows with ornate fixtures overlook Fifth Avenue and Museum Mile. A marble fireplace, lighting fixtures by Josef Hoffmann, and banquettes upholstered with a 1912 Otto Wagner fabric create the atmosphere of the cafés that were important centers of intellectual life. Racks of newspapers invite one to linger over Wiener Schnitzel, mint pea soup, house-made hot chocolate and famous Viennese Sacher Torte. The café is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Visit www.neuegalerie.org or call (212) 628-6200.

Hungry museum-goers have their choice of venues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street). One of them, The Modern, even holds a Michelin star and three stars from The New York Times. Café 2 and Terrace 5 are open only to museum visitors,

Garden Court Café at Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Avenue. Photography by Elsa Ruiz.

but anyone can eat at The Modern, which has its own entrance.

The restaurant has two private dining rooms and a bar room, where the atmosphere is a bit more casual than the main dining area, which has won awards for its design. Chef Gabriel Kreuther’s menu includes such gems as licorice-poached summer flounder and chorizo-crusted cod. The fare is a bit simpler at Café 2, where chef Lynn Bound makes handmade pastas, artisanal cheeses, salads, paninis, and sumptuous desserts. Dine in a Danish modern setting at Terrace 5, where wines and micro-brewed beers are on hand along with seasonal selections and desserts. Visit www. themodernyc.com or call (212) 708-9400.

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NYC, APP-LAND {BY JESSICA GROSS}

Shutterstock.com

, an iPhone, I got my first smartphone ar. In just at the beginning of this ye me inseparable. eight months, we’ve beco wakes me up I sleep near my iPhone, he now, as I type, in the morning, and right next to my he’s a silent buddy dozing one realm computer. There was only cently, left to explore: apps. So, re I could.

I downloaded as many as

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his is a complicated city to navigate, and while, like many New Yorkers, I pride myself on my intricate knowledge of the subway system, I figured it couldn’t hurt to augment that knowledge. So, first stop: map apps. The best subway-navigation, by far, comes from iTrans, though at $3.99 it’s relatively expensive for an app (one of only three I’ll recommend that costs anything at all). iTrans presents a standard MTA map. Click on any stop, and you get details of the train schedule. Right now, for instance, I could sprint to 86th and Lexington for a downtown 4 train in three minutes, or amble for the 5 train a few minutes later.

The app also offers directions, “adjusted for scheduled service changes,” with step-by-step instructions, written and highlighted on the map.

NextTrain gives arrival times for the closest train, offering less information and in a less palatable format than iTrans. As an iPhone user, I’m less familiar with apps for other devices, so I turned to my friend Jesse Friedman, a Product Marketing Manager at Google who used to work with Google Maps. The Android offers Google Maps for Mobile, which “can do just about everything you can do on the desktop,” Jesse told me. It alerts you when your route is disrupted and offers a compass button, which allows you to see the buildings around you in 3D—useful for the disoriented pedestrian. It also offers offline storage, so you can access your route in out-of-service areas, on a road trip, say.

The map’s GPS navigation routes you around traffic, which, according to Google’s own statistics, can save an average of two years over a lifetime.

There’s also Exit Strategy (the other costly app, also $3.99), which offers subway, bus, and neighborhood maps, plus diagrams of where to stand on the subway platform based on station, subway line, and direction. Taking the N uptown to Times Square?

If you want to get out at 42nd Street, get on the first car; for 40th Street, get on the eighth, almost at the back of the train. It’s brilliant and terrible: how the heck am I going to impress out-of-towners now?

And finally, for drivers and cyclists, there’s BestParking and BikeThere. Input your location into BestParking and you get a map with on-street info—what’s free, metered, and prohibited—or garages and lots, with clickable bubbles that give pricing and contact information. BikeThere gives you step-by-step biking directions.

Beyond the apps that help you map, there are those that integrate mapping with urban attractions. The most overwhelming of these is NYC Way, which has 47 different categories—dining, movies, jobs, airports, cross street finder, green, kids, traffic cameras, safety, Craigslist, events, restrooms, and on and on. Click on one and you get a list of locations nearby. It’s good in theory. I assume it’s meant to be the only app necessary, but in the end gives me the same feeling I get walking into an enormous,

fluorescent department store: “This place is going to eat me alive.”

If you have the stamina for that sort of thing, you’re a stronger person than I, and you can probably handle NYC Way. NYC Map is similar, though less aesthetically pleasing: it’s an amateurish map with clickable names of establishments attached to basic information and consumer reviews.

After toying with one of those for a while, Citysearch is a relief. There’s a much more manageable 14 categories, including bakeries, attractions, movies, hotels, spa & beauty, shopping, and restaurants, presented in an attractive scroll bar at the top of the screen. Within each, you can filter by distance from your location, by various sub-categories, and, in the case of restaurants, by price. These filters are under a bar called “What do you feel like?” which is mostly comforting. If I’m shopping, do I feel like bookstores or second hand goods? But sometimes it’s inappropriately comical, as under the “Health” category, when you might “feel like” a health clinic, a dentist, a doctor, an emergency medical service, a hospital, or a pharmacy.

If you know you’re looking for a restaurant, Immaculate Infatuation is your best bet. Unlike the Zagats app, at $9.99, it’s free; and unlike Yelp or, really, most other apps, it’s curated and offers comprehensive, thoughtful restaurant reviews. You can search by location or by recent addition, or by a number of filter categories, from the practical (BYOB, Big Groups, Late Night Eats) to the humorous (Impressing Out of Towners, Listening to Black Eyed Peas Mash Ups, Celebrity Sightings, Full On Pork Indulgence).

For event listings, the Village Voice app is commendable.

Click on an attraction and get the Village Voice review. I’m partial to The Scoop, the New York Times’ app (full disclosure: I write for the Times Magazine). Search by nine categories—including the more unusual “Only in N.Y.” and “Day Trips”—and get a list of choices sorted by distance, each paired with a Times review (as in the Village Voice app). Once you’ve done an activity, you can click “done.” This app is just missing the ability to quickly add an event to your own to-do list.

Be warned: The Scoop is a gateway app. It recommended that I “Hear Up-and-Coming Musicians” at the Juilliard School, which “provides an astonishing number of performances,” for free.

Brilliant. Without a to-do list function, though, I flipped to an app called Stamped—another favorite, which allows you to recommend cultural gems, see others’ recommendations, and, most importantly for the moment, create a to-do list. The Scoop also suggested that I “Explore Central Park—and a Musical Puzzle,” i.e. download another app, created by Bluebrain. I obediently obliged, and headed into Central Park with my new app, headphones in my ears—because Bluebrain’s magical creation pipes in music to correspond with your location. As I entered the park at East 79th Street, a haunting symphony swelled in my ears. For helpful background on park attractions, I also fired

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charmingly impish app told me, “I’m looking to see what the Empire State Building is up to…”—but, assessing the state of the internet in my apartment: “I have no idea what the Empire State Building is up to.” Later that day, it informed me that the green, blue, and white lights were “in honor of the Major League Soccer All-Stars versus Manchester United Game.” Who knew?

And then there are the apps that mean business. Use 311 to report an infrastructural problem or request assistance for a homeless person. With Report a Taxi, you can enter a taxi medallion number (or take a photo) and cite your grievance—anything from a “reckless or unsafe” driver to “broken or missing equipment” to “rude service.” Brooklyn residents may be particularly delighted by the “refused to pick up a passenger” option.

One app I have no personal experience using: SitOrSquat, a Charmin app that supposedly tells you where to find the nearest restroom. Before I could poke around, SitOrSquat requested that I agree to let the app “transfer personal data about you or your device to Facebook without action by you.” For obvious reasons, I declined.

SitOrSquat notwithstanding, it is clear that, new apps in hand, I likely will be unable to disconnect from my smartphone, ever. But if these apps lead me to free Juilliard concerts, immersive nature/musical experiences, and the Philip Roth novel I’m searching for at the NYPL, I’m okay with it. U

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Shutterstock.com

up Central Park NYC Lite. Did you know that Turtle Pond “was designed so that at no position can a viewer take in all its perimeter”? I continued across the park, flipping between Bluebrain (birds chirping, wind whooshing, bees buzzing) and Central Park NYC Lite, until I’d made my way to the west side, at which point I hopped on a bus and heard the Bluebrain soundtracks on hyperspeed and in reverse (much less enjoyable).

The whole enterprise was frazzling, as Bluebrain only operates when it’s open. Probably, you should not multi-task this one.

Which brings us to museum apps. I tried out Explorer, the American Museum of Natural History’s offering. Its maps are incredibly useful: click on an exhibit and get step-by-step directions through the museum based on your location (and did you know the museum has free WiFi?). The tours, however, are distracting. The app has only short snippets of text about various exhibits—no audio—which in essence means you’re staring down at your phone instead of reading the wall text and actually interacting with the museum.

NYPL Mobile though, is a different story. Looking for a book?

This app tells you the closest branch library where it’s available.

Simple, helpful, and smart. Night Light NYC is amusing: no matter where you are, you can see a graphic of the Empire State Building’s lit peak (you can even rotate the building with your finger), with an explanation of what the colors signify. Near the end of July, this

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A PLACE IN THE CITY:

The Allure of the Pied-à-Terre { b y I n g r I d W. r e e d }

Photography courtesy of Shutterstock.com

I

n 2003, my husband and I, together with a likeminded couple bought what the French so aptly call a pied-à-terre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The apartment realizes our dream for a place in the city. Those three French words, pied-à-terre, fall short when literally translated—foot on the ground—in conjuring up one of the most desired visions of the good life: a second very different small home in a vibrant city that is, from time to time, an alternative to the realities of suburban life, a place that is compact not sprawling, spare but comfortable, within walking distance of diverse foods and entertainments, and a quiet retreat for down time.

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Photography courtesy of Shutterstock.com

S

uch is the ideal. But what moves suburbanites to live out the dream of a pied-à-terre? Is it continually looking at your watch during the fourth act of a favorite opera in order to check the late train departures and leave before the curtain calls? Or could it be the thought of the ride home at night on a train with lights as bright as an operating room? Or slowly driving through the maze at the Lincoln Tunnel when all you want is a lovely night cap before slipping into bed? Perhaps it’s having decided that two museums have special exhibitions too unique to miss but you need a place to put up your feet and have a cup of tea between the two.

When it dawns that life is too short and too precious not to have “a place” in the city, here are some things to think about.

The LocaTion In what part of the city will you be content because you like the surroundings and it’s easy to get to the things you like to do?

Most people in New York City think of themselves as either East Siders, West Siders or Villagers. A preference for general location should be tested on other related issues.

Do you want a quiet street or an active one? How will you come in and out of the city and what role should that play in your choice? You can’t beat the West Side for direct subway access to Penn Station, but if you drive, do you want a garage nearby?

How far are you willing to go to buy food or to eat out? If you’ll be traveling into the city at a late hour, do you want a well-lit 24/7 neighborhood? Do you want to walk to entertainment or do you readily jump in a cab, in which case being close to a major avenue makes sense.

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The aparTmenT

A pied-à-terre is usually thought of as an intimate space.

Having more than one bedroom may mean you are open to guests and/or will be tempted to use a second bedroom as an office. No matter the size or purpose of your place, in New York City, you will be confronted with a choice of a “coop” (pronounced co-op) or “condo.”

Very simply, here’s the difference. In a cooperative building, purchasing an apartment means becoming a part owner of the entire building, holding shares based on the size of the apartment.

The maintenance fee includes the costs of running the building and real estate taxes. A coop board will review your application to determine how well it meets their standards. Common lore is that applications from potential pied-à-terre owners are not viewed favorably. This is a pity, since coops are usually priced less than comparable apartments in condominiums.

Although pricier, a condo is a more flexible option. Purchasing a unit in a condominium is similar to buying any kind of real estate.

You purchase a specific unit, hold a mortgage if you like, have a deed and pay real estate taxes. The building’s board, elected by the apartment owners, sets the maintenance fee, supervises the maintenance staff, and determines rules for living in the building.

A condo permits sub-lets and pied-à-terre arrangements. In New York City, coops still predominate, but newer buildings are mostly condos.

The choice of a building with or without a doorman is another consideration. A doorman building can be 24/7 with a concierge desk or partly staffed. A doorman provides security, but for the pied-à-terre owner, the staffed building provides useful services such as keeping a spare set of keys, assistance with small repairs or glitches, accepting deliveries, etc. All apartment buildings, even a four-unit brownstone, will have staff or some kind of manager and rules, so it’s important to check out how a building “works.”

The Search

Of course you will want to “Google” apartments, read ads and talk with experienced friends. Doing research can be fun, informative and a great way to determine your “must-haves.” To actually acquire a place, you’ll probably find it efficient to use a real estate agent. Interview several and make a date to look over at least five places that meet your needs: location, size, price, and other items, such as a laundry on the same floor, closet large enough for some storage, separate kitchen or not, etc. Don’t tire yourself out looking, but also don’t buy something you won’t want to cuddle up in during the winter or escape to as a cool spot in the summer.

The coST

Buying a pied-à-terre is a very personal decision, one that you would probably not consider if it didn’t fit your budget for non-essential spending. The solid performance of New York City real estate makes it possible to see the purchase as a sensible investment. But as with any real estate—a house at the shore, a cottage in the mountains, or your own home—expenses go beyond the initial purchase price and mortgage. Increases in maintenance fees and special assessment should be anticipated as well as other expenses, such as furnishings, cable and internet fees, insurance, tips for staff at holiday times and for special favors. Be sure to consider whether you will be comfortable with extra spending on transportation to and from home, more frequent dining out and theatre performances. Of course, there is always the possibility of enjoying more free entertainment, exploring marvelous city parks, excellent take-out meals, and getting your money’s worth on museum memberships.

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Photography courtesy of Shutterstock.com

Being Organized

To truly take advantage of your place in the city, make sure it’s easy to move between your regular home and your pied à terre.

Keep a few pieces of New York City clothes in your apartment (black is still de rigeur). Have a special bag for electronics and other essentials that occur to you when at home. Extra umbrellas and gloves are a good bet. And remember to take along cityrelated information mailed to your home, such as the MOMA calendar. Keeping a Zagat guide in both places makes restaurant reservations a breeze from either location.

alternatively…

Before you rush to buy, why not consider renting a place or using a hotel as a base for exploring the city. If these options appeal, think of them as having the character of your own pied-à-terre. For a hotel, find one that you want to return to so there is a comfortable predictability in knowing the staff and accommodations—request the same room so it feels like you belong. As for renting, since a short time commitment will feel more like a vacation than a departure from routine, opt for a year rather than a month so that you experience a change of pace and the spontaneity of going when the spirit moves you. That, after all is the charm of having a place in the city.

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My REALTOR®?

Gloria Nilson, Real Living® of course.

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© Gloria Nilson, REALTORS®, Real Living® An independently owned and operated firm.

HOLIDAY TOURING

Best Dressed Christmas Trees...

By Taylor Smith. Illustrations by Ruth Strohl-Palmer By the time the first snowflakes descend upon the pavement, New York City is aglow in Christmas trees and holiday lights. It seems that no matter what neighborhood you find yourself in, you’re sure to be impressed by the festive evergreens that mark the holiday season. Check out these well-known and lesser-known Christmas trees for a show stopping spectacle of lights.

The American Museum of Natural History Tree This striking tree lights up the Museum’s permanent collection.

This year’s theme is “discovery” and will feature origami designs of all kinds. While you’re there, take the kids on a tour of the “Creatures of Light” exhibit, dogsleds, rockets, dinosaur bones, and more. The Museum’s tree will be on view from Monday, November 19 through Thursday, January 6.

Where: Central Park West at 79th St. 212.769.5100 Broadway Holiday Tree It takes all the stars of Broadway to light-up this theater-themed tree on Monday, November 26.

Where: Duffy Square at Broadway and 46th St.

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Cathedral of St. John the Divine Peace Tree Why not commemorate the season of light with a stroll through the Cathedral to see the giant Peace Tree? Every year, the Cathedral decorates the tree with nearly 1000 paper cranes and various symbols of peace. Call 212.316.7540 for dates and times. Where: 1046 Amsterdam Ave. Chorus Tree at South Street Seaport This singing Christmas tree stands over 50 ft. tall and features carolers performing on most weekends between Friday, November 23 and Tuesday, January 1.

Where: South St. and Fulton St. 212.SEA.PORT Metropolitan Museum of Art Christmas Tree A collection of 18th century Neapolitan angels and cherubs fill this Christmas tree’s boughs.

Also, look for the nativity scene made of realistic creche figures located at the tree’s base in the Museum’s Medieval Sculpture Hall. Special lighting ceremonies will take place every Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. after Thanksgiving.

Where: 1000 5th Ave. at 82nd St. 212.535.7710

Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree & Ice Skating Rink Every year, on the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving, the world’s most famous Christmas tree transforms into an awe-inspiring mountain of branches covered in more than 30,000 lights and 5 miles of wire. While you’re there, lace-up your skates and twirl away at the Ice Skating Rink at Rockefeller Center. Here you’ll find native New Yorkers and visitors alike skating against a unique urban backdrop. And with room for only 150 skaters at a time, it is a surprisingly intimate experience. Never ice skated before? Be sure to book a private lesson and you’ll be jumping a toe loop in no time.

Where: From 47th to 51st St. between 5th and 6th Ave. 212.332.7654 New York Botanical Garden Holiday Tree Enjoy the peace of nature at this early lighting as you and your family take in the winter wonderland of the New York Botanical Garden.

After the conifer gets lit on Wednesday, November 23, exercise you caroling skills with group performances by the Westchester Chordsmen.

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Where: The Bronx River Parkway and Fordham Rd. 718.817.8700 Park Avenue Trees After the first Sunday in December, anyone walking along the Upper East Side should make a point of viewing the 2.5 mile long stretch of Christmas trees that line Park Avenue.

Where: Park Ave. from 97th St. to 48th St. Lincoln Center Holiday Tree The festivities begin in early December with a tree lighting in Dante Park followed by a block party featuring performances by the Big Apple Circus and food from local restaurants.

Where: Broadway and 63rd St. 212.875.5108 Winter Garden at the World Financial Center An hour-long version of New York Theatre Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” begins with a light show, during which the glass atrium of the World Financial Center is illuminated with 100,000 twinkling bulbs (will take place after Thanksgiving).

Where: World Financial Center, 250 Vesey St. 212.417.7000

HOLIDAY MARKETS

Creative Gift-Giving...

By Taylor Smith. Illustrations by Ruth Strohl-Palmer Shop creatively at a selection of festive holiday markets that offer up a great opportunity to see a wide variety of gift options (even if they’re not on your family’s shopping list). These markets will have you lingering throughout the afternoon.

Bryant Park’s Fete de Noel New York’s own Fete de Noel echoes the French tradition of outdoor shopping, eating, and entertainment. Surrounding the pond at Bryant Park, the Holiday Shops at Bryant Park are known for their high quality handmade goods.

Where: Situated behind the New York Public Library in mid-town Manhattan, between 40th and 42nd St. & 5th and 6th Ave.

For more information, visit www.bryantpark.org.

Dates: November through Saturday, January 26 Christmas in Little Italy On any given day, the Christmas Wonderland of Little Italy will feature parades, religious processions, colorful floats, and marching bands.

Take in the numerous street vendors selling artisanal food, hot cider, ornaments, and more.

Where: At the Piazza Natale on the corner of W. Date & India St. For more information, visit www.littleitalynyc.com.

Dates: Throughout the month of December.

Union Square Holiday Market One of New York City’s most popular holiday markets, the shopping at Union Square ranks high on most New Yorkers list as you can find a little bit of everything. Expect to see a good selection of handcrafted jewelry, fine art and toys.

Where: East 14th St. and Union Square West. For more information, visit www.unionsquarenyc.org.

Dates: Friday, November 16 through Monday, December 24 Grand Central Holiday Fair The Grand Central Holiday Fair has one distinct advantage over all the others—it’s housed inside of the Grand Central Terminal, making it a safe choice even if the weather outside is frightful.

Where: Grand Central Terminal, 87 East and 42nd St. For more information, visit www. grandcentralterminal.com Dates: November through Monday, December 24

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Holiday Market at Columbus Circle Located at the southwest corner of Central Park at Columbus Circle, the Holiday Market at Columbus Circle features 120 vendors. Be sure to stop by after a winter stroll through Central Park.

Where: 10 Columbus Circle. For more information, visit www. urbanspacenyc.com Dates: Wednesday, November 28 through Monday, December 24 The Holiday Gift Shops at St. Bartholomew’s 2012 marks the 9th year for the Holiday Gift Shops at St. Bart’s, now a New York City tradition. Housed inside St. Bartholomew’s Church, these shops have more of a traditional flea market flair than many other holiday markets.

Where: St. Bartholomew’s Church, 109 East 50th St. at Park Ave. For more information, visit www.stbarts.org Dates: Thursday, November 15 through Monday, December 24

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ART SCENE

HOLIDAY CELEBRATING

Hanukkah in Style...

By Taylor Smith. Illustrations by Ruth Strohl-Palmer Celebrate Hanukkah in style in New York City.

Manhattan is celebrating the eight-day Festival of Lights with a full line-up of events and activities. We’ve rounded up 8 of our favorite Hanukkah fetes for families. Expect plenty of latkes, singing, dancing, and driedels.

Lighting of the World’s Largest Hanukkah Menorah Everything is bigger in New York City including this 32 foot tall, two-ton candelabra. The nightly lighting ceremonies will be accompanied by folk dancing and sufganiyot (holiday jelly doughnuts). The menorah lighting will take place on each night of Hanukkah, from Saturday, December 8 through Sunday, December 17.

Where: Grand Army Plaza, 5th Ave. at 59th St. near Central Park (718) 287-3400 Hanukkah Lights at the 92nd Street Y Each night during Hannukah, you can view the menorah lighting in the main lobby at the 92nd Street Y, dance and sing with the 92nd Street Y School of Dance and Music, then end the evening with chocolate Hannukah gelt.

The menorah lighting will take place on each night of Hanukkah, from Saturday, December 8 through Sunday, December 17.

Where: 92nd Street Y, Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. Visit www.92y.org for more information.

Where: Town & Village Synagogue, 334 East 14th St. Town & Village Synagogue will host Hanukkah-related events all December-long. Visit www. tandv.org for more information.

Sephardic Music Festival The Sephardic Music Festival is back in town! Artists including Yair Dalal, Electro Morocco, Michael Cohen, Diwon, Pharaoh’s Daughter, and many others. Venues include restaurants and synagogues all over Manhattan. This year’s festival will take place from December 8 through 15.

For a comprehensive listing of this year’s artists and performance times, visit www. sephardicmusicfestival.com/ny Where: Multiple venues.

Klezmer for Kids Family Concert Sing and dance to the sounds of the Klezmerfest band, learn some Yiddish, and participate in an interactive recreation of a shtetl wedding. This celebration of klezmer music will take place throughout the month of December.

Where: The Museum at Eldridge St., 12 Eldridge St. between Canal and Division Streets. To listen to musical clips from last year’s concerts, visit www.yany.org.

Hannukah Family Day Head to the Jewish Museum for an afternoon of Hanukkahthemed fun. Be sure to checkout the annual display of menorahs curated by Maurice Sendak, then listen to some live bands croon “The Dreidel Song” and “S’vivon.” The Sendak exhibit will be on view from December 2 through January 29.

Where: The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave. at 92nd St. For even more Family Day activities, visit www. thejewishmuseum.org.

The Poppy Seed Players Present Latkes and Applesauce The Poppy Seed Players troupe revives its annual holiday musical revue featuring short seasonal skits, including a Hanukkah-themed parody of A Christmas

Hanukkah Concert at Town & Village Synagogue Celebrate Hannukah music at the annual Cantor Louis Moss Memorial Concert, featuring Cantor Shayna Postman, the Town & Village Synagogue Choir, and other special musical guests. The concert will include a candle lighting and a sing-a-long.

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Carol and American Idol. The performance will take place on December 9.

Where: Merkin Concert Hall at the Goodman House, 129 West 67th St. Visit www.kaufmancenter.org for ticket information.

Hannukah Lobby Celebration Each winter, the lobby of the JCC (Jewish Community Center) in Manhattan is transformed into Hannukah central. Families can play driedel, do arts & crafts, decorate cookies, enjoy musical performances, and listen to a reading of The Runaway Latkes by Leslie Kimmelman.

Festivities will take place throughout the month of December.

Where: The JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. Visit www. jccmanhattan.org for further details.

II

POUR HOMME

III

Panerai Tuttonero Luminor, price upon request.

(212) 223-1562.

IV V

Baume & Mercier Capeland 10062, $4350. 800.Mercier.

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Tourneau TNY Series 40 Chrono Automatic, $6400.

212.758.5830.

URBAN AGENDA New York City

Tag Heuer SLR Laptimer Chronograph, price upon request.

866.260.0460.

VI

Patek Philippe 5130/1G010 White Gold - Men Complications, price upon request. www.patek.com

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Phillip Stein Small Ceramic, $1775.

Neiman Marcus.

877.777.5321.

VII

Audemars Piguet Tradition Perpetual Calendar, price upon request.

212.688.6644.

POUR FEMME Roberto Coin Enamel & 18K Gold Ring, $1100. Saks Fifth Avenue.

212.753.4000.

Givenchy Antigona Envelope Clutch, $1280. Barneys New York.

212.826.8900.

Portolano Opera Length Leather Gloves, $395. Neiman Marcus. 201.291.1920.

Creed Jardin D’Amalfi Perfume, $640.

212.439.7777.

Van Cleef & Arpels Vintage Alhambra bracelet, 5 motifs, $3700. 212.896.9284

Hearts On Fire Beloved Stud Earrings, $2450. Heartsonfire.com

Tom Ford Padlock AnkleStrap Pump, $1100. Bergdorf Goodman. 888.774.2424.

Yves Salomon Exclusive Shawl Collar Fur Vest, $1595. Intermix. 212.249.7858.

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URBAN BOOKS/MOVIES

KEY LIME PIE WITH THE

“QUEEN

OF QUIPS” {BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS}

Key Lime Pie. Whenever I make it, I think of Nora Ephron. It’s her recipe, you see. Ephron included it in Heartburn, the book she wrote after the break-up of her second marriage. A friend gave me a copy when my second husband “fell in love” with one of his twenty-something graduate students. As my marriage crumbled, I felt a constant pain in my chest, as though a piece of me was smouldering. Heartburn? Nora knew better.

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Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman.

R

In preparing this piece, I enjoyed my own Nora-Fest, immersing myself in her writings and films. I laughed and I cried. Sometimes I laughed till I cried.

In Heartburn, the movie, I spotted Kevin Spacey in an early role as the subway mugger who robs Nora’s character and her entire therapy group. In the last scene, Streep smooshes Key Lime Pie in Nicholson’s face. “The key lime pie is very simple to make,” wrote Ephron, oh so matter-of-factly. “First you line a nine-inch pie plate with a graham cracker crust. Then beat six egg yolks.

Add one cup lime juice (even bottled lime juice will do), two fourteen-ounce cans sweetened condensed milk, and one tablespoon grated lime rind. Pour into the pie shell and freeze.

Remove from freezer and spread with whipped cream. Let sit five minutes before serving.” Perfect for eight friends or one cheating husband. To be on the safe side, since the yolks are uncooked, it’s best to use pasteurized eggs (a piece of advice at which, I’d bet, Nora would have scoffed).

Ephron’s humor was often self-deprecating. Of her time as a White House intern in the summer of 1961, she joked that she was probably the only intern that John F. Kennedy didn’t make a pass at. If there’s such a thing as New Yorkitude, Ephron had it.

Actresses like Meg Ryan, Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton loved working with her.

Ephron wrote her first screenplay, with Alice Arlen, for the 1983 movie Silkwood. Streep starred as Karen Silkwood the anti-nuclear activist who died suspiciously while investigating practices at the plutonium plant where she’d been employed.

Ephron moved to directing with the 1992 comedy This Is My Life, which she co-wrote with her sister Delia Ephron. The romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle followed a year later, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Hanks and Ryan are separated for most of the film and meet at the end on Valentine’s Day atop the Empire State Building, just as Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr had done in the sentimental 1957 An Affair to Remember. Ephron acknowledges the reference. Ryan is shown watching the old movie on television.

Hanks and Ryan got together again in Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, which, in addition to being a romance, is a love letter to Manhattan.

Like her predecessor Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, 1934; It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946), Ephron’s comedies have satisfyingly happy endings. Like her contemporary Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated, 2009) Ephron deftly handles modern relationships. And as the consummate New Yorker, she shares Woody Allen’s love for the city, romanticizing Central Park with

Ephron was the screenwriter and producer for Heartburn, and multiple other feature films. She was credited as director for a total of eight movies.

In Heartburn (1986), Meryl Streep stars as the real life Nora Ephron, and Jack Nicholson stars as her philandering husband.

www.altfg.com

eading the book introduced me to the writer who was a big sister to a whole generation of women; an advance scout, warning of what lay ahead. Wherever life took you, marriage, motherhood, divorce, menopause, and ultimately aging, Ephron had been there. What’s more, she could look back and laugh.

Ephron’s life was her copy and while her personal narratives were her own, they resonated with her readers. She wrote candidly about her failed relationships and difficult childhood (by the time she was 15 her mother was drinking a bottle of Scotch a night and her father had a similar problem). Her subjects were quotidian—the insipidness of egg-white omelets, her apartment in the historic Apthorp Building on the Upper West Side, Teflon pans, even neck wrinkles. “There are chicken necks.

There are turkey gobbler necks. There are elephant necks,” she wrote in the title essay from her 2006 collection I Feel Bad About My Neck. “There are necks with wattles and necks with creases that are on the verge of becoming wattles. ...According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at 43 and that’s that.”

When Ephron held up a mirror, millions of American women saw themselves. One could imagine bumping into her in Zabar’s.

She’d be the perfect dinner guest. Ephron knew food. She sprinkled recipes throughout her writings. Heartburn is studded with them: food as metaphor for feeling. “Nora understood that nothing talked more loudly, or more eloquently, than food,” wrote restaurant critic Frank Bruni in a June 27 Diner’s Journal tribute. No matter how soon Bruni got to a new city restaurant, Nora had already been there. “Nora was a foodie not only before the word became so tiresome and tedious but before it even existed,” he said. “Nora was a foodie in the best way: driven not by snobbery but by the joy of discovery and eager not to one-up you with her latest bliss, but to share it with you, guide you toward it.”

With Director Mike Nichols, Ephron stirred Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Stockard Channing and Jeff Daniels, together with a dash of Carly Simon, for Heartburn, the movie. Streep stars as the real life Nora (heavily pregnant with her second child and juggling motherhood in Washington with a writing career in New York City). Nicholson stars as her philandering husband, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, whose character in the book is described as “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”

Bernstein along with fellow Post reporter Bob Woodward, (he famously exposed the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon) threatened to sue, but wisely thought better of it.

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When Harry Met Sally: pyxurz.blogspot.com, Julie & Julia: moviebuzzers.com

Ephron received one of her three Oscar nomination for When Harry Met Sally... (1986), starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal.

The last movie Ephron directed, Julie & Julia (2009), starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child, drew on her passion for food.

scenes of skaters on the pond, children sledding, and the Rockefeller Center tree as a counterpoint to Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s dawning realization of love in the 1989 film, When Harry Met Sally… Unlike Allen, however, there was nothing self-absorbed about Ephron. She had none of his pretentions to high art.

Ephron received one of her three Oscar nominations for the When Harry Met Sally… screenplay (the others were for Silkwood and Sleepless in Seattle). The film includes what is probably Ephron’s most famous line. Meg Ryan’s simulation of orgasmic ecstasy while seated in a diner across from Billy Crystal has become a classic movie moment. Ryan’s oohs, aahs and table-pounding climax are hilarious. The line that follows, “I’ll have what’s she’s having,” delivered dead pan by an elderly woman patron (played, incidentally, by Director Rob Reiner’s mother Estelle Reiner) caps it all.

The last movie Ephron directed, Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child, drew on her passion for food. “Wait until you see the butter,” Bruni recalled her telling him while the film was in production: “She was talking about one of her favorite shots, of butter melting and sizzling in a pan, and she had taken exquisite pains to make sure it was just so, to make sure that anyone with any sort of appetite at all would see it and feel his mouth water, his stomach rumble.”

Born in 1941 on the Upper West Side, Ephron was the eldest of four daughters, all of whom became writers. When she was four, her parents, Henry Ephron and Phoebe Wolkind, moved to Los Angeles to work as Hollywood screenwriters. They wrote, among other films, Carousel and There’s No Business Like Show Business. Although she lived among Hollywood royalty, Ephron always thought of New York City as her real home and never forgave her parents for the move.

After graduating from Wellesley in 1962, she headed straight back to New York. Her first job was as a mail girl and fact checker at Newsweek. Soon she was contributing to The New York Post, covering events like the arrival of The Beatles. By the late 1960s, she had built a reputation for candidly funny personal essays and incisive profiles for Esquire and New York magazines and was a regular contributor to The New York Times.

To readers like me, Ephron’s life seemed an open book. One thing she kept private, however, was the gravity of her illness. Her death in June came as a shock. It turned out that she’d been diagnosed with leukemia in 2006. Only a few close family members and friends knew.

On August 26, Ginia Bellafante, host of The New York Times’s Big City Book Club (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com /category/big-city-book-club/) celebrated Ephron by reading her 1960s and ’70s articles from Rolling Stone, New York and The New Yorker.

Comparing Ephron to Joan Didion, Bellafante wrote: “Ms. Ephron and Ms. Didion were arguably the two most acclaimed female journalists of the late midcentury, their sensibilities perfectly opposed. One wonders what they made of each other at the parties, in New York and Los Angeles, where they inevitably came into contact, Ms. Didion’s neurasthenia up against Ms. Ephron’s strudel-loving bonhomie.”

Ephron’s talent drew comparisons to Dorothy Parker. Writing in ArtsBeat magazine, John Williams called her “The Queen of Quips.” Here’s why:

“You want monogamy? Marry a swan.”

“When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

“Secret to life? Marry an Italian.”

This last line, one imagines, as a tribute to Ephron’s third husband, author Nick Pileggi, whose 1986 book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family was adapted into the 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. Nick and Nora. How Ephron must have enjoyed the happy coincidence with Dashiell Hammett’s characters Nick and Nora Charles played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the 1934 film The Thin Man. In addition to her films and the recent collections I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006), and I Remember Nothing (2010), check out Ephron’s earlier collections: Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad (1975), Scribble, Scribble (1978).

And take my advice, for pains of the heart, there’s nothing like Nora’s Frozen Key Lime Pie. U

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URBAN FOOD

ESCAPE THE MADDING (HOLIDAY) CROWD

After a quarter century of living, cooking, and eating in New York City, I know where I like to eat and I know exactly why. I first came to the Big Apple to teach at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now the Institute of Culinary Education). Good fortune led me to work as a food editor and senior stylist at the late, and very lamented, Gourmet magazine. My original training had been as an artist (the illustrations in Simone Beck’s Food and Friends: Recipes and Memories from Simca’s Cuisine are mine) and today I continue to satisfy my dual passions—for art and for cooking—as a food stylist, creating beautiful images of food for books, magazines, and the occasional advertisement. My pencils and brushes have long nestled happily alongside my cook’s knife-roll.

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(clockwise from top left) www.figandolive.com, www.themodernnyc.com, -Nisa (flickr), nicknamemiket (flickr).

{BY PAUL GRIMES}

A

s the year draws to a close, thoughts of Holiday shopping—finding just the right something for just the right someone (perhaps yet another tie for Uncle Willie and scarf for Auntie Mae?)—make this cook want to run screaming. I’d prefer to peel a mountain of shrimp, one of my least favorite tasks in the kitchen, than jostle my way through crowds of shoppers in their annual, frantic consumer-contact sport.

By the time you are in the holiday spirit and having romantic visions of a snowy Christmas in a Currier and Ives landscape, I will have already put together and styled eight Thanksgivings, half-a-dozen Christmases and fried enough Hanukkah latkes to last several lifetimes. So when people ask me “What are you making this holiday?,” I say “Reservations!” But it’s the festive season, and I must stare down my inner Scrooge. The best way to do this, I’ve found, is to leaven duty with delight; life’s revenge is to eat well.

Here are three recommendations for a well-deserved break if you find yourself in the city on a shopping expedition. All are swell.

May I suggest you gently and carefully remove this page from the magazine and put it in your back pocket so that after you have taken care of everyone on your list, you can treat yourself to a meal far beyond the allure of any sugar plum. All three are guaranteed to either cure the holiday blues or maintain that holiday buzz.

FIG & OLIVE (10 EAST 52nd St., 212.319.2002) Upper Madison Avenue has always been a tony shopping destination but has recently also become seriously hip. At Fig & Olive, a quick turn between Madison and Fifth, the street hustle and bustle is magically transformed into a Mediterranean getaway. The friendly staff will offer you a choice of seating at the spacious bar, at an elevated communal table, or, if you prefer, traditional table service. You can eat light or enjoy full service from executive chef Pascal Lorange. Lorange’s dishes are sure to transport you with their sunny, bright, robust flavors. Whet your appetite on a selection of crostini, cured meats, cheeses, crudo and interesting vegetables. Then the full menu will hop, skip, and jump you through the flavors of France, Italy, and Spain. Hey, who knew you could be so suddenly and delightfully far from the madding crowd.

THE MODERN (Museum of Modern Art, 9 West 53rd St., 212.333.1220) has such a discreet entrance, separate from the museum, that I tend to walk past it every time. As you enter the restaurant, with its minimal design nod to the museum, you’ll immediately feel the calm after, or during, the storm. Hand yourself (and your bulky bags) over to the ever-gracious and accommodating staff of Danny Meyer’s acclaimed Union Square Hospitality Group, which runs the museum’s three dining options. The cocktail sections or tables are just right for lunch or early dinner and more formal destination dining is available in the adjacent space overlooking the Modern’s sculpture garden (book ahead) where the floral designs are definitely museum quality. The French-American cuisine of Alsatian-born chef Gabriel Kreuther excites the eye as well as the palate and well-versed bartenders will help you navigate not only the drinks offerings but as many choices of small plates and nibbles as you could hope to find in a Christmas stocking. The diverse menu here reminds us that to eat in New York is to be at the center of the culinary universe.

THE PLAZA FOOD HALL (The Plaza Hotel, One West 59th St. Concourse, 5th Ave. & 59th St., 212.986.9260) at the Plaza Hotel is the perfect destination if you’re traveling in a pack with family or friends. Even the most finicky of tastes will find satisfaction. The basement of the renowned hotel has been tastefully and excitingly transformed into the likes of a European food hall. A hostess will show you to one of the elevated tables or counters scattered throughout the hall, and no matter where you are seated you can order anything from the many stations: the grill, pasta, pizza oven, oyster bar, sushi bar, salads of all kinds, noodles and dumplings, a taqueria (for tacos), artisanal cheeses, and cured meats. Fun, too, to simply wander around. Not only can you eat like a king, but you can shop like one. There are a zillion items to gift the cook in your life. Now that’s the kind of shopping I enjoy. U

H OL IDAY 20 1 2

URBAN AGENDA New York City

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november

calendar highlights Ongoing Events in November: The New York Comedy Festival.

The New York Chocolate Show.

Mon, November

12

Madonna, the queen of pop, stops in New York City as part of her 2012 World Tour; Madison Square Garden.

Tues, November

13

“A Civil War Christmas” by the New York Theatre Workshop (through Dec. 30).

The Museum at FIT presents a fashion conversation on “Swedish Fashion: H&M, Acne, and Much More.” The guest panel will discuss the prominent role that Sweden has played in the world of fashion and design. The presentation will include guest appearances

by Mikael Schiller, CEO of Acne Studios, Catarina Midby of H&M, and many more.

Thurs, November

15

The “Legendary Movie Stars” series returns to the 92nd Street Y. The series is devoted to classic movie stars who defined glamour. Howard Oboler leads the discussion and shows film clips focused on the style of such film greats as Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. For more information, visit www.92y.org.

The Milliners Guild hosts its fifth annual homage to St. Catherine, the patron saint of hatmakers, with a promenade through midtown. The parade begins at the Millinery Center Synagogue between 38th and 39th Streets.

16

Fri, November

Opening of the New York Transit Museum’s Holiday Train Show. Wander through the 34-foot long display detailed with miniature versions of NYC landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building; New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex (through Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013).

Sun, November

18

The Brooklyn Museum presents an arts workshop for children called, “Sparkle, Shimmer, Reflect, and Shine: Art and Light.” In this class, children will learn how artists from JeanMichel Othoniel to Claude Monet worked with light and will use this knowledge to create their own masterpieces.

Tues, November

20

Enjoy free coffee and pastries at select dog-friendly parks in Central Park for New York’s Central Park Bagel Bark.

Writer and comedian Gary Shteyngart reads from his satiric novels Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan; BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn.

Sun, November

25

Free Fashion Walking Tour through New York City’s Garment District. Visit private showrooms, a sample sale, tour Mood Fabrics, and more. The tour is free and begins at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 39th Street (also meets December 9).

Wed, November

28

The 80th annual Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting, Rockefellercenter.com (on view through January 7).

“Don Giovanni” at the Metropolitan Opera (through December 20).

Opening night of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 2012 Season.

12/5

11/22

11/16

Thurs, November

29

36th Annual Margaret Mead Film Festival; American Museum of Natural History (through Dec. 2).

Wed, November

21

Watch the popular balloons from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade being inflated (it’s a lot less crowded than the parade, itself); held near the American Museum of Natural History.

Thurs, November

Wed, November

14

The Who’s Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey perform their classic rock opera, “Quadrophenia”; Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, NY.

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URBAN AGENDA New York City

Sat, November

22

The 86th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Macys. com

17

Annual Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Gardens, Nybg.org (through January 13).

New York Road Runner’s Club presents the NYC 60K, New York City’s premiere ultramarathon race, nyrr.org.

Fri, November

23

The New York City Ballet performs George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker”, David H. Koch Theater; Lincoln Center, Nycballet.com (through Dec. 30).

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Fri, November

30

The Red Hot Series presents a musical tribute to Cuba featuring musical artists Alexander Abreu, CuCu Diamantes, and Kelvis; BAM, Brooklyn.

On-going Exhibitions: Bergdorf Goodman celebrates its 111th Anniversary with 111 topdesigner pieces created for the occasion. Expect special retail exhibits from everyone from Marc Jacobs to Valentino.

“Ivy Style” looks at the history of preppy men’s fashions with more than 60 looks dating back to 1919; The Museum at FIT (through January 2013).

Experience “Lilliput, Artwork Along the High Line”; The High Line (through December 1).

“Katherine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen” examines the private and public fashion choices of Hollywood legend Katherine Hepburn; New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (through January 2013).

“EletriCity: Powering New York’s Rails”; New York Transit Museum (through December 30).

“Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art”; Brooklyn Museum (through February 2013).

The 30th Next Wave Festival; Brooklyn Academy of Music (through January 2013).

“Bernini: Sculpturing in Clay”; The Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 2013).

“Matisse: In Search of True Painting” (through March 2013).

“Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust”; Museum of Jewish Heritage (through April 2013).

“Battle of Brooklyn, August 27, 1776”; Harbor Defense Museum (through December 31).

“Journey to the Stars”; American Museum of Natural History (through December 31).

“Edith Wharton’s New York City: A Backward Glance”; New York Society Library (through January 1).

“Spy: The Secret World of Espionage”; Discovery Times Square (through December 31).

Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites; American Museum of Natural History (through December 31).

“Masterworks: Jewels of the Collection”; Rubin Museum of Art (through December 31).

“Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence”; American Museum of Natural History (through January 6).

All of December:

Wed, December

Holiday Shop Windows.

Sat, December

1

Whitney Museum hosts “Family Fun Art Workshop: From Wegman to Warhol.” For families with kids ages 6-10, come learn what Pop art is all about! Families will discover how artists explore themes such as popular culture, celebrities, and consumer culture in America (also, on Dec. 8 and 15).

5

Andrea Bocelli performs at Barclays Center, Brooklyn.

Artist and former Talking Heads musician, David Byrne delves into his personal history with a discussion of the mechanics of songwriting and musicmaking; Celeste Bartos Forum, Humanities and Social Sciences Library at The New York Public Library.

12/31

Tour the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s new visitor center, BLDG 92 (through December 30).

Fri, December

7

Baroque performance by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Alice Tully Hall Starr Theater.

12/13

Sat, December

8

Lighting of the World’s Largest Hanukkah Menorah (through December 16).

Thurs, December

13

8PM Legendary rock-group The Rolling Stones perform at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ.

Sun, December

Tour the 9/11 Memorial “Reflecting Absence” by Michael Arad (open through December 27).

Gazillion Bubble Show; New World Stages (through December 30).

One the American Museum of Natural History’s most popular seasonal exhibitions, “The Butterfly Conservatory” runs through May 2013.

First Saturdays for Families at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. New Museum First Saturdays for Families are free of charge and offer hands-on programs, docent led tours, and access to all of the latest exhibits.

The New American Wing; The Metropolitan Museum of Art (through December 30).

Photographic installation by Gabriel Orozco; Guggenheim Museum of New York (through January 13).

Screening of The Met’s, Live in HD “La Clemenza di Tito”; Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“Activist New York”; Museum of the City of New York (through December 31).

“Picasso Black & White”; Guggenheim Museum of New York (through January 23).

Tues, December

“Behind the Screen”; Museum of the Moving Image (through December 31).

“Tokyo 1955-1970: A New AvantGarde” at the MoMA (through February 25).

4

African Art, New York and the Avant-Garde exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (through March 2013).

H ol iday 201 2

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Brandenburg Concertos by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Alice Tully Hall Starr Theater (through December 18).

Tues, December

18

The iconic singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen performs live at Barclays Center; Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Mon, December

31

Times Square New Year’s Eve Celebration, Timessquarenyc.org.

New York Road Runners Emerald Nuts Midnight Run, Nyrr.org.

URBAN AGENDA New York City

57

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For more information about properties, the market in general, or your home in particular, please give me a call.

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URBAN AGENDA New York City

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HAVE YOU REALLY EXPERIENCED ALL THERE IS? CONTINENTAL GTC V8

The new Bentley Continental GTC V8 promises an open-top driving experience that is as refined as it is exhilarating.

As the engine accelerates through the smooth 8-speed transmission, the revs build taking the menacing growl to an awe-inspiring roar. It is the sound of the all-wheel drive GTC’s visceral 4.0-litre twin-turbo delivering unadulterated sports performance, dashing from zero to 60mph in a mere 4.7 seconds. This is a Bentley like no other.

DIFFERENTLY DRIVEN.

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Bentley Parsippany 250 U.S. Highway 46 Parsippany NJ 07054 USA For infomation call 973.575.7755 or visit www.paulmillerbentley.com

BENTLEY PARSIPPANY

Fuel consumption figures for the Continental GTC V8 in mpg: City 14; Highway 24; Combined 17. EPA-estimated fuel economy. Actual mileage may vary.

The name `Bentley’ and the `B’ in wings device are registered trademarks. © 2012 Bentley Motors, Inc. Model shown: Continental GTC V8.