On a recent Thursday night, go-go girls in silky white capes swung from on high, as art heavyweights like Larry Gagosian and Simon de Pury mixed with fashion celebrities like Vera Wang and Tory Burch, and waiters in crisp white shirts and skinny black ties passed through the room with trays of Dom Pérignon.
Socialites from the old order (Gigi Mortimer and Ghislaine Maxwell) blended seamlessly with those of the new (Nicky Hilton and Hannah Bronfman). Bono talked Knicks with Vito Schnabel. Tony Shafrazi, another art dealer, showed up late with Owen Wilson.
Yet none of the luminaries commanded more attention than Aby Rosen, the developer and bon vivant, who was celebrating his 53rd birthday. Pointedly underdressed in a black T-shirt, Mr. Rosen was gyrating on the dance floor to Kool and the Gang, silver hair flowing, fist in the air. At midnight, a shower of gold confetti rained from overheard. An attempt to raise a celebratory glass devolved into a shirt-drenching Champagne fight, with Mr. Rosen, happily the loser, dripping in the middle of it.
“If you give a party,” Mr. Rosen said in his Kissingerian growl, “you better give it right.”
Consider that a mantra.
Propelled by a bearish charm and a provocateur’s sensibility, Mr. Rosen, the son of a small-scale developer from Frankfurt, has thrust himself into roles typically reserved for scions of New York’s leading families. He is a real estate titan whose company controls the crown jewels of modernism, the Seagram Building and Lever House, and an art collector with 800 postwar gems, including 100-plus Warhols. He is a regular on the charity circuit, particularly since being named chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts, a post formerly held by Kitty Carlisle Hart.
He is married to a pillar of New York society, Samantha Boardman. Dinner invitations to the couple’s 14-room home on Fifth Avenue — opulently furnished with Warhols, Basquiats and Calders — are highly coveted, with the guest list ranging from Barbara Walters to Alex Rodriguez to the Harvard professor Steven Pinker. Attendees say that the star wattage radiates equally from the guests and hosts. “They’re the ones with active minds,” said the artist Rachel Feinstein, who, with her husband, the painter John Currin, is a frequent guest. “They seek him out, he seeks them out.”
But what Aby Rosen really wants to be is a party boy, to judge by his latest endeavor. He already owns a celebrity-packed clubhouse restaurant in Midtown, a fashionable hotel in Gramercy Park and a glassy resort in South Beach that rages during Art Basel Miami Beach. Unknown to most of his birthday guests, his most ambitious foray into night life was under their feet — the $20 million revival of the Diamond Horseshoe, a legendary nightclub in the basement of the Paramount Hotel that was immortalized in the 1945 musical film of the same name starring Betty Grable as the headlining showgirl.
Set to open this fall, the Diamond Horseshoe, as envisioned by Mr. Rosen, will be a new night-life concept: a Dalí-like mix of high art and camp, theater and circus, audacity and calculation. In other words, Aby Rosen at his essence.
“I wake up every morning and I think, ‘You know what, I’m a lucky bastard,’ ” Mr. Rosen said, creeping through traffic in the back seat of a black Mercedes S-class on a recent afternoon.
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Yana Paskova for The New York Times
