P.J. Clarke's
We're running a bit late to the corner of 55th & 3rd. Max Wastler is waiting for our lunch date. After a handful of text exchanges, we spot him in the red brick saloon—penny-tile floors, carved mahogany bar, tin ceiling and stained-glass transoms. P.J. Clarke’s is a vestige of a better time—another century all together. It also serves a legendary burger. It’s wall-to-wall packed with suits (and deals were certainly being made) but we manage a grip of stools at Doug Quinn’s bar with a bit of timing and keen eyes...
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Skull and Bones 1948 Yearbook
While browsing The Cary Collection last month, we discovered a most curious book in Cary’s voluminous inventory. Simple in appearance, bound in black Moroccan leather with four names stamped in silver leaf across the cover. It is a yearbook of sorts—Thomas William Ludlow Ashley’s Skull and Bones yearbook to be exact. Founded in 1832, the secret society at Yale university in New Haven, Connecticut is infamous for tapping campus leaders and other notable figures for its membership. The family names on the secret society’s roster read like an elite party list—Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Kellogg, Pillsbury, Vanderbilt, Bush and so on. Though Ashley went on to enjoy a longstanding political career in Washington, it is another politician’s membership that shrouds this yearbook with bated breath—a one George Herbert Walker Bush...
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The Cary Collection
Thomas Cary just paid $1,400 for Take Ivy, and it was only the second edition. It doesn’t bother him that it’s being reprinted. “I have clients—I sell to Tommy (Hilfiger?),” he assures us. Over the last decade he has spent up to a quarter million a year on rare and vintage books only to turn around and shrewdly supply them to the likes of Kate Spade, Tory Burch, J.Crew, Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. They are just a few of many tapping The Cary Collection for design inspiration and display; furnishing their retail stores stretching from the Hamptons to far east Asia. Though a queer client list for a book dealer, Cary’s aesthete taste has granted him access to this veritable Who’s Who of neo-prep designers...
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J.G. Melon
The patronage is meager by the time we duck in and grab the table in the front corner. It’s usually packed at dinner—the line running out the door. Back when Lee introduced me to J.G. Melon, we skipped the wait in favor of the bar as he nonchalantly pointed out all the somebodies everybody treated just like anybody...
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