Anthony Haden-Guest (Getty Images)

Heaven knows we’d be horrified if Public Storage seized and auctioned the contents of our storage locker—it’s precisely where we keep our incriminating photos and fat-day jeans! Anthony Haden-Guest, whose personal effects are at risk of being auctioned, is living through this nightmare—and he’s fighting back with a party-cum-variety show to pay his legal fees and prevent the sale of his art and papers. Guests are to include noted wine columnist Jay McInerney, newly re-emergent Whit Stillman and Vanity Fairscatologist George Wayne. We’ll be there, looking for good gossip to store up!

Hiro Ballroom at the Maritime Hotel, 88 Ninth Avenue, 7:30 p.m. to 12a.m. Tickets available at the door.

The updated version of Model includes a new twelve page afterword called "The Last Word," according to reports. The book, which details the dark side of the modeling industry, was originally released in 1995.

'Savage Beauty' late at night.

"BUT HOW DID HE DIE?" said a young man to the girl standing next to him in an outsize dress.

The couple was looking at a blossoming, red-feathered, evening-wear creation, the first taste of the Met’s hit exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” The deceased in question, of course, was the designer.

“You don’t know?” she said.

He shook his head.

The two had come to the exhibit at a time that would seem appropriate but, given the mammoth crowd now populating the hall of Rodin, saving their visit for the last night turned out to be folly. “Savage Beauty” was closing at midnight, the latest the museum had ever stayed open. At 11 o’ clock, many line-standers had been waiting to bid McQueen adieu since early that afternoon.

“Really,” came a whisper. “How did Alexander McQueen die?”

She leaned in and told him.

“That’s pretty serious,” the young man said.

The Observer ducked into the compound’s side entrance, on 81st Street, at 10:00 p.m. Sunday night, and upstairs we witnessed the feared line that snaked through the halls, engulfing statues on display into the theme park-caliber queue.

We had bypassed it all, though, and so we witnessed the collection before many, and we found it an aggressively brilliant fever dream played out in silk, all the frocks cut with daring.

It was one of the most successful exhibits in the museum’s history. Hence, the line on that final night was very, very long. We had heard horror stories: six-hour waits, irate groups turned away feet away from the entrance, not to mention the claustrophobic hell once you do get inside. At one point during the week, a young child was rumored to have wet himself while on line. The parents did not want to risk losing their place.

“What did we do all that time?” said Simon Barros, a 21-year-old student, of the afternoon-to-night stretch. “I tried to download the app, but, I dunno, talking to people in line, talking to my friends, I’m thinking it’s definitely going to be worth it.”

Her voice trailed off.

“I’ll see when I come out.”

“Well, I thought this would actually be an event,” said Cole. He’s 26 and works for the United Nations. It’s not so often that a exhibition of this scale and importance has its last hurrah at the going-out hour, and it seemed many had joined The Observer in having a few cocktails beforehand.

“And it is an event!” he went on. “Some people were getting angry a lot, cutting in line … ”

Speaking of cutting the line, it was time for us to take in McQueen’s final show.

“I haven’t seen it yet either!” Anthony Haden-Guest, the writer whom we walked in with, exclaimed as we approached.

Those were the last words we exchanged with him, or anyone, for the rest of the time inside. The clothes were draped on mannequins with iron skulls for heads, the bare eye sockets and deep-sunken cheeks often deprived of breath by a suffocating cloth. And blindly they peered down at the masses.

“One of the mailroom guys told me yesterday how much he enjoyed the show,” Anna Wintour told The New York Times a few days earlier.

Some share her surprise, but they shouldn’t. Yes, even those poor souls who work outside the Vogue editorial department can enjoy the video of the fragile, 17-year-old Shalom Harlow—in a pure white dress girded outward and affixed above her chest with a belt—cowering swanlike on a giant revolving lazy Susan. Then she wriggled in horror as the danger crept closer. As she spun, two robotic metal appendages darted at her, sniffing her neck, before bursting at the tip and sullying the muslin fabric with yellow and black splatter. The paint-stained dress hung below the video display.

McQueen’s vision evolved with each room. In the next, Tartan garb evoked the Scottish heroes whom McQueen worshipped. And in a glass box a fuzzy ball of pixie dust melted into a hologram of Kate Moss, a tiny ethereal vision twirling in a dress made of fog and light, fabric of milky cloud-sinew, to the theme from Schindler’s List.

“I knew he killed himself, but I didn’t know too much about him,” said Mary Adams, a nurse practitioner who was leaving the show. The elderly woman had driven from Boston that morning. She had been in line since 2:30 and the clock was edging toward midnight.

“Did he have a troubled life?” she asked The Observer.

We leaned in and told her.

As we left, a new batch of people huddled by the front of the line got nodded in. The line still flowed from one gallery space to another, but they would be among the last of the groups. With entry gained, the people raised their arms, let out a vigorous whoop of anticipation and walked under the ghostly photograph of Alexander McQueen—the fashion show, for them, about to begin.

nfreeman@observer.com @NFreeman1234

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Anthony Haden-Guest said with a frown, leaning against a wall in the back. “This doesn’t look like the usual art crowd.”

The garage door at the front of the gallery started to open and a row of people leaning against it spilled some of their drinks in surprise. Mr. Powhida was being driven down W. 25th Street in a dark green Mercedes convertible. He sat in the back with his arms around two beautiful blond women. He was drinking from a bottle of champagne. The car parked in the gallery in front of a wall that said POWHIDA. He posed in front of his name and drank straight from the bottle. He was wearing a suit with a purple shirt underneath it and sunglasses.

“Well I’m bored as fuck,” he said and entered further into the gallery, taking a seat on one of the roped off couches. He was joined by a few friends, one of them the owner of Roberta’s in Bushwick (his girlfriend was one of the blonde women). A few people gathered around the couches. Many remained disinterested. He walked up to the oil painting. It featured a man in a black suit and a purple dress shirt with sunglasses releasing a white dove from his hands. A blonde woman with her breasts nearly exposed was clutching his leg. It was called Powhida (Portrait of a Genius).

“I think it’s great,” he announced and took a seat again. He began drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes. They were Marlboro Reds. The joke was becoming stale. The Observer wanted something to happen.

“Can I have some champagne?” The Observer asked Mr. Powhida.

“I don’t see why not. Would you like champagne or a Budweiser?”

“Champagne.”

“No! Give him a Budweiser!” The beautiful blonde woman said venomously.

“How about a Budweiser?” said Mr. Powhida. “We’re running low on champagne.”

He reached into a mini fridge and gave The Observer a bottle of Budweiser. Once more, very little happened. After a while, Mr. Powhida called out for an assistant and ordered him to remove the oil painting from the wall and to turn it around. The assistant did so. After a couple of minutes, a few handlers carefully re-hung the painting properly. Again, The Observer was bored. Performances like this only work if there is some follow through. No one was being provoked. Mr. Powhida was simply pretending—half-heartedly—to be an asshole. When the artist’s back was turned, The Observer entered the roped off area. He lit a cigarette off of one of the beautiful blonde women’s and smoked.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Mr. Powhida said. “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in here?

“Excuse me, sir,” Eric Gleason, one of the gallery’s directors, told The Observer sternly, “You can’t smoke in here.”

“I gave you a beer! What the fuck are you doing in here?”

Mr. Powhida ripped the cigarette from The Observer’s mouth.

“You should put it out on the painting,” The Observer suggested. He stomped it out on the ground.

Later at the after party, one of the beautiful blonde women was running the guest list. She looked bored.

mmiller@observer.com

Anthony Haden-Guest, the fighter, at The Standard.

Consummate party-goer and writer Anthony Haden-Guest stood on the deck of The Standard last night having just seen the premiere of The Shoe, Andre Saraiva's sex-filled Parisian romp with a slight footwear fetish. He was drinking a glass of red wine. It was, The Observer noted, not his first of the night.

"Let's go up to the party!" he said, gesturing toward the other end of the balcony. The celebration was set to continue at Le Bain, the top-floor spot Mr. Saraiva had opened with Andre Balazs last summer, still going strong a year later.

"It's such a mess out here, though," The Observer responded. In order to get to an elevator we had to direct the 74-year-old Mr. Haden-Guest through a vast and tightly packed crowd, dodging half the art world and half-drunk fashion kids.

Not going to happen. So Mr. Haden-Guest grabbed a rolled-up poster for the film and started thrashing at the men and women ahead of him. The Observer followed dutifully. And as he smashed into the shocked onlookers, jabbing at them with the makeshift sword, the clearing begrudgingly began to form.

"Who is this guy?" said a woman holding a cocktail.

"It's all right," said her companion. "He's a successful writer."

By the time we reached Le Bain, Mr. Haden-Guest had ditched his Excalibur and began dancing wildly, all jerky wonderful motions that would get anyone with less cache kicked out of the place, or at least mocked. Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of The King's Speech, stood by the bar, watching. He couldn't even eke out a stutter.

Shortly thereafter Mr. Haden-Guest challenged The Observer to fight. We accepted, of course.

"Do you box?" he asked us.

"Not really," we said.

"I used to be a boxer," he said. "I trained with the greatest."

He said the trainer's name. We didn't recognize it.

"All right, let's go!" he said.

The Observer put up two fists and hopped around Mr. Haden-Guest, who was just as nimble in the ring as he was on the dance floor. Unfortunately, the ring in this case was the strip next to Le Bain's indoor hot tub. After a bit of sparring and some light touches to the chest there's a flash and a slight pain in The Observer's nose. It turns out Anthony Haden-Guest has a mean left hook.

"You see that?" he said to us. "You let your guard down."

Ligne Roset provided the furnishings for the evening, with trademark ruche sofas  and chairs scattered throughout the garden.  The design company also provided a bed for the event, arranged strategically beneath a low hanging tree alight with ligne roset fixtures. Guests, including self-described “beauty doctor” Dr. Lewis Feder schmoozed in the whimsical cot throughout the evening.  Dr. Feder, master of all things glamorous, chatted with us about the state of the media. He praised the Wall Street Journal’s facelift in recent years, but disparaged the New York Times for “being a little too left. Its one step left of…. Karl Marx!” Dr. Feder exclaimed.

The Hamptons Preview also had an impressive showing from the luxury interior design set. A stately dressed Paul Chapman, president of ABC Carpets, told us he was enjoying the relaxed atmosphere. “As long as there’s no poison ivy, we’re fine,” Chapman added.

Before the night was through, two other guests warned The Observer about the insidious threat of poison ivy.  Evidently unaccustomed to nature, attendees feared the worst even in Manhattan House's pristine garden.  This reporter, a California native, found herself uninformed on the subject of the perilous plant. We asked  revelers how precicely one would identify the weed. "It has three leaves," responded one guest with a haughty look.  Befuddled as before, we carefully trotted over to the food, vigilantly counting leaves and avoiding all tripartite foliage. (We later determined that the panic was overblown; not a sprig of the stuff was found.)

Mini-burgers and finger sandwiches proved a huge hit among the guests. Just as a waiter would replenish the ever disappearing supply, a hoard of hungry Hamptonites would swoop in and polish off the batch.

Guests willing to wait were treated to thirty minute massages by the Exhale spa. Mounting massage chairs situated in bowers throughout the garden, weary invitees had their backs rubbed by the Exhale professionals.

Representatives from local businesses were also in attendance, displaying their wares for all to see.  Perfumer Bond No.9 had a table featuring an arrangement of colorful New York scents. Indoor cycling company Flywheel had representatives on site with spirited demonstrations. A jazzy duo performed throughout the evening and added to the festive atmosphere.

After chatting and gossiping for a spell, guests sauntered through the palatial  lobby of Manhattan House and out onto Third Avenue.  We returned home and scrupulously checked for signs of poison ivy, finding none.  We intend to invest in a large bottle of Calamine as a precaution. You never know what sorts of things might be sprouting in the wilds of Manhattan's private gardens.

eknutsen@observer.com

Free drinks for art is fine news for artists. But how will the program work?

As an example, Ms. Gavin said she approached KAWS, a.k.a. Brian Donnelly, the Brooklyn-based  artist, late last year in Miami. (He’s perhaps best known for his memorable street piece embellishing a bus kiosk photograph of Christy Turlington with a space alien.) “Lovely guy,” she told me later.

She told him she wanted to acquire a drawing for the collection going up in the lobby and corridors of the just-opened Soho Beach House in Miami. The artist said he was delighted. “They make you a global member and they give you credit,” said KAWS. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling you the amount, but they are generous.” Did KAWS visit the Beach House? “Oh, yes,” he said.

Standouts in the artist-bar category, that is to say bars that drank their way into art history because of their habitués, would include the Paris Bar, which flourished in Berlin in the early 1990s, and, of course, New York’s Max’s Kansas City. The work of Max’s regulars, who included Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain and—in the back room—Andy Warhol, filled galleries. Max’s was saluted in strong shows at the Loretta Howard and Steven Kasher galleries here last fall. But Mickey Ruskin opened Max’s in 1964, and it was already running out of puff when he closed it in 1973. Artist bars and bar-restaurants were never long-lived.

The Paris Bar and Max’s were anarchic haunts—the plate-glass window of Max’s was regularly shattered by brawling artists—and they flourished in that curiously recent period when the avant-garde art world was tiny and huddled together, as if for human warmth. But we live in a different cultural climate. Today’s giant art world requires no such frontier camaraderie. The Soho House group is that very modern thing, a brand. Their art-for-bar-tabs project is not the product of an urge to create a psychic shelter but a smart curatorial project and a shrewd investment strategy.

The program was initiated just over a year ago when the Soho House London, the parent of the group, opened a space on Dean Street (in addition to its Greek Street headquarters) on premises once occupied by the Gargoyle, a club that was the stuff of boho legend. The members-only club launched in England 16 years ago, with Damien Hirst as an early member (and decorator of the walls), but has recently become something of a hotel chain. West Hollywood opened last spring, then Berlin, then Miami. Each major outpost has gotten its own art collection. “It’s an ever-increasing collection that’s getting put into the houses internationally,” said Ms. Gavin. This summer, Soho House New York’s collection will be unveiled.

“In Berlin, it’s all Berlin-based artists. In New York, we’re going to have all New York artists. Like the rest of the collection, it will be largely paintings and works on paper.” No video, and not much photography, she said. “Most of the work is drawings, paintings and prints.” How many pieces will they be looking to pick up in New York? “I imagine around 80, like in Dean Street and Berlin.” But, noting the largesse in Miami, she added, “I wouldn’t want to be held to it.”

Artwork in the Beach House includes pieces by Jack Pierson, Hernan Bas, Shepard Fairey and John Baldessari, whose piece was added just as his retrospective opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; all of the pieces were bought in exchange for bar (and food) tabs. The Berlin club has work by, among others, Douglas Gordon, Thomas Demand and Tacita Dean, and the West Hollywood club has picked up pieces by Ed Ruscha, Mark Ryden and Raymond Pettibon. (Of course, these geographic distinctions are a bit fungible, since Mr. Baldessari, for example, is better known as a California artist and Hernan Bas a Miami one.) Ms. Gavin said she has not yet approached anybody in New York, and will not discuss her budget.

Art dealers looking forward to a fat chunk of a bar tab may be in for some grief, though. “Mostly we deal directly with artists,” Ms. Gavin says. And as for the size of the bar tabs involved, well, that will depend on the value assigned to each individual piece, which is often where the dealer does get involved. “Membership is for a couple of years—not for life, sadly,” she says. “Though artists can obviously renew.” (Yearly membership is $1,800 for access to the New York branch alone; it has 4,000 members and claims a waiting list nearly as big.)

Yes. But will they? Clearly Ms. Gavin is putting together an intelligent collection, but the bar in the Soho House makes no effort to replicate the louche electricity of Max’s Kansas City. You can hang art, but you can’t bottle lightning. That was another time, another world.

Trying to make sense of an art fair, either as a business system or as a window into cultural change, is like sailing through a fog, straining to interpret the noises and flashing lights. Toward the enervating end of a fair, though, the fog lifts somewhat, dimness hardens into substance and rumors either dissipate-or crystallize into fact. Many of the 303 art dealers who arrived at Art 41 Basel last week had approached the huge annual event with caution, or worse. They suspected that the spring's auction successes were fragile, generated by a handful of trophy hunters, and did not represent a more widespread clambering onto firmer ground.

By the close of the event Sunday, well, it was not as it was a few years ago at the world's largest contemporary art fair. But compared with last year's ill-concealed gloom, it was up, up, up. The organizers claimed a record 62,500 visitors, nosing ahead of the Miami sister to this fair, held every December. Those who could be spotted traversing the Messeplatz and the subsidiary events included Dasha Zhukova, Peter Brant and the Rubell clan, actor Val Kilmer and Bianca Jagger; museum honchos like Nick Serota and the metamorphosed Jeffrey Deitch; auctioneers like Brett Gorvy; Manhattan mega-dealers Marc Glimcher, David Zwirner and Tony Shafrazi; and artists Christo, Richard Phillips, Agnes Varda, Gavin Turk and Rob Pruitt.

In that company, some of the keenest signs of art-world health are unsubtle, a mixture of gossip and business news. Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, for example, seems to be redecorating. "It's gone superbly well for us. Roman Abramovich bought a huge amount. In front of everybody," bubbled Subhas Kim Kandasamy of Carpenters Workshop, which was showing wares at the design fair. (A buzzing sculpture that incorporated live bees by sssss, among his choices.)

He's redoing his home?

"Moscow. Not London anymore," he said, then led me to You Fade To Light by the design collective Random International 2009. It captures the image of whomever wanders within its force field with a system of light-emitting diodes.

What if the system gets cranky?

"We'll come around to anyone's house. Anywhere in the world. For two years," he promised.

So, back to the main fair, where the flash did not fizzle after opening day, Miami-style, and the crush, if anything, intensified.

"Nobody was haggling this year, nobody," marvelled Chelsea's Carolina Nitsch. "They really want something, Anthony. Or they don't." Ms. Nitsch, who deals largely in works on paper and editions, said, "We have sold at all price levels between $5,000 and $250,000." By day three of the fair, White Cube had sold five Antony Gormleys at about $250,000 apiece, and had sold two of Damien Hirst's new canvases.

But, as always, what dealers say is less compelling than what they do. It was nice, for instance, to hear Sarah Watson of Upper East Side Gallery L&M say that they had sold a Paul McCarthy and some William Kentridges-"Several large drawings and a tapestry"-but it was more convincing to learn that Ms. Watson would shortly be heading up a new L&M space in Venice Beach. "We open in September with a Paul McCarthy show," she said. "The same week as LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)" opens a show.

So, blue chips sold predictably well but there are more interesting symptoms of the system's health than sales. There has been some feeling that the art world has has become just a system for trading brand-name luxury goods on its high plateaux with little benefit to the cultural eco-system at large. But, at Basel , there were plenty of signs that the klieg light was also falling on younger, or lesser-known, artists.

Maxime Falkenstein at Barbara Gladstone Gallery showed me a line of watercolors by an artist unknown to me, Cecilia Edefalk: delicate watercolors of breasts. "We just started working with her. She's from Sweden," he said. "We sold them all." Ms. Nitsch showed me some work by another artist I had never heard of, Alyson Shotz, who had some small metal pieces on the wall. "She's not known in Europe at all," she said. "They are magnetic. I have to tell people, don't go too close if you wear a pacemaker."

Anthony James, a new recruit to Los Angeles gallery Patrick Painter and the gallery sold five of birch-trunk-and-infinity-mirror installations at between $75,000 and $125,000 apiece.  Well, yes, James is a friend but he's in some notable collections. Other semi-known artists to get thoroughly appropriate attention were the Spanish artiist Alicia Framis for her funny/poignant installation-cum-video, Le Petit-Prince-like Lost Astronaut and the terrifically talented Nathalie Djurberg, a Swedish woman artist, whose darkly comic animated movies, seen in the skeleton-packed Natural History Museum, were for me one of the stand-outs of the entire event.

There are even subtler signs of health, too. Day four, I asked Bernard Jacobson, the Cork Street gallerist, how he was doing.

"It's been fantastic!" he mock-exulted, adding: "I sold two Motherwells. But I bought three."

I misunderstood. "Brought?" I asked.

"Bought!" he said.

When dealers buy, well, that is a good sign.

As the Basel furor wound down, I lunched in the VIP Room, which was still busy, but not as it had been on opening day. "We did 1,200 lunches on Tuesday," the barman told me.

And today? Four hundred?

His hand descended like a helicopter.

"Less, I think," he said.

Closing days are closing days. And nights. On Saturday night, the thrumming and gossipy Kunsthalle had metamorphosed into a drably faceless noise machine. On Sunday morning, there were still latecomers getting credentials but an end-of-term-at-boarding-school melancholy hung around the corridors of the main fair, and the only energy was generated by dealers trying to pump one last sale through their iPhones. ("I can go down to 1.1. 750,000? Sorry, m'dear! Let's meet in the middle!") Yet, some of these eleventh-hour discounts proved successful. Happily, everyone, or seemingly almost everyone, packed up and moved onto Simon de Pury's glorious wedding party.

It is, of course, possible that hard times will return. Brooke Alexander, just for one, believes it may be a double dip, and he's been around long enough to have a sense of such things. But overall, dealers at Basel were just too exhausted to force the smiles, and, yes, they were smiling. The general sense was that the future was looking rosier. The recent auction results had not been generally trusted as reliable indicators, but now there was a second round of fair sales (and some good auctions in Paris and London). Art Basel had been good. So, too, may be the fall.

editorial@observer.com

There were Mr. McMullan's friends from the old days, like gossip columnist Liz Smith, social fixture Anne Slater, and Iman the supermodel. There were newer friends like socialites Byrdie Bell, Olivia Palermo, and Ally Hilfiger. And there were the sorts of guests we rarely see out at New York parties that commence later than the cocktail hour, like interviewer Charlie Rose, Gayle King, and Rick and Kathy Hilton.

Around the room, Mr. McMullan's photos from decades past were blown-up and displayed prominently. A photo of the photographer with Hillary Clinton hung over the bar; another shot of a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio, wearing '90s-appropriate flannel and being carried by a few of his buddies, was on the opposite wall.

The guests wanted to make a few things clear about "Patrick." One, he is good at taking photos. Two, he is very nice. And three, his good photos are very nice to his subjects. 

"Patrick is the head of the diplomatic corps," Glenn O'Brian, editorial director of Interview, told the Daily Transom. "You have to have good manners to do what he does and remember people's names. Patrick is great with people so he charms everybody and makes them feel at ease. That's why he gets the good shot. When I met him he was following Stephen Saban around for Details. Stephen would write his nightlife column and Patrick would follow him around and take pictures. But he's always had that Irish confidence."

Socialite Lydia Hearst, dressed in a floor-sweeping Herve Leger gown that kept getting caught under the feet of nearby guests as the place filled to capacity, took her praises of Mr. McMullan a step further. 

"Patrick is New York. When I think about Manhattan, I think about Patrick," she said. "I've known him since I was born; he's always been a very close friend of the family."

The Daily Transom inquired whether socialites like herself favor Mr. McMullan over other party photogs when getting their picture snapped because his shots are almost always flattering. 

"Yes!" Ms. Hearst replied and flashed an angelic smile. The socialite told the Daily Transom that she couldn't wait for fashion week to begin; her good friend, actress Michelle Trachtenberg, will be arriving in town in a few days and they will be hitting some shows together. 

Writer-socialite Anthony Haden-Guest was pushing his way through the crowd to get to the bar. And how long has he been acquainted with Mr. McMullan? 

"Probably since the Byzentine epoch," Mr. Guest replied, in his charmingly apathetic British accent.

"You know, I've been thinking a lot about what makes an artist survive. It's partly about keeping going, and he just keeps going," Mr. Guest said of the photographer. "I had an interesting conversation with Chuck Close once. When Chuck Close takes a photograph for a portrait, he wants complete complicity with his subject rather than ambush his subject. Patrick is definitely of the Chuck Close fashion. He likes familiarity."

Former Village Voice fashion columnist (and soon-to-be New York magazine fashion blogger) Lynn Yaeger pointed out one other reason to admire Mr. McMullan.

"I've actually known him for about 15 years, since I first started writing about fashion. He was very friendly and if you started in the fashion world back then you remembered who was friendly," said Ms. Yaeger. "And he's interested in shooting everyone, not just famous people. And, I don't know, he's just ubiquitous."

Outside, earlier in the evening, the crowd of smokers had grown quiet as they peered over each others' shoulders to gawk at financier Bruce Wasserstein strolling out of the restaurant with his new wife, 35-year-old Angela Chao. Mr. Wasserstein was well aware of the whispers and stares. He clutched Ms. Chao's hand, warily looking around as the two walked some 10 feet to a chauffeured SUV and drove away at the reasonable hour of 9:30 p.m.

Around 8 p.m. last night, several partygoers--who had been toasting the Chelsea Arts Tower--tore themselves away from Cheim & Read Gallery, and took in the city view from high above the High Line.

Although Calvin Klein--who recently dropped $4 million on an 18th floor unit--didn't show up, there were plenty of real estate industry types and art aficionados (like Anthony Haden-Guest) on hand. The stylish group boarded a rickety, cage-like elevator, and headed up to the building's, still unfinished, 15th floor.

In a few months, the 20-story, glass and concrete tower--located on a former West 25th Street parking lot--will be completed. Full-floor, commercial condo units have already been scooped up by Marlborough Gallery, and several prominent art collectors--including Adam Lindemann.

Up above the low-lying galleries in the neighborhood, contracting consultant George Protheroe assured the guests that the Statue of Liberty was visible from the building's south side, or had been earlier in the day, when the light was better.

And Mr. Protheroe also hinted that the tower would soon have a high-rise neighbor, although "not quite as tall as this one." Nevertheless, he remained cagey: "I'm not at liberty to say yet what it is." Hmm....

Earlier in the evening, down in the ground-level gallery space next door, partygoers sipped their wine and listened to stories of Chelsea's far less ritzy (and not so distant) past.

"Dating back 10 or 12 years ago, it was strictly kind of a gritty, warehouse area," said Stuart Siegel, managing director at Grubb & Ellis. "It was kind of a blighted area. Not much money had been spent in the buildings."

Of course, Mr. Siegel was quite prescient; he paid only $9 million for the site. With the tower bringing in about $750 to $1200 a square foot, an average of $3 million per unit, he's doing very well.

Designed to house galleries and private collections, the 75,000-square-foot structure will open in August.

- Lidija Haas