I was riding home in a cab mid-afternoon. Turning into 79th Street off of Park, we were passed by two ambulances and two unmarked cars with sirens and flashing red lights. At Third Avenue we were stopped to let more ambulances and unmarked police cars pass. This kind of thing can annoy in New York, incidentally; mainly the unmarked cars with sirens. Politicians use them to avoid the traffic we have to sit in. All the time.

Then as we crossed over York Avenue, I could see a lot of flashing red lights seven blocks down in the vicinity of 72nd Street. Turning off 79th onto East End, there were small crowds of people on the sidewalk and in the roadway, all staring, gaping ominously south and up. At 80th, I looked behind and could see the bright orange flames and black smoke bursting out of some apartment windows in a brick tower a few blocks away. I got out of the cab. The cabbie got out. Everyone was getting out of their cabs. A neighbor of mine was on her cell, telling her husband that a small plane had just crashed into an apartment building. She was worried about her child who was in a day care.

It was obviously not a big plane – at first the report was a helicopter -- and the fire was roaring out of only three or four windows, although there was a stream of black soot extending above and all the way down the side of the building. But everyone was worried about another attack.

I wasn’t. I believed it easily was a plane or a helicopter. Maybe that’s the optimist in me (or the damned fool, depending). We see aircraft all the time flying up and down the East River channel space. Three or four miles away, as the crow flies, across the river, is LaGuardia. Sometimes in the early morning or late at night, the planes take off every few minutes in a flight pattern that seems to run right across this neighborhood.

Sometimes the noise and the vibration is so intense, you wonder just how high up they are as they are passing over. And you wonder if we’re safe in these apartment houses. Safe from accidents. Answer: yes we are, generally speaking. But then things happens, like today. The city is no pasture, or wooded area, or span of water. The city is canyons of brick, glass, concrete and steel. Where hundreds of thousands of people live in a few densely packed miles of brick, glass, concrete and steel. There’s no place to go but us. That requires an orderliness that man does always provide, that is simply god-given miraculous. The jaywalkers run the odds every moment of their lives. Hundreds of thousands of them. The guy in the plane who really has no business flying around the metropolis ran the odds.

Later I stood on my terrace to take a shot of the catastrophe eleven blocks south. The fire looked like it was mostly out. I hoped that there were no people or creatures in the immediate vicinity of that apartment that was burning out. I hoped that no one was home. That was a false hope because there’s no way there weren’t people and creatures in the floor areas of any of these builidings. Let’s hope they were able to get out of the way. But this part of town, around three in the weekday afternoons is jammed with people – kids getting out of school, and business and neighborhood people.

About five in the afternoon, it started to rain, raining very hard. And windy. It came out that the plane was owned by the Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, who was aboard. I read somewhere on the internet a quote from one of the team executives who said previously that all Cory Lidle cared about was gambling and flying around in that plane of his. Fate snapped.

Barbara Walters and Sir Howard Stringer at last night's Great Performers Fall Gala at Avery Fisher Hall.

Me and My Scaasi. The rain and wind continued into the evening. Last night’s social calendar meant there were going to be lot of wet ones around the city, a lot of business for the cabbies and the livery chauffeurs. The Boy’s Club of New York had their annual Fall Dance at Cipriani 42nd Street. The Skin Cancer Foundation held their benefit “Step and Repeat” over at the Pierre. Over at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, The Great Performers Fall Gala honored Sir Howard Stringer of SONY with a dinner and performance.

At Lotus down on West 26th Street, the ASPCA was holding a benefit “Please wear your best denim” which is still going on as I write this (at 11:30 pm, Wednesday). And down at the Natonal Arts Club on Gramercy Park South in the glorious but spiffy old Samuel Tilden mansion, they were honoring fashion designer Arnold Scaasi with their Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement.

The National Arts Club is a New York treasure located in another New York treasure, Gramercy Park which is located between Park and Third Avenues and 20th and 21st Street. The club was founded by a New York Times literary and art critic Charles de Kay in 1898. But before that the building had been the home of Samuel Tilden, once a governor of the State of New York as well as the 1876 Presidential candidate who won the popular vote and lost the electoral college vote (or something thereabouts or slightly vague thanks to the inclination of politicians allegedly operating for the public good). Sorry, couldn’t resist.

When Governor Tilden bought the place in 1860 he gave it a massive overhaul. By then Gramercy Park was one of the smartest addresses in the city (the rich and powerful had barely begun to move uptown) and the closest thing to an English residential square. Tilden hired Calvert Vaux, the designer of Central Park to “victorianize” the façade with sandstone, bay windows and Gothic ornamentation, as was the “in” fashion at the time. John Lafarge created stained glass ceilings for the interior. The fireplaces were made by Italian wood carvers. Donald MacDonald wrought a unique stained glass dome for the building. It was a big house, tall, spacious and grand. The rich, the powerful, the influential crossed the threshold to call on the governor and they were surely impressed with the décor which remains beautifully intact today.

The club acquired the house in 1906. Its early members included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and artists such as Robert Henri, Frederic Remington, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, Saint-Guadens, Dadniel Chester French, Anny Hyatt Huntington, Alfred Steiglitz, Victor Herbert, Walter Damrosch, Stanford White. Current members include Martin Scorcese, Ethan Hawke, Robert Redford, Uma Thurman.

From the looks of last night’s reception for Arnold Scaasi, the club has a burgeoning and enthusiastic membership. There must have been a couple hundred at the seated dinner in a dining room with walls lined with the art work of its members past and present. At cocktails beforehand, the reception rooms were full of guests. Arnold was one of the last two arrive, and there was a small gaggle of photographers flashing and snapping him and his glamorous old pals Joan Rivers and Kitty Carlisle Hart as they arrived on the landing. In the reception room right before him was a black and white Scaasi number on a dress dummy. It had been made for Elizabeth Taylor when she introduced her popular perfume.

Arnold Scaasi, besides being a famous fashion designer who’s dressed First Ladies, movie and stage stars as well as the socialites hither and yon, is a well known citizen of New York. Well known like a well known neighbor. You may not know him but you almost feel like you do. He and his partner of forty-four years Parker Ladd have a high social profile here, in the Hamptons and in Palm Beach. They also have an active participation in steering Literacy Partners which they developed with Liz Smith into a multi-million dollar philanthropic project assisting people in how to read – a big big big problem in our society and culture today.

But Arnold is more than that. He has controversial personality amongst his peers. Droll, laconic at times, acerbic, a tone that can imply the threat of petulance if you carry things too far, and the first one to laugh at any foibles of his that are pointed out: he has the talent to amuse. The end result is an enormously creative personality who can dominate any situation. Last night was one of those situations.

Chrishunda Lee

The tributes were all about that. Introduced by the lovely young television personality Chrishunda Lee, Joyce Brown, the President of F.I.T., wearing a Scaasi explained how the man just knew how to make a woman feel good, look great and glamorous and leave a lasting impression. Ms. Brown’s school gave a Scaasi retrospective four years ago. After Joyce Brown, New York Tines photographer Bill Cunningham  told us about attending Arnold’s first fashion show in 1956. Mr. Cunningham, the elfin, white-haired peripatetic and ubiquitious lensman of social and fashion New York, moves so quickly at this game that one rarely hears a word, even so much as a voice out of him. Seriously. He’s always working, looking for those shots. Last night he spoke for about ten minutes, filling us in on the details of Arnold’s first fashion show (in the Baroque Room of the old Plaza), as if he were the camera. Everyone was amazed to hear him speak, and at such length; in itself a tribute to his friend Arnold.  In short, he said, Arnold had astonished and wowed ‘em at his very first show.

Then Liz Smith gave testimony to the whys and wherefores of her longtime friend. She and Parker and Arnold are bonded for eternity because of the outstanding work they’ve done in raising the millions and millions to make Literacy Partners effective with impact on the society. Then William Ivey Long spoke. Mr. Long is one of Broadway’s and Hollywood’s most successful costume designers with more Tony Awards under his belt than maybe any other individual. He’s also a fellow with great interest in the creative work of others. As well as great interest (in a way, a fan’s interest) in the lives of the rich, wildly eccentric, extremely creative socialites, movie stars, artists, designers; anyone whose result glitters and glows, which now of course includes his persona. No small accident then that he knows Arnold Scaasi.

In his testimonial to Arnold he told about meeting him for the first time and Arnold’s recounting his first experience designing costumes for a ballet. The upshot of the anecdote (where the ballet’s director changed all of Arnold’s costumes and reduced most of them to barely a memory of the original) was that Arnold had taught William a lesson that he never forgot: stick to what you do best and forget the rest.

There was a brief film of Arnold talking about his career. He came here from Canada, the son of a prosperous businessman and a woman who loved fashion. When he was four, he said, he took one of his mother’s evening gowns and cut off the sleeves. There, that’s better. It’s been like ever since with him. Liz Smith said in her speech that Arnold said he struggled in the beginning of his career but she didn’t really believe that. Arnold was not one to struggle. He was a natural and just made it happen. Now it just happens when he’s around. Like last night at the National Arts Club where everyone had a very good time, very amusing too, thanks to Arnold Scaasi.