Diana Vreeland was and continues to be the arbiter of style, even after her death 20+ years ago. Do yourself a favor and read “D.V.”: her autobiography/manual of style/name-drop-a-thon. It will seriously change your life. Watch “The Eye Has To Travel,” her documentary. You will start to look at style as something you own, not something you follow and conform to. She will teach you that the sexiest most attractive thing one can have and wear is confidence. Ladies and gentlemen, Diana Vreeland. Style Icon.
NAME: Diane Dalziel Vreeland OCCUPATION: Journalist BIRTH DATE: March 01, 1924 DEATH DATE: August 22, 1989 PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France BEST KNOWN FOR: As a fashion journaist, Diana Vreeland was an influential figure in American fashion during the 20th century.
Diana Vreeland began her career atHarper’s Bazaar in 1936. Her column “Why Don’t You…?” was famous for offering outlandish fashion and lifestyle tips for the times. Vreeland later became the magazine’s fashion editor and established herself as one of the country’s leading arbiters of style. In 1962, Vreeland joined the staff of Vogueand continued to be a powerful force in the fashion world.
Fashion journalist. Born Diana Dalziel on March 1, 1924, in Paris, France. Diana Vreeland was an influential figure in American fashion during the twentieth century. The daughter of wealthy parents, she spent her early years in France before moving to New York as a teenager.
Diana Vreeland began her career as a columnist for Harper’s Bazaar in 1936. Her column “Why Don’t You . . . ?” was famous for offering outlandish fashion and lifestyle tips for the times. Few could afford in the Depression follow her advice. Moving up the editorial ladder, Vreeland became the magazine’s fashion editor, a post she held until the early 1960s. At Harper’s Bazaar, she established herself as one of the country’s leading arbiters of style.
In 1962, Diana Vreeland joined the staff of Vogue, another influential fashion magazine, as editor in chief. At Vogue, she continued to be a powerful force in the fashion world, often able to identify the coming trends, such as the popularity of the bikini. Vreeland also worked with many well-known photographers, such as Richard Avedon, in making the magazine.
While she left Vogue in 1971, Diana Vreeland did not leave the fashion world. She worked as a consultant for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, putting together fashion exhibitions. Vreeland died on August 22, 1989. Married to T. Reed Vreeland since 1924, she had two sons, Thomas R., Jr., and Frederick.
Personal Quotes:
“People who eat white bread have no dreams.”
“Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.”
“Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.”
“I always wear my sweater back-to-front; it is so much more flattering.”
Maybe I have not ever explained what criteria I use when assigning people the “Style Icon” and “Not So Secret Obsession” status?
Style Icons are assigned to people I admire, if it is simply beauty or fashion, it is most likely unconventional and risky choices that provoke conversation. They are artists, writers, musicians, politicians, humanitarians, architects, activists, actors, directors, fashion designers, scientists, basically anyone whose life work fascinates me and I admire. They are almost always dead because it is my moderate worry that dead people will be forgotten and keeping an ongoing list of them is my effort to remember them. If, along the way, someone else likes them and discovers someone that fascinates them, even better.
Not So Secret Obsessions are usually things or events. I am obsessed with Hardy Boys books and the 1968 Sears Holiday catalog for their retro goody-goody aesthetic. I am obsessed with political street art: you can be walking down the sidewalk and be visibly reminded that Republicans thing that some rape is OK.
For the month of February (and maybe a bit of a spill-over into March) I will be focusing only on Style Icons. One a day, like a multivitamin, I will be dosing you with people that inspire me. The format is straight-forward: I will write a bit at the top of the post about what it is that inspires me about the person, followed by their details. I will do my best to include links to additional reading at the bottom of the post.
It is true, the best of everything is a bit shocking, a bit nasty, just a bit off. That’s what makes it interesting. That is what makes it ‘a bit of all right.’ It’s too impossible to rattle through all the quotes of hers that are so spot-on incredible, and the film! Even if you don’t a hounds tooth from a eyetooth and don’t ever care to, this woman is an instruction on how to LIVE! Become it, make it, do it, EXCLAIM IT! Always be interested, always learn, be excited about something/anything. I guess, overall, do not be a passive participant in life, go out and make it whatever you want, become whoever you want, and perhaps, consider wearing your V-neck sweaters back-to-front, it’s simply more glamorous.
“too much good taste can be boring.” - Diana Vreeland
Antonio Lopez (February 11, 1943 – March 17, 1987) was a fashion illustrator whose work appeared in such publications as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Interview and The New York Times. Several books collecting his illustrations have been published. In his obituary, the New York Times called him a “major fashion illustrator.” He generally signed his works as “Antonio.”
Antonio Lopez is the Picasso of fashion illustration. Mostly known as just plain ‘Antonio’, he was a giant in the field of fashion illustration. He captured the pulse of style from the 60s to the 80s, and is still revered as the most inspiring illustrator by today’s practitioners. He worked with a variety of materials including pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, watercolor and polaroid film. His work appeared frequently in Vogue, Harper’s bazzar, Elle and Interview.
Recording and predicting contemporary style trends, Antonio also used his immense versatility to adopt a broad range of art movements, from Pop Art to Surrealism.
For Antonio, life – bestial and sublime – surpassed any fiction. His illustrations and photographs capture the beautiful people who are part of celebrity folklore, and who were more often than not his friends: Jerry Hall (to whom he was engaged), Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol (with whom he worked on Interview magazine), Paloma Picasso and Marlene Dietrich.
Packed with previously unpublished material, this is a thrilling retrospective about an artist who is represented in major collections from the Metropolitan to the Louvre. Even posthumously, Antonio has not relinquished his grip on the fashion world: his style and quest for beauty live on.
I am deciding on my next pair of readers from Warby Parker. I have three pairs currently, but need a new pair (with a stronger power) and decided to use their Home Try-On Program. You can pick up to five pairs of glasses to try on at home, it takes all the worry out of online buying. They ship them to you, you ship them back after you decide which one is the best for you.
Also, for every pair of glasses they sell, they provide a pair to someone in need. So you read easier and help someone see better all at the same time. Here are the options I chose, feel free to vote below:
Last night, we saw “Diana Vreeland: They Eye Has To Travel” at the Egyptian Theater. Here is the movie synopsis:
An intimate portrait and a vibrant celebration of one of the most influential women of the 20th century, an enduring icon whose influence changed the face of fashion, beauty, art, publishing and culture forever. During her fifty year reign as the “Empress of Fashion,” she launched Twiggy , advised Jackie O and coined some of fashion’s most eloquent proverbs such as “the bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb.” She was the fashion editor of HARPER’S BAZAAR where she worked for 25 years before becoming editor in chief of VOGUE followed by a remarkable stint at the Met’s Costume Institute where she helped popularize its historical collections.
She is a frequent subject here at waldina.com and deservedly so, she changed 20th century fashion, she got people to dream, she gave numerous fashion designers, photographers, writers, and models their break. She made it a party that everyone was invited to and encouraged to attend. And if you have learned anything, you will rise to your feet, exclaim “GREAT!”, rouge your ears, reverse your V-neck sweater, throw on your favorite blue jeans, and brush up on your knowledge of the Ballet Russe (it will be a topic of conversation), and never look back (always forward).
DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL is an intimate portrait and a vibrant celebration of one of the most influential women of the 20th century, an enduring icon whose influence changed the face of fashion, beauty, art, publishing and culture itself forever.
Along the way, the story of Vreeland illustrates the evolution of women into roles of power and prominence throughout the 20th century, and travels through some of the century’s greatest historical and cultural eras, including Paris’ Belle Epoque, New York in the roaring twenties, and London in the swinging sixties. It also spans such historical events as the great wars, the flights of Lindbergh, the romance of Wallis and Windsor, the Kennedy inauguration, and the freewheeling spirit of the 1960′s youthquake, and the advent of countless fashion revolutions from the bikini to the blue jean.
Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was the 20th Century’s greatest arbiter of style, an exotic and vibrant character who, during her fifty-year reign as the “Empress of Fashion,” dazzled the world with her unique vision of style high and low. She launched Twiggy, advised Jackie O, and coined some of fashion’s most eloquent proverbs such as “the bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb.” She lived a vibrant and remarkable life, and as the star performer in her own drama, Diana began writing the script for it at an early age.
It all started during the Belle Époque: modernism, Art Nouveau, the Ballets Russes, and haute couture. Diana was fascinated with the glamorous and eccentric characters of this era who paraded through her parents’ living room in Paris. But her childhood was also marked by the loveless relationship she had with her mother, an American beauty. “I was always her ugly little monster,” Diana recalled. As World War I started, the family moved back to America. Diana, forced to speak English, developed a stutter and failed in school. Eventually she dropped out and found refuge in dance, a true passion.
If Diana felt insecure about her looks, she never wallowed in it. Instead, she created her own world in which style, originality, and allure were supreme. She invented a dazzling persona that embraced every moment of life as an adventure, whether she was witnessing the coronation of George V or riding horses with Buffalo Bill in Wyoming. At 19, she captured the heart of one of the most handsome and eligible bachelors, Reed Vreeland – “the most ravishing, devastating killer-diller,” as she put it later. Together they settled in London and started a life full of romantic trips around Europe in their Bugatti coupé: Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Rome. During these years, she cultivated her love of couture and became friends with all the couturiers in Paris.
Diana’s unexpected career in fashion began upon her return to New York in 1936 when Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, noticed her unique style and look at a party. Diana was hired as Bazaar’s fashion editor, and she immediately became renowned for her provocative “Why don’t you?” column that dared readers to open their imagination and live their dreams. She would write homilies such as, “Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in dead Champagne to keep its gold,” or “have a white monkey-fur bedcover mounted on yellow velvet?” Through her column and photography spreads, Diana lent the magazine pages of her amazing flair for beauty, high and low. Photographer Richard Avedon, who affectionately called her his “crazy aunt,” exclaimed, “she was and remains the only genius fashion editor.”
After twenty-five years at Harper’s Bazaar, Diana resigned and took over as Vogue editor-in-chief. It was the swinging sixties, where – as Diana would say – “you could have a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body and carriage.” Uniqueness was being celebrated and Vreeland’s transformation of Vogue was at the vanguard of this cultural revolution. The pages of Vogue exploded with fashion, art, music, film; this became its “golden years.” It was suddenly a young, new and exciting magazine, where models had personalities and fashion spoke to all women. Diana became a living legend, with her striking silhouette, her jet-black hair, and her peculiar voice, somewhere between high society and street slang. Her famous red living room, “a garden in hell,” became the headquarters for New York arts and society. Diana would look upon these years as her most glorious ones; she had finally found an era fit for her vivid and wild imagination.
Shortly after the death of her husband, Diana was abruptly fired from Vogue in 1971, turning the fashion world upside down. Rumors had it that she was so distraught that she took to bed for a year, but Diana was far from having her last dance. In 1972, at age seventy, she started working at the Met’s Costume Institute where she set new standards for exhibiting fashion worldwide, awakening an institution that had been forever sleepy. Like a film director, she created sets in which elaborate fantasies came to life. Her controversial approach – based on drama and theatre sometimes more than historical fact – was criticized by some historians, but they were silenced when her shows brought in huge crowds and put the Costume Institute on the map. Diana blended fact with fantasy throughout her career, even once exclaiming that Charles Lindberg had flown over her lawn in Brewster on his way to Paris. Upon being asked if her story was fact or fiction, she responded, “Faction!” Diana Vreeland was the oracle of fashion for much of the 20th century, inviting us to join her on a voyage of perpetual reinvention and take part in the adventure of life. Through her trained and diligent eye, she opened the door of our minds and gave us the freedom to imagine. Her images and accomplishments are as fresh and relevant now as they were then, and her spirit is just a vibrant and relevant today. As Jackie Onassis once put it: “To say Diana Vreeland has dealt only with fashion trivializes what she has done. She has commented on the times in a wise and witty manner. She has lived a life.”
Diana Vreeland by Horst P. Horst. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the nearly 50 years since the earliest James Bond movies starring Sean Connery were made, the special effects in the films have considerably improved with each passing decade. However, when looking back at the films that started it all, it’s striking how Sean Connery’s wardrobe as James Bond is as stylish and glamorous now as it was then. In the early ‘60s, most men donned a suit and tie every day when heading to the office, and the always perfectly turned-out James Bond provided an example of classic British style that showed men around the world the importance of dressing like you’ve got somewhere to go. Not one to be caught dead in anything that didn’t exude class and polish, ‘60s Bond stuck to luxe basics, demonstrating to men everywhere that looking perpetually good can be as simple as buying the most high-quality garments you can afford and wearing them with confidence.
And regardless of the generation you belong to, if you’ve ever had any doubt about the power of clothes to influence women, ‘60s Bond proves that practicing good grooming and putting a bit of effort into your wardrobe will actually increase your masculine allure and make you utterly irresistible.
To look like Sean Connery’s ‘60s Bond, you’ll need to start buying your clothes as classically as you can. If it’s at all possible within your shopping budget, get a British-style suit made just for you. It will fit like a glove, emphasizing all the best parts of your body and creating the look of a very strong and masculine physique. And don’t be afraid that old-English tweed blazers or three-piece suits will be difficult to pull off. While it’s true that modern men don’t dress up as much on a daily basis as ‘60s James Bond did, all you have to do to avoid seeming old-fashioned is pair these pieces with some contemporary apparel. When it comes to what to pack for a holiday, we can all learn a thing or two from ‘60s Bond as well.
In 1965’s Thunderball, Sean Connery is pictured defeating evil-doers in the Bahamas in a blue and white vertically striped shirt and a pair of white trousers, a look that’s just as cool and elegant now as it was then. The stripes on this comfortable shirt are slimming and nothing says vacation like crisp white pants. Of course, James Bond never leaves home without his impressive collection of watches, including the Rolex Submariner in Goldfinger (1964) and the Breitling Top Time in Thunderball.
Just picking out the perfect costume for the day and decided to give credit where credit is due. Thanks Edie.
“But you see in dealing with me, the relatives didn’t know that they were dealing with a staunch character and I tell you if there’s anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman… S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There’s nothing worse, I’m telling you. They don’t weaken, no matter what.”
Performer, documentary film subject. Born Edith Bouvier Beale on November 17, 1917, in New York City, as the eldest of Phelan and Edith Ewing Beale’s three children. A first cousin to Jacqueline (Bouvier) Kennedy Onassis, “Little Edie”, as she was known, knew only affluence. The Bouviers earned their fortunes on Wall Street and in law, paving the way for a lifestyle that allowed Little Edie and her two brothers to have a childhood that bounced between Manhattan and the Hamptons. In the early 1920s, Edie’s father moved the family into a new summer home called Grey Gardens, a spectacular 28-room mansion with water views.
Like her mother, a creative type who harbored dreams of becoming a singer, Edie Beale had artistic yearnings. At the age of nine a poem of hers was published in a local New York magazine, spawning a desire to become a writer. Yet her real love, despite her father’s deep objections, was for the stage—something that was almost certainly fueled by her relationship with her mother.
At the age of 11, Edie Beale was taken out of school for two years by Big Edie for what was described as a respiratory illness. Instead of class work, Little Edie tagged along to the movies or the theater with her mother nearly everyday.
Blonde, blue-eyed, and tall, Edie Beale was a beauty, “surpassing even the dark charm of Jacqueline,” recalled her cousin, John H. Davis. In 1934, the same year she attended Miss Porter’s finishing school in Farmington, Connecticut, Edie Beale modeled for Macy’s. Two years later, her debutante party in New York City was covered by The New York Times. She participated in fashion shows in East Hampton, too, and by her early 20s Edie Beale had earned the nickname, “Body Beautiful.” She dated Howard Hughes, and reportedly turned down marriage proposals from John Kennedy’s oldest brother, Joe Jr., and millionaire J. Paul Getty.
As a young adult, Edie Beale took up residence at the Barbizon Hotel in New York City, a residential hotel that catered to women who wanted to be actresses or models. As Edie Beale would later tell it, it was a time of opportunity for her. There was more modeling work to pursue and within time, Edie said, movie offers from MGM and Paramount studios.
The limelight, though, would have to wait. By the mid 1930s, Phelan Beale had left Edie’s mother for a younger woman. The couple’s eventual divorce gave Big Edie Grey Gardens, some child support, and not much else. To keep the household going, Edie Ewing Beale leaned on her father for financial assistance and sold family heirlooms.
On her own, without a husband to try and drag her to the Hampton cocktail parties she had no interest in attending in the first place, Big Edie’s singing aspirations only strengthened. She frequented clubs, and even recorded a few songs. In 1942 she showed up late to her son’s wedding, dressed as an opera singer.
Her father, “Major” John Vernou Bouvier, Jr. was appalled and soon cut her out of his will.
Without the money to support her or her house, Edie Ewing Beal’s life at Grey Gardens fell into disrepair. In 1952, at Big Edie’s calling, Little Edie returned home from New York City to take care of her mom. She wouldn’t leave again until Big Edie’s death in 1977.
For the next two decades, Edie Beale and her mother became increasingly reclusive, rarely venturing outside their property. Grey Gardens itself continued to slide downward, too, becoming the domain of stray cats—later estimates would put the count as high as 300—and raccoons, both of which Edie Beale took care to feed on a regular basis. Bills went unpaid and the two women subsided, in part, on cat food. In one memorable photograph, Edie Beale stands in front of a mound of discarded cat food cans measuring several feet in height. The exterior of the property changed as well; unkempt trees, shrubs and vines closed in around the house.
In the fall of 1971 County officials, armed with a search warrant, descended on Grey Gardens. They informed Edie Beale and her mother that their home was “unfit for human habitation” and threatened eviction. The story, and the close family connection the two women had with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, caught fire with the press. The New York Post ran the headline, “Jackie’s Aunt Told: Clean Up Mansion.”
Big Edie and Little Edie railed against the threats, calling the visit by County officials a “raid” and the product of “a mean, nasty Republican town.” “We’re artists against the bureaucrats,” Edie Beale said. “Mother’s French operetta. I dance, I write poetry, I sketch. But that doesn’t mean we’re crazy.” Eventually, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis stepped in with her checkbook, paying $25,000 to have the place cleaned up—on the condition that her aunt and cousin could remain in their home.
In the fall of 1973, filmmakers David and Albert Maysles started shooting their documentary on Edie Beale and her mother. The film, which was released in 1975 to wide acclaim, showed a Grey Gardens that had virtually reverted back to its pre-cleanup squalor. But audiences and most critics took to the unique Beales. Amid the trash and the cats, Little Edie paraded around in high heels, dancing in front of the camera as she lamented her missed chances at true fame.
Edie Beale’s style was also a popular part of the film, in particular the improvised head wraps—towels, shirts, and scarves—she used to constantly adorn her head. The coverings weren’t designed for style, but as a way to conceal hair loss from the alopecia she contracted in her early 20s. The effect, though, was a look that earned adulation. Calvin Klein reportedly claimed Little Edie’s look influenced some of his designs, and in 1997 Harper’s Bazaar produced a photo spread that was inspired by Edie Beale’s clothing creations.
Following her mother’s death in February 1977, Edie Beale left Grey Gardens for New York City, where she had a short run as a cabaret singer at a club in Greenwich Village. She sang, danced, and answered questions about her life from the audience. Little Edie brushed aside any notions that she was being exploited. “This is something I’ve been planning since I was 19,” she said. “I don’t care what they say about me—I’m just going to have a ball.”
In 1979 Edie Beale sold Grey Gardens to Washington Post editors Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn for a little more than $220,000 and a promise from the couple to restore it. Eventually, Little Edie relocated to Florida, where she rented an apartment in Bal Harbour. She died there on January 14, 2002. She was 84.
Grey Gardens and the life that Edie Beale and her mother led there, has continued to endure. In recent years a crop of new material about the women has been produced, including a 2006 DVD release of “The Beales of Grey Gardens” featuring more than 90 minutes of cut material from the original Maysles brothers documentary.
In addition, Edie Beal and her mother’s life together inspired a Broadway musical that earned three 2007 Tony awards, as well as a 2009 HBO production starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie. In the end, the 1975 documentary, which in 2003 Entertainment Weekly ranked as one of the top 50 cult films of all time, gave Edie Beale and her mother the kind of fame they’d always longed for.
It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.
Looking Back at Manhattan’s Lost Gilded Age Mansions
Thursday, February 9, 2012, by Rob Bear
["Clark's Folly," as it once stood at 77th and Fifth (Photos: New York Historical Society)]
Before the limestone towers of Fifth and Park Avenues completed their social ascendence, the mansion was the only acceptable way for the extravagantly wealthy to live in the city. While many hunkered down in what we know today as townhouses, other, more, er, vulgar types, could only settle for the most enormous, obscenely well equipped versions, many with sprawling lawns, all built in an unabashedly ornate style. Only a handful of these mansions remain, the most prominent survivor being the Fifth Avenue spread of steel baron Henry Clay Frick,, today a museum housing his private collection of art, which occupies the entire block between 70th and 71st Streets. What now seems like an anomaly was in fact the standard, before developers discovered that rich people were perfectly willing to live stacked on top of one another.
Perhaps the most over-the-top Fifth Avenue mansion of all time was the childhood home of Huguette Clark, built in 1907 by her father, the silver king and Senator William Andrews Clark, at the corner of 77th and Fifth. The elaborate townhouse, designed in the height of Beaux Arts style, boasted “121 rooms, 31 baths, four art galleries, a swimming pool, a concealed garage,” and a private underground rail line to bring in coal for heat. It cost Clark $7M—that’s $162M in today’s dollars—to build, but stood for only 20 years, bought by a developer after Clark’s death for less than half the construction cost and demolished to make way for 960 Fifth Avenue.
[Photo: New York Architecture]
↑ Members of that most illustrious of American families, the Vanderbilts, were not to be left out of the building spree of the late 1800s. Cornelius Vanderbilt II built his extravagant brick-and-limestone mansion, designed by George Post, on the heavily trafficked corner of 58th and Fifth in 1893, catty-corner to the Plaza Hotel that would rise in 1907. But this magnificent home too was demolished in 1927 and today the site is occupied by the Bergdorf Goodman department store. The only remnant of the mansion are its magnificent gates, which today provide the entrance to Central Park’s Conservatory Gardens at 104th and Fifth.
[Photo: New York Architecture]
↑ Cornelius Vanderbilt’s brother, William Kissam Vanderbilt, also kept a house on Fifth Avenue, this one a few blocks south at 52nd Street. Of a slightly more modest scale than his brother’s, this stone pile, known as the “Petit Château,” was one of three commissioned by William and designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Influenced stylistically by Paris’s Hôtel de Cluny, the building would have a strong impact on the design of urban houses until its destruction in 1926. Today, the site is occupied by an office tower, with some of the city’s most expensive retail space on the ground floor.
↑ The West Side was not without its fabulously wealthy fans, like Charles M. Schwab, who built an ornate mansion on an entire city block on Riverside Drive between 73rd and 74th Streets. In 1901, Schwab, a partner in the United States Steel Corporation, spent the unheard of sum of $865K—that’s more than $22M in today’s dollars—on the building lot alone, then had French architect Maurice Hebert design an absurdly elaborate residence for the park-like grounds. Construction lasted six years, in part because of the sheer complexity of the building, which incorporated a four-car garage, a service tunnel beneath the garden, an indoor swimming pool, belfry with chimes, roof garden, and private chapel. Though the completion of this massive home, which replaced a decrepit orphanage, sparked a new wave of building on Riverside Drive, it is that newfound desirability that doomed the place to demolition. It survived until 1939, when Schwab shuttered the 50,000-square-foot, 75-room spread, disbanded his staff of 20, and unsuccessfully attempted to sell to the city as a mayoral residence. It was finally knocked down in 1948 and replaced with the Schwab Apartments.
[Photo: New York Architecture]
↑ Few of these grand mansions survived into the latter half of the 20th century, but the home of Isaac Vail Brokaw, completed in 1890 on the corner of 79th and Fifth, lasted until 1965, when it was demolished to make way for one of the Avenue’s least architecturally worthy apartment houses. The blue-blooded Brokaw, who earned his fortune as a clothing merchant, built this formally subdued home for himself, along with a pair of more ornate townhouses to the north for his two sons and one just to the east for his daughter, as a wedding present. By the time the Brokaw houses met their end in the ’60s, New Yorkers were beginning to lament the destruction of such historic structures. Developers prevailed in this case, but the public outcry provided the support for the Landmarks Law of 1965.
