Take a Look Back at AD’s New York Issues From Throughout the Years

1988

A new look at Manhattan’s famed Carlyle Hotel, a late-night visit to Elaine’s, and photos shot by Bill Cunningham would seem just about as New York as any issue could get. But add to it the fact that the November 1988 issue started with “An Exile’s Impressions,” an essay by John Updike, and it would be crazy to consider this edition of the magazine anything but a true treasure. “New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left,” Updike wrote in his opening sentence, tapping into a sentiment many will no doubt feel in the year 2021. He went on to include this musing, a perfect ode to the city’s pre-coronavirus past:

“Always, as one arrives, there is the old acceleration of the pulse—the mountainous gray skyline glimpsed from the Triborough Bridge, the cheerful games of basketball and handball being played on the recreational asphalt beside the FDR Drive, the startling, steamy, rain-splotched intimacy of the side streets where one’s taxi slows to a crawl, the careless flung beauty of the pedestrians clumped at the street corners. So many faces, costumes, packages, errands! So many preoccupations, hopes, passions, lives in progress! So much human stuff, clustering and streaming with a languid colorful impatience like the mass maneuvers of bees!” 

1989

Salon paintings, Brooke Astor, and a home designed by the Prince of Chintz Mario Buatta are as fitting of a trio as any. And in the November 1989 issue of Architectural Digest, they all stood out as clear highlights. Other notable features included a Peter Marino space that recalled Scandinavia and the home-slash-studio of Jennifer Bartlett.