A Local for the Fourth
We asked our New York Queridos to tell us what to do this weekend. With the country turning 250 and the city already in a celebrating mood, the answer came back without hesitation: stay uptown, on the Upper East Side, and make The Lowell the home base. What follows is one perfect Fourth, told the way only a local could tell it.
There is no hotel in New York that makes us feel more like we actually live here than The Lowell, and every time we check into the Park Avenue Suite we have to remind ourselves that we don’t. Michael S. Smith redesigned it recently, and it now holds a wood-burning fireplace, a fully equipped kitchen, and décor details we keep photographing so we can talk ourselves into recreating them at home. The windows open straight onto East 63rd Street, which is really the whole appeal. For a weekend, this is home, and we are in no rush to leave it.
We start the day at the Frick, less than ten minutes on foot at East 70th and Fifth. The 1914 mansion reopened last year after a long renovation that finally brought the public upstairs to a second floor it had never seen, and there is a great deal to love in the new rooms. What gets us, though, is something smaller. Boucher’s Four Seasons still hang in the West Vestibule in the exact spot where Henry Frick placed them in 1916, the year he bought them. The whole visit takes us about thirty minutes, which we have always counted as a point in its favor. Culture, done properly, and then back out into the day.
From there it is two blocks to Ralph’s Coffee, tucked inside the landmark Ralph Lauren boutique on 72nd, where the crowd is half neighborhood and half visitor and we mean that kindly. We order a cappuccino and a croissant, take a left, and walk straight into Central Park toward the Conservatory Water. There is a bench near the Alice in Wonderland statue that we have quietly claimed over the years. We sit, we watch the sailboats, we finish our coffee, and for a little while there is nowhere we need to be.
When we are ready we cut north through the park, come out at 79th and Fifth, and make our way to the Met. The spring exhibition is Costume Art, the first show to open in the new Condé M. Nast Galleries, with garments staged against works drawn from five thousand years of the Met’s collection. The Met Gala dress code this year was Fashion is Art, and the work on the walls makes the better case. The galleries alone are reason enough to come.
On the way back we drift down Madison and into Kirna Zabête, then cross the street to Elyse Walker. Both are so well curated that we have never once managed to leave either of them empty handed.
Then it is Afternoon Tea at The Lowell, and we will admit we are partial, but Majorelle is still where we would send anyone. The setting is lovely, the florals even more so, and the Lily of the Valley service, named for Christian Dior’s favorite flower and set on Dior Maison tableware, is exactly the kind of detail this hotel gets right without ever making a fuss about it. We order English Breakfast no matter the hour, a glass of Champagne, and the trio of Moroccan dips, which we take over the tea sandwiches every single time. We always leave room for the scones, and we always ask for extra Devonshire cream and jam.
After that we go back up to the suite to do absolutely nothing, which on the Fourth of July feels like its own small act of independence. We page through the books, take a few more photographs, and keep up the pleasant fiction that we live here.
Cocktail hour happens downstairs at Jacques Bar, an if-you-know-you-know kind of room with a chic, easy crowd. The team knows our order before we sit down, a glass of Domaine Alphonse Mellot, the Sancerre La Moussière, and we like to carry it out to the sidewalk seating on East 63rd and watch the block go by.
Dinner is at Le Bilboquet. The original sat directly across from The Lowell on 63rd, and the larger restaurant on 60th still has the same well-dressed, mostly local energy it always did. We read the menu like we might try something different this time, and then we order the Cajun chicken with frites, because we always do.
Then it is a short walk home to The Lowell, our Upper East Side address for the night. The country turns 250 this weekend, and we get to spend it as locals. That, to us, is the whole point.
