Manhattan Transfers

A classic Fifth Avenue building

Prescott Investors Founder Takes an Interest in 1030 Fifth

It must be a good time to buy real estate. After plunking down $10 million for a Palm Beach mansion in February Thomas Smith and wife Diane have scooped up a four-bedroom co-op at 1030 Fifth Avenue for $15.5 milllion.

Does Mr. Smith, the co-founder and president of Prescott Investors, know something about the real estate market that makes now a good time to buy? Or is the octogenarian, who lists his company’s Greenwich address on the deed, downsizing from some larger place elsewhere?

If there’s anything better than buying right now, it might be selling, especially if the Smiths have an even more luxurious place tucked away elsewhere in the city. Read More

Art

The Ocean Swells: In the Pink at the Palm Beach Fair

Palm Beach is 90 minutes from South Beach by way of Highway I-95. But it is also, of course, a world away, at least a generation away, and it inhabits a whole different universe of shapes, sounds and colors. The colors of South Beach, for example–derived from the once superhot architectural outfit Arquitectonica via a Read More

The Mores, the Merrier! Primer for a New Politesse

Old-fashioned etiquette is alive and well and living in Palm Beach. While vacationing there last week, I saw the kind of extreme posturing and genuflection which one associates with 18th-century Versailles. Everywhere you look, there are doddering titans of industry kissing the backs of ladies’ hands and deftly inserting gilt dining chairs under lifted bottoms. Read More

Stung by a WASP! Still, I Love Palm Beach

Contemplating a second home in Florida? Struggling to decide between frowzy Palm Beach and freaky Miami Beach? Let me add to your confusion.

My husband Jonathan Adler and I spent last week in Florida, commuting back and forward between Palm Beach and Miami Beach. We are more than familiar with Palm Beach, owning, as we Read More

Tipsy Good-Time Gal Strusts in Stilettos

Holly Dunlap, who wears a perma-tan, gold and exclamation marks, grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz., where her mother forbade her to wear black. “I grew up wearing basically all pink and green until I was a teenager,” she said.

Dad was a real-estate developer; Mom covered the house head to toe in Lilly Pulitzer. “It Read More

Society Flaps South

On a recent Friday afternoon, Manhattan society hostess and art collector Beth de Woody was sitting in Terminal 6 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, awaiting her JetBlue flight to Palm Beach, when she ran into Caroline Hirsch, owner of Caroline’s Comedy Club, and her boyfriend, attorney Andrew Fox. “We were all hanging out in Read More