The wintry look wasn't quite the Day After Tomorrow. No, the look was far more restrained and elegant for the more than 400 guests who attended the New York Public Library's (NYPL) eighth annual Library Lions dinner and awards ceremony.
Planned by NYPL director of special events Kathryn Laino, the event began with cocktails in Astor Hall, where guests mingled at birch log tables designed by David Monn. Tall white pillar candles, which also lined the library’s front steps, were encased in oversize hurricane vases and nestled in beds of moss. Monn also flanked the hall’s tall candelabra with cut birch logs and added bare birch trees around the room. A trio of musicians from the Mannes College of Music at the New School provided background music.
Trumpeters called guests to dinner in the Celeste Bartos Forum, which Monn transformed with a rustic winter setting. The perimeter of the room was lined with bare birch branches, moss, leaves, and flickering white candles, and the room’s pillars were wrapped in birch bark and topped with bird’s nests.
Monn suspended shimmering chandeliers constructed from birch bark, branches, crystals, and disco balls from the ceiling. Spectrum Event Lighting cast a wintry glimmer around the room.
The table design alternated between two rustic looks’pinecone-encrusted containers filled with dozens of white roses and large birch-bark containers filled with disco balls, pinecones, moss, pears, and mushrooms. Small bird's nests and birch log candleholders were tucked around the centerpieces. Programs designed by the library staff to look like leather-bound books topped each place setting.
The three-course menu from Glorious Food included smoked salmon Napoleon, chicken scaloppine with braised fennel, fava beans, morels,.phparagus tips, and green peas, and warm brownie pudding with vanilla bean ice cream for dessert.
The evening's honorees were conductor James Conlon, soprano Renée Fleming, author and Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates Jr., and David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.
—Amy Leibrock
Read about last year's Library Lions event...
