Not since Monopoly came out has a railroad been such a hot property. These days, the chic pet cause is the High Line—the elevated steel railroad structure built in the 1930's to carry freight trains—which runs from 34th street through the west Chelsea gallery neighborhood down to Gansevoort Street. And the Friends of the High Line, an organization of New York residents, business folk, artists, architects and design professionals who are, according to the organization's Web site, "dedicated to the preservation and adaptive reuse of the High Line," gathered in the meatpacking district for a chic summer benefit. Rick Little, the nonprofit's operations manager, planned the event with Bronson van Wyck of Van Wyck & Van Wyck, the chairman of the benefit committee.
Van Wyck made the event feel like an intimate summer garden party for the 600 guests. (Yes, we said intimate.) It started with a simple cocktail hour at the Diane von Furstenberg Studio, where 100 white orchids potted in moss lined the table in the front room. Freelance chefs Scott Skey and Nick Hosea provided colorful, bountiful tables of veggies and dip that looked fresh from the garden.
Rickshaws from the Manhattan Rickshaw Company transported guests through the rain to Phillips, de Pury & Company for the dinner portion of the evening, where guests found the multiroom raw space transformed. White Egyptian linens with a thick orange stripe covered all the tables; centerpieces included wheatgrass, orange roses, poppy pods, Japanese eggplant and pepperberry. But the floral focal point wasn't on the tables—it was above them. Van Wyck created a spectacular 700-foot indoor version of the High Line by suspending hundreds of bunches of springerii and.phparagus ferns from the ceiling and running it through the entire raw space.
"We were trying to make it feel like you were in different drawing rooms and several different dinner parties going on [at once]," van Wyck said. "So one room would have a long table and beautiful flowers projected onto semi-transparent acrylic disks hanging with a bunch of mirrors reflecting the lighting, and other rooms were meant to feel like a railroad, with long tables with wheatgrass running down the middle." The result was that each individual room "felt like it was dinner party for 30 people," van Wyck said, "but in reality it was a dinner party for 600."
Urban Events' dinner menu included a red and orange beet salad with tangerine and beet vinaigrette, seared halibut with a soba noodle cake and baby bok choi with cucumber yogurt coulis and a soy wasabi reduction, and a summer berry melange with Tahitian vanilla whipped cream and a .phpberry and mango coulis.
—Erika Rasmusson Janes
