A Blast From the Past:The Guys in the (New York) Dolls
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of the New York Dolls debut record, England’s Guardian has resurrected a profile of the band (that I wrote as a neophyte journalist in summer 1973 for England’s New Musical Express) for its weekly “From Rock’s Backpages” feature.
John Casablancas, Elite Models founder, R.I.P.
John Casablancas, 70, the agent who invented the modern fashion modeling business at Elite Models in the 1970s, died last night after a long, courageous bout with cancer, in Brazil where he lived with his second wife and their family. “He was the most magical man in this business; definitely a prince,” says photographer Jacques […]
Isn’t it rich? Extell on Extell’s excellence
According to this Extell promo video, “the buildings that shaped this famed skyline”–the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building–are the context in which to view the real estate development company’s towers like the Aldyn and the as-yet-unenclosed One57. “We aspire to create a reputation as the very best,” intones the narrator as computer-graphics-enhanced images of […]
Message in a cyber-bottle: Rogues’ Gallery reviewed.
Four years post-publication, Rogues’ Gallery endures and has just been reviewed in The Epoch Times. James Grundvig says the book is “a tour-de-force” full of “dead-on observations” that “brings [to] life an unseen dimension of New York City in the show and lore of high society.”
If I Were A Carpenter’s House (I’d be worth $1.9 million)
The Sag Harbor cottage that I profile in my latest Unreal Estate column in the July issue of Avenue on the Beach is a shingled exemplar of upward mobility, having passed from the hands of a carpenter to those of an angel investor over the course of 150-or-so years. Condi Rice makes a cameo appearance, […]
House of Outrageous Fortune: Now available for pre-orders
House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address is now available for pre-orders on Amazon by clicking here. Publication date is March 11, 2014. I’ll post a bn.com link as soon as it, too, becomes available.
A Modest Proposal (for added airline income)
That’s me, at right, at Antonio Lamela and Richard Roger’s amazing Madrid Barajas Airport yesterday, en route to London and thence home to New York. I look happy, don’t I? I wasn’t, by the time we got home. Seated behind us on the trans-Atlantic flight was a mother with a small child who was old […]
Koch is Chill(ing)
Via Bloomberg View, author William D. Cohan adds his voice to the chorus of condemnation aimed at billionaire Tea Party pal and 740 Park resident David Koch (shown greeting the late New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg at an obviously bipartisan 2010 party) in an essay titled “David Koch’s Chilling Effect on Public Television.” Cohan is […]
Rogues’ Gallery: Still censored after all these years
Ada Louise Huxtable, the late, great architecture critic who died in January, was remembered yesterday at a memorial tribute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an institution she both praised and criticized. So on the way in, I visited the museum’s store to see if by some miracle, Rogues’ Gallery–my history of the museum’s founders, […]
Is Wainscott the new Montauk?
As lines of cars head east tonight on the trail of tears, aka the Long Island Expressway, into the first nice weekend of summer 2013, thoughts turn to real estate, naturally. Avenue asked me to conduct a roundtable with the top dogs in east end realty earlier this spring and the results appear in the […]