Town & Country Dec/Jan 2021

1985 SOCIAL REGISTER Nina Griscom, the ’80s It girl, model, and entrepreneur—who died in January at age 65—was the rare uptown socialite with a true rebel streak. She appeared on T&C’s cover three times, and she wrote in a 2012 column that she picked up her pack-a-day Marlboro habit at a Swiss boarding school, age 12. She ran with Bill Blass and Blaine Trump and made Park Avenue fun again (in her early sixties she got a porcupine tattoo on her forearm to support a sick friend). On December 8 Christie’s will auction off pieces from her jewelry collection, giving a new generation the chance to own some of her unconventional New York style, the kind of larger-than-life flair that draws so many to the Imperial City.…

Because when I say I don’t, the universal response is “Oh, you’re a real New Yorker,” and nothing makes me prouder. As this year draws to a close, we pay tribute to the city many of us at T&C call home. It’s a town that has taken an especially hard hit in 2020, and when we sent an incredible group of photographers, stylists, and writers into its streets to chronicle some of New York’s most indelible characters, we confirmed what we’d known all along: It’s the people. This issue is really a salute to all the cities we love, the ones that we yearn to see again, that inspire us and teach us and feed us. But it’s a celebration most of all of city people, that fierce, resilient ragtag…

WHAT’S #VERYTANDC HERE? The history: Throughout this issue dedicated to New York City, we pay tribute to the places, people, and institutions that make up the fabric of the city. And what would New York be without its museums? They took a hard hit during the pandemic, but plans for the future soldiered on. A look at all the projects underway around the city (the new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem, designed by Adjaye Associates and slated to open in 2021, is shown here) offers proof that New York is as alive as ever. The news: The Studio Museum is just the tip of the iceberg. Downtown, Rem Koolhaas’s OMA is designing a second building for the New Museum. Uptown, the Frick is temporarily moving into the Met Breuer building…

No, things were not better then, I remind myself whenever I succumb to bouts of nostalgia about the glory days of New York. The defining moment, in a supercharged city whose essence is change, is always and axiomatically now. “I despise when people say things used to be so great,” says Kim Hastreiter, who as a founder of Paper magazine has had a front row seat at New York’s cultural arena for more than three decades. “It is always better now. Now is when it’s best.” The topic is club life. If it has seemed to some in recent years that Manhattan clubbing has died (an all but inescapable conclusion even before the pandemic), they just weren’t looking in the right places. Yes, gone are the warehouses, the storefronts, the dive…

The 1980s were good to me. My career and family flourished, yet, looking back, I feel some embarrassment. So many of today’s social ills took root in that decade. Not that I was oblivious, but I was wrapped up in my own concerns. I feel similarly mixed emotions when I think about The Bonfire of the Vanities. In 1990 Brian De Palma agreed to give me full access to the movie he was making—an adaptation of Bonfire, the 1987 Tom Wolfe novel that had been embraced as a metaphor for everything that was wrong with 1980s New York. In the book, Wolfe lampooned the city’s racial politics, corrupt judicial system, rampant gentrification, barracuda press corps, and ethnic hostilities. It was high-octane social commentary as entertainment, and Bonfire became an instant sensation. Warner…

Every New York story is ultimately about real estate, and The Apartment is no different. Billy Wilder’s 1960 film centers on the action at 51 West 67th Street, where Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter plays reluctant gatekeeper to his officemates’ trysts. But like so many movie domiciles, this one was too good to be true. What we see in the film isn’t New York but Hollywood’s version of it; the titular residence is a fabrication, shot on a soundstage. For all its movie magic, however, The Apartment does tell us something true: that what fuels the city is New Yorkers. This season Manhattan is striving to recover from a strike against what The Apartment argues is the city’s soul: density. “Wilder wanted the glamour of New York but also its anonymity,” says historian…