My favorite character in The Age of Innocence may be Mrs. Manson Mingott, a matriarch of eccentric habits and ludicrous girth who “put the crowning touch to her audacities” by erecting a French chateau “in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.” Edith Wharton modeled her after Mary Mason Jones, a dowager grandaunt whose estate at 1 East 57th Street must have made quite an impression in 1869: a marble mansion gleaming amid shanties, the odd saloon, and goat-strewn outcroppings. Wharton paints a tender portrait of this misplaced sybarite, who sits at her window “watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors.” Flow northward fashion did, of course. By 1871, the widow, aided by architect Robert Mook, had developed the entire block into Marble Row, a clutch of Gilded Age manses that “once frowned disapprovingly upon the noisy jingle of equipages in Fifth Avenue from Fifty-Seventh to Fifty- Eighth Street,” recalled The New York Times in 1929, shortly before the wrecking ball met Jones’s own private Fontainebleau.
Jones’s audacities faded from memory as Marble Row eventually became Millionaires’ Row, then Billionaires’ Row. In recent months, the exact address has become home once again to an aberrant status symbol: a Brobdingnagian stack of six Louis Vuitton steamer trunks. The hyperreal hoarding went up last October to conceal the demolition of the company’s longtime Fifth Avenue flagship, a handsome Cross & Cross production from 1930, as it plans a new building twice as big. Upon its (un)veiling, the trunks—a $6 million investment whose three-dimensional hardware includes a five-thousand-pound metal handle—immediately went viral, and a thousand NYRA subscribers whispered in unison: Duck. For reasons this critic failed to divine, the floral-patterned wrap is ungraced by Louis Vuitton’s iconic monogram, and as such it feels even more, in the elegant parlance of our times, AI-y.
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While the flagship undergoes its yearslong renovation, the company has, across the street at 6 East 57th, opened a sort of chronic pop-up in an art deco building owned by Donald Trump, a tourist trapline whose gridworthy diversions include a chocolatier and OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu’s soaring “Trunkscape,” a trio of Brancusi-esque columns reprising the portmanteaux-as-tower trope. LVHM CEO Bernard Arnault and his heirs have recently deepened their ties with Trump, but the Maison has cozied up to petty dictators long before Arnault took the reins; in 1853, Vuitton was appointed official malletier to French empress Eugénie de Montijo, who presumably stuffed her crinolines and ostrich plumes into a Trianon Gray steamer when driven into exile two decades later.
If the trunk duck is a nauseating portent of America’s new Gilded Age, it also injects some much-needed levity into Midtown’s skyline, or at least that seems to be the consensus. When I visited, on a cold, sunny day in January, its 240 feet of fun felt forced, ominous (will construction workers toil in the dark insides of this gargantuan Veblen good?). But it sure beats a lot of other stuff in this town. Eager to flee the gaucheries of Fifth Avenue, I decided to add to my Whartonian pilgrimage a stop at the author’s childhood home at 14 West Twenty-Third Street, only to find that it’s a Starbucks now—and not even one of the nice ones. I didn’t go in. To quote Wharton herself, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them.