The
reaction to the protests at the University of Missouri, Yale, and other colleges have not escaped the
eagle-like attention of the Weekly Hate Read. That class of pundits that exists like a crusty eczema on the face of society screamed bloody murder at the idea that students who navigate a
cruel and
unequal world might benefit from "
safe spaces." The
santorum spewing forth from the
pusillanimous cry-baby contingent, drawn largely from that stratum of aggrieved and persecuted white, middle-class suburban journalism-school has-beens, has only sharpened our focus on the safe spaces of the
Birkin bag set.
And thus this week our
Grey Lady's Real Estate section delivers (and how) in the euphemistically titled column "
What I Love," otherwise known as, "What I Bought with
Blood Money and Cannot Sell Until It Appreciates Enough to Trade Up for an
Appropriately Sized Estate in the Hamptons." This week gives us an
inside peek into the life of one
Daisy Prince, hapless yet upwardly mobile
bobo:
When Daisy Prince and her husband, Hugh Chisholm, returned to New York in 2009 after eight years in London, they moved to Greenwich Village, where she had wanted to live since she was a college student in the 1990s. “I attended Barnard, and you spend most of your time trying to go downtown to a club or hear music,” she said. “And then when we moved downtown, I was like, wait a minute, I missed the memo — when did everyone move to Brooklyn?”
Alas Barnard's curriculum, despite producing
radical leaders and
renowned scholars, must lack a program in subway ridership, since Ms. Prince spent most of her time there
trying to get downtown. Thankfully, she landed in a
marriage with the financier
nephew of a
baron best known for a passable biography of
Siegfried Sassoon, leading her both to a tenuous claim to nobility and an apartment in Greenwich Village, thus obviating the need for transportation. Tragically for her, the center of cool had moved:
But Brooklyn would have been inconvenient for Ms. Prince, 40, who attends uptown cocktail parties and galas two or three nights a week in her role as the editor of Avenue magazine, which published its 40th anniversary issue this month. Started as a free magazine that was left in the lobbies of high-end buildings on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Avenue provides a safe space for the One Percent.
Of course, cocktail parties and galas two or three nights a week
near the Met would have made a forty minute subway ride to, say,
Brooklyn Heights terribly inconvenient. But what more could be expected from a magazine that provides a "safe space for the One Percent"? Our quick survey of
Avenue Magazine unearthed lines such as, "
What can be more tiresome than planning a vacation?" (The next sentence: "It's time to go wild: get your private jet and fly to more than 200 countries of your choice.") Apparently this was not the article Ms. Prince was referring to when she touted Avenue's sense of
noblesse oblige:
“We write about the positive things they’ve done,” said Ms. Prince, who has been the editor since 2012. “We are not a scandal sheet. To be in Avenue means you have done something significant, usually philanthropically. These are the leaders of this community, and by making them look good, we encourage people to follow in their footsteps.”
One such philanthropic act, supposedly, is the opening of the flagship store of
"The Laundress" in Soho, an "eco-friendly brand of specialty detergents and home cleaning products." The Laundress founders
Gwen Whiting and Lindsey Boyd are evidently leading the community in price point, charging
$20 for a 32 oz. bottle of detergent (a "specialty product"?).
Who else leads this community? Well, one building alone,
740 Park Avenue, boasts several such well-known philanthropists noted for their works (good or bad, who are we to judge?) who've created their own followings. David Koch, of
Koch brothers fame, lives there in a 18-room duplex he purchased for $17 million. (Here are some "
Koch facts" courtesy of the office of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.) Another such leader is Stephen Schwarzman, responsible for donations to the New York Public Library and Yale University in the tens and hundreds of millions, and also for piquant comparisons between tax increases and
Hitler's invasion of Poland.
Yet we digress. None of this should detract from the article's focus on Ms. Prince, both a human
Wunderkrammer of
laughably outdated notions and an accomplished
humble braggart. She also also happens to be eminently quotable.
- On the living room of the four-bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Washington Square Park:
“It’s the part of the apartment we’ve put the most work into,” Ms. Prince said. “It was completely empty when we moved in.”
“We haven’t changed it at all,” she said. “I even bought the sofas from the previous owners. I’m very practical that way.”
- On the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which her husband's great-grandfather edited:
“The 11th edition has a lot of fans [presumably dead?]; it’s considered the best edition [presumably because India was still part of the UK?],” Ms. Prince said. “I like that the shelf groans with knowledge.”
“I thought we should have some family silver.”
“I like to have a glass of wine and chat with my friends in the kitchen, and sometimes I forget to turn on the oven.”
Yet, in her world, she is a bit of a rebel, which provides the rest of us with an idea of just how jolting the pitchforks will be when they arrive on Madison and Park Avenues: "Reflecting on her decision to live downtown, Ms. Prince acknowledged that it would have been considered unconventional for the editor of Avenue at one time." This shift owes itself to the fast-paced hyper-gentrification of lower Manhattan, no longer a scary ghetto of the merely rich:
“The lines are blurring,” she said, citing the “super-fancy” condominiums being built on the site of St. Vincent’s Hospital by the Rudins, one of the “power families” in Avenue’s October issue.
But even Ms. Prince has a soft spot for the New York that was before, however devoid her love for working class lunch spots is of even an iota of class awareness and economic analysis:
“Now there are places selling crepes and Japanese ice cream,” she said. “But I miss Gray’s Papaya.”
One gets the sense that Ms. Prince, however, is mostly glad she must no longer calculate how long it takes to burn off the hot juices of a dollar hot dog at SoulCycle, if we generously assume that what she misses is actually
eating at a Gray's Papaya and not just consuming its rough-hewn kitschy atmospherics. But at heart, there is more than a hint of fakeness in her nostalgia, much like in her family silver, for a block or two from her perch she can find a
Papaya Dog on 6th Avenue. But something tells us she won't venture that far.
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| Waiting to accumulate assets is the worst |
