Downstate: New York City View

Not in the Adirondacks

Ah, the wonderful trials and tribulations of Manhattan real estate! My friend Jennifer has a great two bedroom, two and a half bath apartment on the the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She lives there with her husband and daughter and the place is worth over a million dollars. It's in a fair building on a loud avenue and therefore doesn't have the cache of something on, say, Park or Fifth or Grammercy Park. But it has a doorman and is near good shopping and transportation. Still, she, like all of us living on this Island, is on the lookout for the next place to call home. Something bigger, in a building with more character and history perhaps, and higher ceilings. Something with space, but also with style and a little more of the feel of old money than the 60's white brick building she lives in now. Another friend lives in a three bedroom, three and a half bathroom on the 36th floor of a building down the street with her shar-pei, Topper, and her tea cup chihua-hua, Cliquot. But she's also looking, like all of us, for something better. For her, not necessarily bigger, but something with more downtown style and flair, something fun. Most Americans can't imagine living in a million dollar home, but guess what? That's the average price of a Manhattan apartment. It's enough to make you move to the Adirondacks. Co-ops and million dollar apartments haven't made it that far north yet. And where do we want to life (not counting the Adirondacks, of course)? The Dakota. In John Lennon's apartment.

The Fight for Space and the Battle with Nature

New Yorkers battle for space every day. Adirodackers battle against nature. We find that New York is about finding your space and negotiating through very limited space on a daily basis, and keeping sane while doing it. In the Adirondacks, we have more space than we can use but we are still soldiers - against the relentless force of nature, flooding the basement, slamming trees into the house, eroding the land. Sometimes, between these two battle fronts, the most peaceful part of our lives is in the car. Getting out of the space-challenged city and whooshing toward freedom and fresh air - it is a long, but quiet and battle-free drive. I think the key to surviving both battles (neither, of course, can be "won") is understanding and practicing accommodation, or - just letting it go. I am not good at this. I see the city as a battle I will win someday and the struggle against nature as something that can, with enough money and willpower, be overcome, or at least the battle can be joined. We will build stone houses that won't decay! We will built breakwaters that will protect the land! It won't work. The land will erode, in the end, and the city will chug ahead, with or without us.

Summer Reading 2007

New York writer Dana Vachon's first novel, Mergers & Acquisitions, will be published in April by Riverhead/Penguin. The publisher's advance synopsis of the book follows: "A stylish and hilarious novel about the lives and loves of well-to-do young Manhattanites in their first year on Wall Street, destined to become one of the year's most buzzed-about debuts.

Mergers & Acquisitions is the story of Tommy Quinn, a recent Georgetown grad who has just landed the job of his dreams as an investment banker at J. S. Spenser, and the perfect girl, Frances Sloan, the daughter of one of New York's oldest moneyed families. As he travels from the most exclusive ball rooms of the Racquet and Tennis Club to the stuffiest boardrooms of J. S. Spenser, from the golf links of Piping Rock to the bedrooms of Park Avenue, and from the debauched yacht of a Mexican billionaire to the Ritalin-strewn prep-school dorm room of his younger brother, he finds that the job and the girl are not what they once seemed.

Sharply written, fast-paced, and bitingly witty, Mergers & Acquisitions is a compulsively readable story of Manhattan's young, ambitious, and wealthy. Set against the backdrop of money, lust, power, corruption, cynicism, energy, and excitement that is Wall Street, it is suffused with an authenticity that only an author who lives in that world can provide. A former investment banker at J. P. Morgan, Vachon offers an insider's point of view on the financial scene, and he knows the moneyed turf of Manhattan inside out." You can pre-order your copy from Amazon.com. Dana Vachon was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, and raised in Chappaqua, New York. He attended Duke University, graduating, as he claims, "cum nihilo" in 2002. Following graduation, Vachon landed a job at J. P. Morgan as an analyst and began work on this novel. His writing has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Men's Vogue, The New York Times, and Salon.

ADKS: The Central Park of New York State

It has been said that the Adirondack Park -- six million acres of it -- is the Central Park of New York State. In the real Central Park, Christo and Jean-Claude's dramatic spectacle, The Gates, was installed a while ago and caused a sensation in the City. The Park was transformed. We walked through the Park, through the Gates. It was an interactive experience, walking under the flowing saffron (not orange, no!) fabric winding through and into the landscape. Central Park was a museum and the visitors walked slowly, and quietly, through it, as they might walk through the Frick or another grand museum.