The 212 column revisits New York institutions that have helped define the cityjilipark, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
In the children’s section of Albertine, copies of “Le Petit Prince,” stories of Tintin and Babar and other much-loved French classics are for sale beneath a sapphire-colored ceiling gilded with hand-painted constellations. What’s arguably New York’s most enchanting bookstore opened a decade ago inside the palatial Payne Whitney House, an early 1900s landmark built by the architect Stanford White on the southeast corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue that’s served as the headquarters of the French Embassy’s cultural and educational activities in the United States for the past 72 years.
“Creating the bookstore saved our presence,” says Mohamed Bouabdallah, cultural counselor of France in the U.S. and director of Villa Albertine. At some point in the aughts, explains Bouabdallah, the French government considered selling the building, but then in 2009, when the French bookshop in Rockefeller Center closed, “there was room for a new one.” A few years later, a group of old offices at the Payne Whitney House were repurposed as Albertine.
chipmonkz slotsImageA bronze sculpture of Le Petit Prince, the namesake main character of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s 1943 book, installed outside the building housing Albertine.Credit...Laura BregmanImageEarly editions of books by the French writer Colette on display at Albertine alongside a 1910 postcard from Naples written by Colette to René Maizeroy, who was known for his erotic novels.Credit...Laura BregmanIt was one of Bouabdallah’s predecessors, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, who, at the behest of French president Charles de Gaulle, bought the Fifth Avenue mansion for the French Embassy in 1952. Along with the house came a life-size statue of a boy that had belonged to the home’s first inhabitants. It wasn’t until the 1990s that art authenticators attributed the sculpture to Michaelangelo; in 2009, the French embassy lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
ImageAlbertine opened in 2014 inside the historic Payne Whitney House. Now also known as Villa Albertine, the mansion was designed by the architect Stanford White in the early 1900s.Credit...Laura BregmanTo reach Albertine from the front entrance, you pass the statue’s replica in a little marble rotunda; its pillars hold up a dome-shaped ceiling decorated with ivy trellises and cherubs. On the wall to your left is a 1972 Beauvais tapestry, from a 1946 design by Henri Matisse. To the right is the house’s original reception area, called the Venetian Room, so filled with brocaded furniture, porcelain flowers and gilded glass that it’s like a mirrored box of rich French pastries.
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Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.
Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.
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