7.1.10: Amazing summer day in New York

Amazing summer day in New York

Sidewalk perusing. 6:30 PM. Photo: JH.

July 1, 2010. Temperatures in the low 70s and no humidity (that you could feel), with a slight breeze. Heavenly Noo Yawk.

At the Michael’s lunch (it’s Wednesday), Arie and Coco Kopelman were lunching with Colt Givner and his missus, Pamela Fiori. Peggy Siegal was confabbing with Bronson van Wyck (of van Wyck & van Wyck); the glamorous writer of tell-tales Phoebe Eaton, in from her LA days. Around the room: Jim Abernathy, Barbara Liberman, Alexandra Trower and Kate Betts (former college pals); Media Bistro’s Diane Clehane with Laurie Aronson, Lisa Linden, Hannah Arnold; MediaBistro’s founder Laurel Touby with Christa Babcock of Sirum XM; icon authoress Pamela Keogh with Liz McNeil of People; Steve Haft, Christian Leone with Susan Plagemann; Felicia Taylor with Harriet Weintraub; Amanda Haynes-Dale, Joe Versace and guest, Susan Mercandetti; Quest’s Chris Meigher with his jack-of-all-Managing Editors Georgina Schaeffer; Missy Godfrey, David Poltrack, Craig Schiffer, John Silberman.

After lunch, I walked my lunch date back to her office, and because it was such a nice day I decided to it hoof up Madison Avenue and work off some of those lunch calories instead of quickly grabbing a cab back to East End Avenue. I always like the Madison Avenue stroll. It’s always a video as it is one of those Manhattan highways that is quintessential. It’s the Upper East Side’s Meatpacking. Yes.

The Barney’s windows are showstoppers. The Crate and Barrel windows can turn people who couldn’t care less into decorators or compulsive shoppers. The jewelers like Leviev, Graff, David Yurman, Damian. The parfumers like Creed, the unique boutiques of the names like Oscar, Carolina, Donna. All those shops where they sell sheets for a thousand bucks a sheet (sans pillowcase etc.).


	Barney's.

	Crate&Barrel.

	Fred Leghton.

When I first came to New York out of college (early 1960s), Madison Avenue, like Fifth, was four lanes running both north and south. Thirty or forty years before that (late 1920s), Madison Avenue in this part of town was still just going commercial. A lot of those brownstones that you pass by now with their first and second floor commercial installations were still family residences of the real WASPs of 19th and early 20th New York society. The billionaires and parvenus lived on Fifth. But the Upper Sets lived in their “modest” houses on Madison Avenue (when they were in town). Like the brownstones on the side streets.

I moved away from New York in the late 1970s when I went to live in Los Angeles. When I came back almost fifteen years later, much was the same. And much had changed. Moving back to the Upper East Side I saw on the more eastern avenues (York, First, Second) how the old had been swept almost entirely away by the new.

One of my personal fascinations when I was re-familiarizing myself with the city was to recall my experiences/histories/relationships with certain individuals and businesses in those buildings. It’s nonsensical consideration, I know, but it remains vivid, and I am one for tracing memories; and observing changes brought about by time and Mother Nature. In Manhattan, which is my old stomping ground, the changes are sometimes astounding, while that which has remained continues to stimulate wonder.

For example: in my early days here, the northeast corner of 66th Street and Madison was a pharmacy. A great old apartment building, occupied in those days by many who’d grown up on the avenue and sold their house off to business. This was their drug store, and like any Madison Avenue shop, it was first rate. Today that corner shop is Fred Leighton Jewelers.

Two blocks up on the west side corner of 68th Street, at number 11, an apartment house, probably still a cooperative was where Dr. Daniel Casriel (a founder of DayTop Village rehab) conducted his group therapy sessions which this writer attended (with his then wife).

The groups, which were immensely popular (almost the way tattoos are today), usually had 15-to-25 in them – in a circle. When everyone was settled in with their coffee, tea, etc., the therapist/leader would ask if there were anyone who had a “feeling” they wanted to talk about. And so it began. A lot of noise – a lot of feelings, that is – went on in those first floor rooms.

God knows what it was like for the people who lived above. Anger and Pain were expressed in vivid Technicolor with matching decibels. It was without question, informative and cathartic. Dr. Casriel became the soup de jour of the pampered classes and the generally limping along. Many of us went three, four, five times a week. All was unloaded, ad infinitum. It’s where I learned that very little of “it” really matters.

There was even a famous people’s group which was only open to famous people and a select few non-famers. Movie stars, brothers-in-laws of Presidents with their mistresses, and Big Business Tycoons. Everyone expressing a feeling. Get Angry!! One of our therapist/leaders was a very dynamic and often intimidating fellow named Ralph Ricci. (his pronunciation: Ricky), He eventually married a girl who also came to Group or whom he met in Group. They eventually had a child named Christina who became famous out there in far Hollywood. She pronounces it Ree-chi.

All this from my walk up Madison Avenue yesterday afternoon after lunch. Passing by Nello’s, it’s impossible to resist looking to see who’s sitting on the sidewalk under the awning.

Yesterday afternoon was a photo op. I saw Sonja Morgan (now of Housewives of New York) sitting at a table with two other women. I stopped and turned to say hello and discovered she was with LuAnn, the Countess De Lesseps and LuAnn’s niece, Nicole Nadeau.

I pulled out my Canon PowerShot and took those two pictures. It looked like they’d just finished their lunch and were relaxing watching the world go by. LuAnn told me Nicole was about to start in another “reality” show.

Back to reality: Double Exposure on Madison Avenue. LuAnn, the Countess De Lesseps, LuAnn’s niece, Nicole Nadeau, and Sonja Morgan chillin' at Nello's.

I’ve known LuAnn and Sonja for a long time. I met Sonja when I first came back from Los Angeles and she was the mostest-hostess at San Pietro. She seemed to know every important mover and shaker businessman/tycoon in New York and could call them and tell them to get their ... in to the restaurant for lunch. Marketing, New York style.

When I met LuAnn she was living in Malta with her husband, an international businessman and hail-fellow-well-met, friends of a mutual friend. It would never have occurred to me that either woman would ever have ended up as national celebrities on television shows. Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minute Fame was still a funny idea. Sort of.

I’ve only seen a bit of those shows. LuAnn’s character became what it evidently is, although it’s not personally familiar to me. The LuAnn I met was a wife-companion at the time. They seemed like a cool international, low-key, hip couple. When our friend told me LuAnn was interested in an acting career I was surprised. She struck me as one of those women who was the man’s woman, very cozy and comme il faut, very European sensibility. But often we don’t know people, no matter how easy they seem.

Sonja’s life is a real New York, Manhattan drama. Sonja is one of those women who comes to New York to make their way and learns what the world is like, and learns well. She’s a woman of her generation: independent by nature, self-reliant, friendly, curious, and ambitious. If you don’t know her drama and her saga, eventually it will all be available to you because Sonja has taken that road not taken.

Although I don’t know either of these women very well, I know them well enough to have a sense of who they are, and I’ve always liked them very much. And, I know there’s a lot I don’t know. I like them for that too.