Still, the central staircase, faced in warm marble, has to be one of the finest in the city, reason enough to put the place back on the market, as Mr. Rosen did in 2008. The blushing price was $75 million, the most anyone dared to ask for a home at the time. And there it has sat ever since. Though the place, now asking a mere $50 million, has been far from quiet.

In the intervening years, it has become a boîte of sorts, like so many of Mr. Rosen’s properties--he’s put the house party in Lever House--host to galas, fundraisers, after parties, product launches and, as was the case last night, art shows.

Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, the society fixture, was hosting an opening for Nicholas Pol's Neverlodge—not a bad name for the mansion, either. Even if the art was not all that great, various splatters of paint with clever names (Goat After An Orgasm was one, and not entirely inaccurate) and unusual sculptures of cobbled together ephemera, it all served as a pleasant reminder that townhouses are still lovely, intimate places to show art.

Too bad they command so much more as homes and have thus have become an endangered species uptown.

The Observer caught up with Mr. Rosen just as he was leaving. Before we got a chance to say hi, another guest beat us to the big man. He looked like Mr. Rosen's fellow friend and art dealer Alberto Mugrabi, though it was hard to tell in the faint street light. In the course of the conversation, we overheard the Maybe Mr. Mugrabi remark, "You know, I've talked to two or three people tonight who really want to buy the place."

"Oh yeah?" Mr. Rosen shot back. "I've spoken to more than three. It's great. Everyone wants to buy the place, nobody wants to pay for it."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Prince Pierre Casiraghi with Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, pre-fight (Patrick McMullan)

Updated: An earlier edition of this item suggested that Ms. Hilton was at the club at the time of the assault. She was in Las Vegas, celebrating her birthday and winning a lot of money. The New York Observer apologizes for the error.

Today's biggest headline in the New York Post wasn't about Jeremy Lin or Cardinal Tim Dolan. How refreshing! Instead, the story of the day is about a spat at the Meatpacking Club Double Seven club on Saturday night, between former owner of Hawaiian Tropic Zone, Adam Hock, and a group of very young adults with very old money. The night ended with a sprained shoulder for Mr. Hock and an alleged broken jaw for 24-year-old Prince Pierre Casiraghi, the grandson of Grace Kelly. Mr. Hock is now being charged with four counts of third-degree assault.

Fights between socialites and bar owners are usually relegated to Page Six. So how did Emily Smith's team make Saturday's punch-up front page news? The answer might lay in a throw-away reference to the rest of the prince's posse.

Hock, 47, said he was just defending himself and the bevy of models seated at his table after Casiraghi, Paris Hilton ex Stavros Niarchos and scenesters Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Diego Marroquin became “belligerent” and “aggressive” because he was at a better table than them.

Without getting into the he-said, he-said of the ordeal (Mr. Hock claimed that the kids were drinking his friend's bottle service, while party promoter Nima Yamini said that Mr. Hock "just went nuts") take a look at some of those names. Paris Hilton and her ex-boyfriend Stavros Niarchos were always a terrible combo: those two can't enter a bar without it basically exploding into a flurry of fists. Vladmir Restoin Roitfeld (the son of French Vogue's former editor, Caroline Roitfeld), Diego Marroquin, and Prince Casiraghi, on the other hand, might be well-known party-goers, but their names aren't usually tied to bar brawls.

And reading the testimony of events, it did seem as if the original beef was between the shipping heir and Mr. Hock. While the first Post story assumed Prince Casiraghi as the instigator:

Hock, 47, had been partying with friends — including Double Seven owner Jeffrey Jah, hairdresser-to-the-stars Joel Warren and catwalk stunners Natasha Poly, Valentina Zalyaeva and Anja Rubik — when Casiraghi strolled over to their table with shipping-scion pal and Paris Hilton ex Stavros Niarchos III and two other men at around 2:30 a.m., witnesses said.

...the front-page story today had Mr. Hock switching his story over to blame Mr. Niarchos:

“My friend Peter Bakker [supermodel Natasha Poly’s husband] (editor's note: yes, this would be the same Natasha Poly who just purchased a posh condo at 100 11th Ave) was there at our table with his wife and two other top models. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, I could see there was hostility between Peter and Stavros Niarchos,” Hock said.

Carine Roitfeld.

"No, I don't own any Richard Hambleton," Alberto Mugrabi, whose family owns close to 1000 works by Warhol, yelled into The Observer's ear. "But maybe I'd like to buy some?"

We had run into Mr. Mugrabi, the party-hopping titan of art collecting, at Indochine last night, where Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmorbida were celebrating Mr. Hambleton's retrospective -- their last exhibition of the artist with partner Giorgio Armani -- with the kind of rager befitting the locale. It was so smokey and loud just close your eyes and, hey, it's 1983. And that was, after all, the artist's heyday.

"You know he's here, right?" we told Mr. Mugrabi. "Richard Hambleton."

The man who palled around with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat -- and can claim Banksy as a spiritual descendent -- was indeed hunched in one of the enormous booths, a black tie poking out of his white sweater. Nicky Hilton sat one booth over.

"Oh, wow," Mr. Mugrabi said. "Do you want some vodka?"

The art collector then grabbed the nearest bottle, removed the cap, and took a vigorous swig. He handed it to us and we did the same.

Yes, these handles of liquor -- and bottles of Champagne, too -- seemed to sprout up at Indochine like weeds. And yet Lindsay Lohan resisted the temptation! Instead she sat at the long table in the back, not a single cigarette to dangle from her lips, removing and re-affixing a silver ring from her finger.

We had been here before -- Mr. Restoin Roitfeld and Mr. Valmorbida held the after party for their RETNA show, in February, at Indochine as well -- that didn't matter. By the time Owen Wilson showed up, perhaps it was all a bit too much for him (he's sober these days, and even managed to avoid temptation Kenmare, where we saw him late Thursday night).

"Oh, don't mind me," Mr. Wilson said to us outside, where we were enjoying the novelty of having a cigarette outside. He removed his bike lock, mounted it, and biked away.

We took his lead and jetted to Electric Room, where the new subterranean Meatpacking venue played host to a party for Jade Jagger. Theodora Richards stayed at Indochine and avoided a Rolling Stones kids reunion, but Ms. Lohan made the trip, as did party hosts Mr. Restoin Roitfeld and Mr. Valmorbida.

And Courtney Love was there, again.

"Are you going to Westway tomorrow?" she asked us. "You can be my plus one if you" -- she turned toward a diminutive girl walking into Electric Room --"Oh heyyyy! It's been so long. Nate, have you met Mary Kate?"

Mary Kate Olsen introduced herself.

"I haven't seen you since, what was it, that kimono party at that apartment?" Ms. Love said.

"I believe so," Ms. Olsen said.

Then we went inside, where after an hour of more drinks and dancing in the Britannica-inflected box full of blue glow, we ran into Ms. Olsen one more time.

"What was that Kimono party?" we asked.

"Oh," she said, smiling. "It wasn't really anything."

The Parisian artist was sitting in an empty white storage warehouse, wedged in a corner of the dirty cement floor, wallowing in the bits of clumping plaster.

“Yeah, it’s great,” The Observer responded. Asbestos was scattered about them.

A few rooms over, “Sick Atavus of the New Blood,” Mr. Pol’s second career exhibition, had lured to the gutted-out space on Washington Street editors of glossy magazines, willowy-eyed French girls in gothic, black-strapped heels and men with chunky Gallic noses. The space where the paintings were hung had been wiped clean and stuffed with hovering trays of Champagne, but the cold room, where Mr. Pol sat with The Observer, had nothing but a crude outline of the continents etched onto a discarded wall.

Mr. Pol pointed at the map of the world.

“I wanted it as a piece for the show but no, I can’t,” he said. “It’s way too heavy.”

Nothing in the exhibition, though, was as staid as the page of an atlas. His paintings were chopshops of Warhol ad copy, big colors plastered on top, blunt imagery swirled in. Dug into the canvases were big corpse boxes with corporation logos and the occasional glaring crucifix. His sculptures were overgrown headlike piñatas, their mouths gagging on tongues of Chinese dragon capes that spewed out them, pulsating gold letters jumping off the scarlet base and crawling like carpet through the room.

“Your art is bombastic,” The Observer noted.

The painter had paint stains on his grease-hued cords, a round face and Frankish overtones babying the sound of every syllable.

“It’s good that you say that,” Mr. Pol said. “You don’t need to know too much, if you know some things about what’s going on with the world, that will be enough.”

Mr. Pol’s last show attracted no less than the discerning eyes of the Olsen twins, and though Mary-Kate and Ashley skipped out this go-around, the musk of celebrity was pervasive. This had much to do with Mr. Pol’s promoter and wingman Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and his mother, Carine Roitfeld, the party fixture late of the editor’s desk at French Vogue.

With that in mind, should the artist applaud or sigh if four women want nothing more to do with their Thursday night than crash his afterparty?

“No! We’re going in,” one of the uninvited said after The Observer watched them race past fretful PRs at the Gramercy Park Hotel and into his elevator.

“He said that he’s gonna find a seat for us, so now we’re just going,” said a second. “Period, end of story.”

To their credit, the crashers lasted a good 15 minutes, and even managed to snag The Observer’s seat as he roamed around the garden terrace, overgrown bushes and ferns tumbling off the ledges.

Upstairs, Ms. Roitfeld caught the artist by the elbow and entered into a low but audible whisper.

“It was amazing!” Ms. Roitfeld said. “It’s the third one, no? I’m drunk, but I don’t think it’s the second one. And then the next one!”

By the time Mr. Pol mentioned his next choice of exhibition locale, Hong Kong, they had moved back into French. The words gelled to a blur—The Observer lacked comprehension of the tongue—and then they started repeating something that sounded like “je fume”—oh, they were indicating that you could smoke over there, in the bathrooms.

The terrace was tucked underneath a rooftop glass box and beneath that dome the guests drifted freely between courses and, as the wine set in, during them. On one side sat the de Kooning family.

“Yeah! I definitely see some abstract thing going on,” Lucy, Willem’s granddaughter, said to The Observer over a cigarette. “Like, definitely Nicolas’ work was definitely influenced by my grandfather.”

Asher Roth, the frat-rap MC responsible for “I Love College,” had come with his girlfriend, 23-year-old gin heiress Hannah Bronfman.

“I’m getting my eyes opened right now,” Mr. Roth explained. “It was violent, really violent. You gotta appreciate art of that magnitude.”

The art of that magnitude was there, in the gallery, in the hotel, and The Observer did appreciate it. He noted it in the asbestos smearing the painter’s pants, or the audacity of those walking into a party and taking a random seat. There was also magnitude in the statement The Observer heard before entering the bathroom, uttered by the French man about to exit.

“Enjoy your smoke, mate,” he said.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"I want to work with people of my generation since I have so many people taking pictures around me," he told us then. "So I want to keep on looking for talent, whether it’s in photography or any type of art and see where it might go. Every time it’s a big project to work on and I just started in this business, but I’m just trying to enjoy it."

Naturally, we thought this phase would pass like others before it. Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld briefly worked as an assistant to a producer at Paramount and modeled a bit for Rock & Republic before moving to New York to be closer to his girlfriend, model Lily Donaldson, and his sister, socialite Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, and taking up curating. But it seems that the young Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld seems intent on sticking with this new career path.

During the upcoming Fashion Week, Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld will host an exhibition along with Andy Valmorbida (P.C.'s brother) of works by Richard Hambleton, best known for his shadow paintings from the ’80s, in collaboration with Giorgio Armani on Sept. 15.

The decision to hold the show during the time of year when his entire family will descend and dine together at Indochine, their favorite restaurant, is of course strategic. Mr. Armani is a friend of his mother's, after all, and photographer Mario Testino, who will cause an even bigger fuss when he arrives in town due to his memorable role in The September Issue, is his godfather. “Mario is practically part of the family; he used to pick me up from school when I was younger and take me to fashion shoots,” Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld told us back in February. “I think that maybe by spending so much time with him that maybe I have a certain eye or an instinct for photography.” Mr. Testino and Mr. Armani are of course also known for their celebrity pull. Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld's February show, sponsored by Louis Vuitton, brought in Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Claire Danes, Gisele Bundchen and Mary Kate Olsen, not to mention a slew of society gals.

His mother told the Daily Transom at her son's show in February: "I don't know if he will do more shows or film, but when you try to produce things, it's a hard hard job, and I'm very proud of him. I'll be very happy if he becomes successful."

Among the photographs were topless photos of models (Erin Wasson, Susan Eldridge) by David Muchegan, photos of Juliette Lewis and urinals by P.C. Vlamorbida, and of course, the now-mandatory blown up shots of female genitalia, with a flower growing out of it in this case, by Salim Langatta. ("Is that you? No way! I knew it was her!" the Daily Transom overheard two models discussing while staring at the photo.)

Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld most recent achievements include graduating from University of Southern California, working as an assistant to a producer at Paramount for six months and doing some modeling for Rock & Republic. But since moving to New York about a year ago to be closer to his girlfriend, model Lily Donaldson, and his sister Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, he’s decided to curate and organize photography shows for his friends.

"I want to work with people of my generation since I have so many people taking pictures around me," he told the Daily Transom when we phoned him the day before the show. "So I want keep on looking for talent, whether it’s in photography or any type of art and see where it might go. Every time it’s a big project to work on and I just started in this business, but I’m just trying to enjoy it."

Moving to the U.S. was originally his parents’ idea, said Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld. But he found that he was quite pleased with his American education.

“When you grow up in Europe, you see all the American colleges on TV with campuses, and football fields, people playing sports, going to college in sunny places, and riding bikes or skateboards to school,” he said. “USC was exactly how I pictured it. It was fantastic.

"But New York is home for now,” he continued. “In LA, you’re a bit far from your family and your friends.” (Indeed, in New York he can at least see his mother twice a year when she comes to check out the shows; in fact, the whole family will likely get together for dinner at Indochine later this week, he said.)

Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld's new venture shouldn’t be too hard to realize. There is his family’s long list of art and fashion connections—Mario Testino, the fashion photographer, is his godfather. “Mario is practically part of the family; he used to pick me up from school when I was younger and take me to fashion shoots,” said Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld. “I think that maybe by spending so much time with him that maybe I have a certain eye or an instinct for photography.”

But Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld has also made some friends of his own from the many nights he’s spent having cocktails at Rose Bar, dinner at Indochine, and attending various fashion parties with his girlfriend or sister.

Among the guests last night were Mary-Kate Olsen, The Misshapes' Leigh Lezark, model Gisele Bundchen, and socialites Genevieve Jones and Fabiola Beracasa.

"I'm good!" we overheard Ms. Jones tell Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld. "I need to go get some coffee though, I'm pretty tired." (We politely tried to ask Ms. Jones what she thought of some of the photographs, but she blew us off. "Oh, I'm not really good at this stuff," she told us. "Sorry, I'm really tired.")

Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld's mother and sister arrived on the later side and were immediately wrangled to pose for photos with the other guests.

"I've seen these before and I am very proud of these young guys," Carine told the Daily Transom in her heavy French accent. "It's good not to wait too long to be able to show your work. I'm very surprised by their talent because they are so young, you know?"

We wondered what the French Vogue editor thought of her son's new career path and if she thought it was the right fit for him.

"I don't know if he will do more shows or film, but when you try to produce things, it's a hard hard job, and I'm very proud of him," she replied. "I'll be very happy if he becomes successful."