The evening was held in recognition of New York’s 20 top philanthropists under 40, an illustrious list that included Eric Trump, Nigel Barker, Lauren Bush Lauren and Chelsea Clinton. While waitresses passed out dainty nibbles like grilled cheese fingers and spoonfuls of truffle risotto, the D.J. spun beats to a packed crowd who schmoozed and mingled under the light of two immense Venini glass chandeliers.

The festivities kicked off with speeches by Joseph Meyer and Peter Davis, members of our own Observer family, and from Eric Trump, who spoke eloquently about his involvement with the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Under the auspices of the Eric Trump Foundation, Mr. Trump has raised nearly $6 million for St. Jude’s and the foundation has grown into one of the largest private charities in the country.

“We had the benefit through our company and through our network to do something for people less fortunate,” Mr. Trump explained to The Observer afterwards. “And in this case it's kids who just drew the short straw: it could happen to you and it could happen to me.”

Donald Trump had nothing but praise for his son’s charitable work. “Eric works so hard for so many charities and St. Jude’s in particular, he’s just got that in his blood," said Mr. Trump. "He loves it. And he’s raised a lot of money over the years and I’m very proud of him.”

And the Trumps weren’t the only philanthropy family making the rounds. Gorgeous cousins Amanda and Lydia Hearst—both on our top 20 under 40 list—were in attendance representing their respective charities.

Amanda Hearst started her charity, Friends of Finn, after purchasing her dog Finn from a pet store and discovering he came from a puppy mill. “We’ve gone on puppy mill raids and done more serious stuff but it’s also just been great to interact with the animals,” explained Ms. Hearst. Does Ms. Hearst carry him around in her purse, as is the fashion of another heiress who shall not be named? Ms. Hearst demurred. “He’s kind of chubby so he’d be like a weight on my shoulder,” she laughed.

We spoke with Lydia Hearst-Shaw about her work with Operation Smile, a worldwide charity that treats children with cleft palates and other facial deformities. “For every birthday I no longer accept gifts, I ask my friends to make a donation to Operation Smile,” explained Ms. Hearst, who has gone on three medical missions and helped launch the global offices in Sweden and Toronto. “When you actually go out in the world and realize you can make a difference, it’s a life altering experience,” she added.

We couldn’t help but recognize Lydia Hearst’s date, Kevin Connolly, and we had to stop ourselves from addressing him as "E" after his character on Entourage. But Mr. Connolly assured us that he has left Turtle and the gang well behind. His new hockey documentary, Big Shot, is premiering at ESPN Tribeca tomorrow. “I came here for Lydia’s thing tonight and tomorrow we’ll go to that,” he said with a laugh. “I have two suits.”

About an hour later we spotted Mr. Connolly’s former girlfriend, Nicky Hilton, and her new beau James Rothschild canoodling in the VIP table.  Hopefully the charitable spirit of the evening mitigated any awkward run-ins.

Jesse Cole, CEO of Haute Hippie, made our top 20 list for his work with Ronald McDonald House, which provides housing for children with cancer and their families while they receive treatment in New York City. There Mr. Cole spearheaded the formation of a new board of young philanthropists. Board members are required not only to give or get $10,000, but also to tour the house and interact with children and families. “I didn’t want it to be all about money. Mostly I wanted people to humanize their experience by meeting families and seeing the establishment,” Mr. Cole told us. “In my opinion it’s very easy to get people to join a worthy cause. But it’s not so easy to get people to do God’s work day in and day out.”

“He’s being far too modest,” said Bill Sullivan, CEO of Ronald McDonald House, adding that Mr. Cole’s work raised over half a million dollars last year.

As we tried to navigate the thick crowd forming at the bar, we chatted with art-world beauty and top 20 honoree Bettina Prentice, who has been involved for eight years with Coalition for the Homeless. Coalition provides emergency food, housing, crisis intervention and job training to the homeless in New York City. “There are so many people involved in charities on a macro level but I really want to be involved on a micro level,” explained Ms. Prentice. “I want to affect one person's life. And the Coalition really gives me the tools to do that.”

Ms. Prentice, a new mom to baby Henry, was visibly emotional as she told us about the work that Coalition does, especially a program in which the program will pay a family's back rent in order to save them from eviction. “I’m going to cry I’m so hormonal and emotional from the baby!” she said.

“She’s blaming it on the baby, she’s always like this when she talks about the Coalition,” chimed in Coalition Executive Director David Giffin.

Ultimately, despite some teary hormonal moms, the evening was a festive one, with everyone in generous spirits, copious free booze and more grilled cheeses than we can count. Who says that giving back can’t be fun?

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)

AT JUST 23, ERIC TRUMP DECIDED that young people should do more for their community, so he started his own charitable foundation, the eponymous Eric Trump Foundation, which is committed to improving the lives of children who are battling life-threatening diseases at Saint Jude Children’s Hospital, an institution with a unique and amazing mandate: no child is ever turned away. To date, ETF has raised more than six million dollars for the hospital, and with Mr. Trump’s lean infrastructure, it has become a global blueprint for how to successfully run a nonprofit organization and donate money without spending it. The 30-year-old Mr. Trump is a busy guy—working as executive vice president of development and acquisitions at The Trump Organization as well as starring on the smash TV show The Apprentice alongside his father Donald and sister Ivanka. Outgoing and charismatic, Mr. Trump talks to peter davis on how he has turned his foundation into a model of how to give a charity maximum impact.

PETER DAVIS:  Let’s start with St. Jude Children’s Hospital, which is wonderful because they don’t turn any children away. What was your first encounter with St. Jude?

ERIC TRUMP: We knew that children were near and dear to our hearts, and we went out and we went to every children’s hospital around the country. When we got down to St. Jude, we just saw something that was different; something that’s very special. Obviously, one of those things you just pointed out is the fact that no child ever pays, which is amazing. Beyond that, they’re a true research institution. They have the largest supercomputers in the world. They’ve got the smartest doctors in the world, and they want the problem cases, because the problem cases are what teaches them. For St. Jude in 1960, leukemia, if you had it, there was a 4 percent survival rate; now it’s [a] 97 percent survival rate. They were the ones who cured leukemia! You walk into the labs now, and they’ll have the smartest doctors in the world using the most complicated mathematics. These guys are incredible. 

PD: You also visit the hospital regularly. 

ET: I’m down there three times a year, because I’m on the board, but I speak to numerous parents every time I’m down there and I’ve developed relationships with them. People don’t realize how complex the problem of cancer is. And when you take adolescent cancer, where there’s only about 15,000 cases of pediatric cancer in the U.S., no one wants to study that, because there’s no money in it for the pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer isn’t going to get rich. Of that 15,000, there’s 400 different subsects of that—all of these cancers are incredibly rare, they’re all in different spots. While there are some that are more common than another, no one’s going to produce medicines for those kinds of cancers, because there’s just no market for it. So St. Jude has their own pharmaceutical company, and they’ll experiment on medicines and test them, then they obviously produce them and distribute them all around the world, and the reason they’re able to do that is because of guys like us—people privately fund them and privately fund that research.

PD: And they share their research.

ET: Totally open book—their protocols are what are used by every hospital in the world. In fact, an amazing thing: they’re going down to some of the third world countries where obviously they have these same cancers, and they’re sending effectively a doctor down there who’s diagnosing a problem correctly, in very, very simple places, putting them on the right protocols, and they’re bringing survival rates from 3, 4 percent in some of these kind of developing countries, up to 80 percent, 85 percent. That educational component, and then making sure that they have the right medicines themselves, and then obviously the follow-up, is literally increasing survival rates by 80-plus percent in countries. They’re miracle workers.

PD: That’s incredible. Tell me about the wing you’re opening at the hospital in 2015.

ET: Our recent announcement was that we pledged $20 million dollars for the Eric Trump Foundation ICU—Intensive Care Unit—at St. Jude. It’s the most technologically advanced ICU for children in the world—the first hospital in the world to have a proton beam dedicated directly to children. Effectively, if you have a child that has a tumor in their head, you can go in and remove it, but that’s really risky because obviously you’re dealing with brain tissue. The only way to cure that right now is radiation, but when conventional radiation therapy comes out, it’s like shining a flashlight on your head. It goes through, kills everything on the way in, kills everything on the way out. It also happens to kill the tumor. What they’re finding is kids going through radiation treatment are losing about 20 percent I.Q. points, so you have a perfectly normal kid, other than the fact that they were dealt a short straw, which is cancer, and they’re killing the tumor, but you’re also losing serious I.Q. off a child. Which isn’t acceptable. And so there’s new technology called proton beam, and these machines are $150 million—they’re incredibly expensive—but they’re able to shed, using massive amounts of electricity, protons off of water molecules, and they can control protons. Protons have almost zero energy until they hit a certain point, and then there’s a massive spike of energy, and then there’s no residual. So what they’re able to do is literally use a proton, and go in and erase [a] mass tumor in the head because there’s hardly any energy coming in. Depending on the amount of energy that they pump into it, they control the depth of where that energy spike is, and there’s no residual coming out the back. They’re finding that they can literally go into children with these awful tumors and hit that tumor while the kids are hooked up to a CAT scan, literally three dimensionally go in there and actually erase solid tumors.

PD: Do you have anything planned when the wing opens?

ET: We’re going to do a major ribbon-cutting at the hospital, and it’ll be a lot of fun. For us, that’s going down there in jeans and a polo and getting together with all the little kids and the families, and just going out and eating ribs, and doing what you do in Memphis. Spending time with the families and the kids and the doctors. It really is a family down there.

PD: You minored in psychology at Georgetown. Has that helped in terms of dealing with people that have terminal illnesses?

ET: Psychology is an amazing thing, and the reason psychology is amazing is, traditionally, I’ve always been a pretty black-and-white guy—where it’s right or wrong, it’s black or white. I think the more you study psychology, the more you realize it’s really not. That the gray areas, somewhere in between, probably comprises 98 percent of true life, and it’s not really right or wrong. Psychology changed that way of thinking for me a lot. These kids are the most beautiful kids in the world and the most precious things that we have in our society. I’m 30 years old; if I get cancer right now, so be it. I had a great life, it’s been fantastic. But many of these kids were born and they’ve never seen the proverbial light of day. They’ve never made it outside of a hospital room. They’re being attacked simply because they drew a short straw.

PD:  You started the foundation at age 23. Do you think there are more young people getting involved in charitable organizations than ever before, or has it always been that way? In New York, people associate these things with an older generation.

ET: It’s a great question, and my answer would be I certainly hope so. I think everybody should be involved in charity, especially the people who can make a difference. I have the ability to raise $2 million a year, and that’s because we have the fortune of having the assets. I’m a pretty moral guy, and a charitable guy, and I wish more of that happened. But I wouldn’t rule our generation out. There are a lot of good people.

PD: I saw one of the awards that you had was A Day with Bill Clinton, which I would definitely want to win.

ET: Every year he donates that. A Day with Bill Clinton: follow him around, hang out with him, have lunch with him—and every year we sell it for $120,000, $160,000. He’s the nicest guy in the world. He’s a great friend of my father’s, our family, and it’s just because we had that relationship, we can call him in and call in a favor. We’re very lean. You start putting all these pieces together, and it just turns into this snowball where anything we can sell, we’ll monetize. Any opportunity to raise money, we will. Any favor we can call in, we will. And it’s created this community that surrounds this company, with one mission, and that’s to support St. Jude.

PD: Do you think that your background in business has helped grow this charity?

ET: In five years, we raised $6 million. It is a business; it’s become a major, major business. Most businesses don’t have revenue of $2.5 million coming in every year. It’s pretty incredible. So I’d certainly hope so, but again, I think it’s a business, but it’s a business that’s supported by a business, and it’s a pretty special thing.

[NOTE: Eric Trump's sister, Ivanka, is married to the publisher of The New York Observer.]

Trump National Golf Club, 339 Pine Road (Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.), 11am golfer registration and silent auction begins, 1pm shotgun start, 5pm cocktails and awards, 7:30pm dinner, live auction and performance, tickets and information can be found at erictrumpfoundation.com.

Mayor Bloomberg attends 2011 Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night in Manhattan. April 20, 2011 (Photo Credit: Kristen Artz)

2012: NYT poll finds not much energy for GOP candidates. [Jim Rutenberg]

2012: Video chatter about the poll. [Ben Werschkul]

NY26: Buerkle said, " We don't need to raise taxes. We need to stop spending." [Liz Benjaim]

Same-Sex Marriage: James Alesi, still undecided. [Joe Spector]

Same-Sex Marriage: Opponents say Cuomo is crawling back to liberal base after pushing conservative agenda. [Jimmy Vielkind]

Trump: "[A] blinking neon stand-in for a candidate who will go beyond mainstream boundaries." [Jonathan Martin]

Trump: Likes, but doesn't know much about, classical music. [Caroline Cooper]

Trump: Eric Trump says "I have no idea" if Obama was born here. [Luke Funk]

Bloomberg's Agenda: "[N]othing as bold or controversial as the congestion pricing proposal." [Gail Robinson]

Bloomberg's Agenda: Burning garbage. [Jill Colvin]

East River Tolls: Five GOP senators want to exempt seven counties from MTA tax; foreshadowing return of toll debate? [Liz Benjamin]

Cigarettes: Bloomberg sues online tobacco suppliers. [Livia Scheck]

Economy: "Some people would say Wall Street screwed it up," says John Liu. [Greg Floyd]

Court: Ruben Wills wore a NYC Council pin during his court appearance. [Celeste Katz]

Jobs: Blog for WNYC. [wnyc]

Mr. Trump, lips pursed, was not a man to quibble with. And yet when his middle son, 24-year-old Eric Trump, bought his very first apartment late last year, he not only bought it from his father, he haggled with him over the price. “Of course,” young Mr. Trump told The Observer. “Naturally, we’re not going to get any gifts. We’re going to pay for it. We went back and forth. It wouldn’t be Trump if we didn’t. … His father was the same way to him, and he wants us to work for what we have.”

He paid $2 million for a condo high up in Trump Parc East at 100 Central Park South, according to a deed filed last week in city records. “By the way,” Eric Trump said later, “if I were to go into his office and not haggle, he would have thrown me out and not sold me the space.”

The apartment has 1,353 square feet and three bedrooms. “It’s probably more than I need now at this stage in my life, being a younger, single guy. … I like leather couches, I like comfy couches. I like a warm atmosphere, area rugs.”

As it happens, it took 27 years for the clan to win the apartment. Mr. Trump bought the building and its neighbor in 1981, aiming to raze them and build anew, but was stopped when a court sided with existing tenants. By 1998 the building finally became the Trump Parc East condo, though over half the apartments still had the old rent-regulated tenants, many reportedly paying less than what their new landlord owed in condo carrying charges. He once called them “millionaires in mink coats, driving Rolls-Royces.”

But when the tenants die, move away or default, young Mr. Trump said, their units go to his father. That’s what happened here: “I found out that the apartment came up; I went in and looked at it; I liked it and bought it.” The condo never officially hit the market.

Better yet, three weeks ago, his neighbors voted him onto the condo’s board of directors. “I think they know I gallivant around the world, building buildings, building hotels,” he said. “When they see a Trump living in a Trump building, they know I want to take care of my investment.”

Yet his brother, Donald “Don” Trump Jr., was very publicly ousted from the board at his Trump Place condo on the West Side two years ago. His main rival has since left the building, though, and Don returned to the board last month.

The Trump Parc purchase was first reported on the Web site of The Real Deal.

Of course, Donald Trump’s real-estate empire is full of the kinds of dramatic reversals of fortune that have always attracted ink in this town.

And then, no matter how many deals the other guys make, there’s a certain television show ….

“It’s the jobs,” Mr. Trump told The Observer. “We’re building buildings all over the world … and you get into the public eye that way. There’s no conscious effort.”

Anyone who’s seen The Apprentice might well scoff. But, to be fair, what started decades ago when the son of a barber from the outer boroughs began to play the real-estate game has now turned into a firm whose name will be plastered onto projects from Hawaii to Dubai.

And the Donald had certainly crawled out of the bottom of the loser pit well before he met Survivor producer Mark Burnett.

Donald Trump basically went bankrupt in the early 1990’s, and, according to several accounts, including Timothy L. O’Brien’s in The New York Times, his three living siblings—brother Robert and sisters Elizabeth Grau and Maryanne Barry (a Clinton-appointed federal appeals judge in New Jersey)—bailed him out with money from the trusts bequeathed to them by father Fred Trump.

In 2003, Mr. Burnett presented him with the idea of a reality-show competition based on the premise that to work at Mr. Trump’s firm was to participate in the very top rung of the Manhattan real-estate game.

Millions of viewers later, the Trumps have changed the real-estate game in Manhattan forever.

“Everyone is pushing to get the Trump name on their building,” said Barbara Corcoran, founder of the real-estate brokerage giant the Corcoran Group. (She now does TV production and consulting.) “He’s got a very smart and very easy business proposition; he takes far less risks than if you’re developing. He comes in for the slice of the top, and it’s ingenious, it’s really ingenious—and I really hate saying that. And now his kids are in on the game, too.”

See, there’s Donald, Donald Jr. and daughter Ivanka staring out from the inaugural New York issue of high-end real-estate magazine Haute Living (deliberately pronounced incorrectly by the magazine’s marketers as “Hot Living”), which is strewn about the 26th-floor foyer of Trump Tower. There’s the three eldest children (Eric, 22, now in tow) in a flashy, splashy New York magazine spread in late 2004. And, oh yes (you know you do), there’s millions of people watching them on The Apprentice, season five, and ready to watch them again on season six this winter.

There’s Ivanka, 25, by herself, barely dressed on the cover of Stuff—and then smartly dressed on the covers of Golf for Women and Forbes. (In perhaps an unprecedented dynastic synergy, there’s Ivanka on the cover of Trump Magazine, which also carried an interview with Donald Jr.)

And it’s Donald Jr. giving the keynote address at the international Cityscape Conference 2006 in the chic sheikdom of Dubai three weeks after the Times style section ga-ga’d over him and his pregnant wife, Vanessa, stepping smartly onto the Manhattan Scene before jetting back to the family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

From there, he told The Observer this past Saturday morning that, yes, he’s tired from the travels, but that, no, he doesn’t mind. In fact, later that Saturday, he, his father and his sister would be beamed into a panel at a real-estate conference in Israel.

“I always avoided the public eye until I got into the business,” Donald Jr., 29 this month, said matter-of-factly. He’s now executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization. “If I can create free value for the product when I’m in it, if I don’t take advantage of that, it’s pretty stupid.”

His younger brother remembers a sit-down with his father.

“He certainly sat us down and said, ‘Yes, you’re going to take over this name,’” said Eric Trump on Monday morning, seated in a 26th-floor conference room of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by Brand Trump: seven of his father’s books, one Newsweek cover of his father and two giant posters of Mr. Trump. “But what he’s really tried to get through when raising us is to try to instill values in us, give us the best educations, all the instruments we would need to carry a brand.

“The power of any brand,” Eric says, “is—especially in this day and age—the most powerful instrument for selling real estate or really any other product.”

But that was hardly a new lesson for the Trumps. Fred Trump, whose father was a barber from Germany, built his real-estate fortune in apartment blocks in Brooklyn and Queens.

Backslap-happy and well-connected, Fred earned a reputation both as a frugal businessman and a bit of a blowhard. According to author Wayne Barrett, Fred would boast of building more homes than he actually had and would talk up projects before shovels even hit the dirt.

This brew of bravado and self-promotion served Fred well, and he was able to leave a comfortable fortune in the low nine figures to the next Trump generation.

Now more than ever, and perhaps forever, partners slip in line for the chance to slap the Trump name on a project, regardless of the family’s actual clock-punching efforts on the project’s behalf. In Soho, where a condo hotel is expected to rise off Spring Street 45 stories, Mr. Trump partnered with both the Bayrock Group and the Sapir Organization. In Toronto, Mr. Trump has a minority stake in what’s slated to be the tallest residential building in Canada, but it will still bear the brand as the Trump International Hotel & Tower. (At least 11 towers worldwide already bear or will bear the name Trump International Hotel & Tower, including the original on Columbus Circle.)

And, in the summer of 2005, in what was the priciest land deal in New York City history, Mr. Trump sold dozens of prime acres on the far West Side for $1.76 billion—with several partners from Hong Kong. Mr. Trump had a 30 percent stake in the 77 acres, so it’s unlikely he truly cleaned up on the deal.

But so what? So what if the money now comes in from TV shows, vodka and bottled water rather than from bricks and mortar?

“Once you’re out there,” Donald Jr. said (and he meant in the public eye, though we think “out there” is a fair description of the whole Trump dynasty), “it’s never easy to go back.”