Search results for ""Author Ellen Stern""

A tribute to the unique, historic home and New York City treasure--a classic volume first published in 2005 is here revised and updated for today, with a new foreword by Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray.In this handsomely illustrated paean to New York City's mayoral residence, author Ellen Stern charts the history of Gracie Mansion from its construction as Archibald Gracie's country home in 1799, to its importance as the home of New York City's mayors and their families, to its splendid restoration in 2002, to its new role today as a center of diversity and openness--the people's house.Blending the mansion's architectural and decorative progress with anecdotal portraits of the mayoral families, exclusive interviews with many of those who have lived and worked here, and over 200 paintings and watercolors, letters and maps, invitations and elevations, designers sketches, and before and after photos, this beautiful volume, written with the cooperation of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, is the definitive account of a beloved New York landmark that is more popular today than ever before.

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The definitive biography of Al Hirschfeld, renowned caricaturist and artist. Al Hirschfeld knew everybody and drew everybody. He occupied the twentieth century, and illustrated it. Hirschfeld: The Biography is the first portrait of the renowned artist's life—as spirited and unique as his pen-and-ink drawings. Beginning in the 1920s, he caricatured Hollywood actors, Washington politicians, and—his favorite—celebrities of the stage. Broadway belonged to Hirschfeld. His work appeared in the New York Times and other publications, as well as on book jackets, album covers, posters, and postage stamps, for more than seventy-five years. He lived in Paris, Moscow, and Bali, and in a pink New York townhouse on a star-studded block where his closest friends—Carol Channing, S. J. Perelman, Gloria Vanderbilt, Brooks Atkinson, Elia Kazan, Marlene Dietrich, and William Saroyan—flocked in and out. He played the piano, went to jazz joints with Eugene O'Neill, and wrote a musical that bombed. He drove until he was ninety-eight years old and always found a parking space. He worked every day, threw dinner parties twice a week, and hosted New Year's Eve soirees that were legendary. He had three wives, a formidable agent, and a daughter, Nina, the most famous little girl that no one knows. Hirschfeld died in 2003, at the age of ninety-nine. "If you live long enough," he liked to say, "everything happens." For him, it did. And good and bad—it's all here. Through interviews with Hirschfeld himself, his friends and family (including the mysterious Nina), and his famous subjects, as well as through letters, scrapbooks, and home movies, Ellen Stern has crafted a delightful, detailed, and definitive portrait of Al Hirschfeld, one of our most beloved, and most influential, artists.

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