Immune Deficiency
Talks between Italy and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee and benefactor Shelby White have bogged down, says the New York Times, over White’s demand for a lifetime laissez-passe in exchange for nine objects (part of a great antiquities collection created with her late husband, the financier Leon Levy) that Italy contends were illegally looted from […]
Caryl Palin, R.I.P.
Another death at 740 Park Avenue: Caryl Entratter Palin, a resident of 740 Park since 1973, the wife of developer Mickey Palin and the daughter of Smilin’ Jack Entratter, the one-time manager of the Copacabana and the Stork Club and part-owner of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas is remembered in today’s New York Times..
Making the Mummies Cringe
Does the Metropolitan Museum of Art practice censorship behind the scenes? After its recent, fabulous, sex-charged show of German art of the 1920s, Glitter and Doom, you wouldn’t think so, but arts journalist Judith H. Dobrzynski says otherwise. A new book, Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Danny Danziger, described […]
Roots, Ralph-Style
In the coverage of the opening of the first Polo store in Russia near Moscow’s Red Square in Friday’s Women’s Wear Daily, Ralph Lauren‘s son David Lauren is quoted saying his family had visited a genealogist there, because “my dad really wanted to trace his roots here.” Funny, as that job has already been done […]
Sell, Steve, Sell
The New York Observer’s Max Abelson reports a new high water mark in Manhattan apartment sales — a $50 million contract for a flat in the unfinished Plaza Hotel condominium. A year ago, a broker told me that if Blackstone Group chairman Steve Schwarzman put his 740 Park Avenue duplex on the market it would […]
One for the Books
Though it no longer holds the record for the most expensive co-op apartment in New York, 740 Park remains at the pinnacle, says The Cooperator. When New York Stock Exchange boss John Thain bought Enid Annenberg Haupt’s two-bedroom apartment there last year for $27.5 million, it was “the equivalent of an extraordinary $7,638 per square […]
Brokerback Mountain
In today’s New York Observer, real estate reporter Max Abelson reveals that there are now two — count ’em, 2! — vacant duplexes at the summit of Manhattan real estate, 740 Park Avenue, and calls 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building “a nose-twitching biography of the building.” Janet Coleman, the 89-year-old […]
The Very Model of a Modern Hedge-Fund Billionaire
Noted without comment: 740 Park’s Steve Schwarzman and wife Christine Hearst rock out at Dan’s hamptons.com.
Leo Roars
What’s now called “Anna’s Party,” the annual benefit at the Metropolitan Museum for its Costume Institute, held last night, was once a society party, but now, chaired by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, it’s become a celebrated celebrity petting zoo. According to the New York Times report, social leaders like Annette de la Renta and Jayne […]
When Worlds Collide, Pt. 2
I’ve long thought it odd that in the five years since I published a biography of fashion eminence Ralph Lauren, I’d not run into him even once in public. So I guess it’s not odd that Fishbowl NY thought it worthy of comment when I finally did. But what I like more than the name […]