An Old-School Prep’s Take in NYT

If you dress up a bit for others—especially for those you don’t know—you honor them by your efforts. So I wear a bow tie to take my stand against the unraveling of man. It’s also a social thing to do. You would be surprised how many street conversations start simply from wearing a bow tie. You’re part of a club that cuts across ordinary divisions. And there are also practical considerations. A bow tie doesn’t brush against an inky desk. Editors, doctors, and shopkeepers traditionally wear bow ties for a reason.

My ties mostly come from Seigo Neckwear on the Upper East Side. The owner Seigo Katsuragawa designs the styles and has them woven in Kyoto. He’s also almost always in the shop and there to help pick out a pattern to match your needs. Most of my shirts, suits, and sport coats are from J. Press. I especially like their garments made in the USA from Fox Brothers fabric (When visiting the store in the Yale Club, ask for Tuck). Add a spritz of St. Johns Bay Rum and I’m ready for my day. On the weekends I generally wear Filson, in part because I LARP as an outdoorsman, but also because I like traditional materials. It feels good not to wear synthetic clothing that might otherwise exist as a plastic bag.

Recently the writer Alex Nazaryan reached out for my opinion on New York’s “new prep” style. “Preppy Attire Without the Cultural Baggage,” is what the title of his article calls it in today’s New York Times calls it. Happy to oblige. I was pleased to offer my thoughts on this trend in his piece.

These new preppies seem to be following an old tradition. Prep is a youth style and open to experimentation. Traditionally, it has reflected a preparation for taking the reins of power, but also some indifference regarding just where and when that power is conferred. It’s an American “sprezzatura.” Consider seersucker, a workman's textile that Princetonians adopted in the 1920s. If you look at Take Ivy, the 1965 book of Japanese photography that made an anthropological study of Ivy League style, you see a lot of mixing and matching. Madras shorts with white socks and penny loafers. It’s what was clean combined with whatever father left behind on the Cape. Nowadays that can mean mixing in vintage thrift wear, or combining it with other youth styles as we saw with early Hip Hop. From Nazaryan:

James S. Panero, the executive editor of The New Criterion, exemplifies the classic prep. A graduate of the elite Trinity School and Dartmouth, Panero, 50, married a Yale graduate and wrote about skiing in Switzerland with William F. Buckley Jr.

Panero is fond of wearing bow ties and described his own style as “reactionary.” Yet he approved of the decidedly unreactionary aesthetic of Mason and his circle.

“I wouldn’t necessarily make the same choices, but I applaud the insouciant efforts,” Panero said, referring to Mason and his cohort’s blending of new with old, and their enthusiasm for wearing vintage clothes instead of one-clicking their way into a wardrobe.

“Recently I bought a Brooks Brothers ‘Made in England’ bow tie at a church sale for a dollar. Now I wear it all the time,” Panero said. “Take that, fast fashion.”

Catch the full piece here.

What Happened to Roosevelt?

A heartbreaking story to anyone who cares about American art.

In the New York Post, I discuss the fate of James Earle Fraser’s statue of Theodore Roosevelt, until recently the centerpiece of the Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History. Read more from reporter Chadwick Moore.

Play Land

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2026

Play land

On “Noguchi’s New York” at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation & Garden Museum.

What is New York’s greatest unrealized work of art? An argument can be made for Riverside Playground. This sprawling sculptural landscape, designed for what today remains an unremarkable hillside in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, between 101st and 105th Streets, would have occupied an indeterminate zone between art and recreation. An assembly of ramps, steps, sandpits, covered rooms, and climbing mounds, sloping from the curving heights of Riverside Drive down to the promenade, it would not have been your typical artwork or sculpture park. Nor would it have been another playground of swings and seesaws. Instead, this landscape of brick, concrete, asphalt, grass, and water was designed to pose more questions than answers. It might have seemed archaeological, temple-like, as though it were a subterranean stratum discovered below the urban surface. Its Upper West Side neighbors in their classic sixes did not know what to make of it.

Developed over four years in the early 1960s in a partnership between the architect Louis Kahn and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, this contoured, contested ground very nearly broke ground before going broke itself. The project was officially titled the Adele Rosenwald Levy Memorial Playground, named after a founder of the Citizens Committee for Children and daughter of the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Supporters donated $600,000 to the city in her honor for what was then a $1.1 million project. The outgoing mayor, Robert F. Wagner, even signed the initial construction contracts. Then the incoming mayor, John Lindsay, killed the playground with the help of his new parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving. While citing escalating construction costs, the savvy “Republican Kennedy” was fulfilling a pledge made to voters who opposed the plan. They feared it would attract teenagers from the housing projects to the east.

Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) thought of sculpture in a way that was often out of step with his times but that can now seem more in line with our own. “Noguchi’s New York,” an exhibition currently on view at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, argues that the artist saw little distinction between object and landscape and favored what we might now call the immersive experience.1 Through his interactive work, he blurred the lines between sculpture and spectator. The environment created its own sculptural shape—in particular, for him, the forms and figures of New York. “I’m really a New Yorker,” he once said. “Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers.” Such wandering meant that Noguchi was as comfortable casting portrait busts of Buckminster Fuller as he was designing stage sets for Martha Graham or carving a sunken garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza. All of these projects are now among the fifty-some works and proposals on display at the museum overseeing his legacy.

Isamu Noguchi, Riverside Playground Model, 1965, Plaster & paint, Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble.

Noguchi was nearly a native-born New Yorker himself. His American mother, Leonie Gilmour, was a committed bohemian educated at New York’s progressive Ethical Culture School (then named the Workingman’s School) and later at Bryn Mawr College and the Sorbonne. She met Isamu’s father, Yone, when the Japanese poet was living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He took out a classified ad looking for editorial help. She answered it. Following a brief affair, Yone returned to Japan. Leonie pursued him west, giving birth to Isamu in Los Angeles. Two years later, she moved to Japan with her young son, finding intermittent work as a teacher, editor, and translator. Yone had named their toddler Isamu, meaning “courage,” but by then he had taken a Japanese wife and was largely absent from the future sculptor’s upbringing. During her Japanese sojourn, Leonie also gave birth to a daughter, Ailes Gilmour. This time the father was an unknown Japanese man. Nevertheless, there must have been something about that Gilmour girl. A pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement, Ailes became a founding member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, where her half brother later created Graham’s most celebrated set designs.

In 1917, Leonie sent Isamu back to the United States—on his own—to continue his schooling. The unaccompanied minor rolled into a work-camp school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. At the time known as Sam Gilmour, Noguchi was taken under the wing of the school’s founder, Edward Rumely. Their relationship continued after the school shut down over Rumely’s pro-German sentiment. Through a grant from Rumely, Noguchi then continued east, eventually arriving at Columbia University to study medicine.

Noguchi’s sudden upward trajectory was a remarkable reversal of fortune for a drifting, interracial child born out of wedlock, but Leonie was outraged at her son’s preprofessional turn. She encouraged him to study sculpture. Noguchi enrolled in night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East Tenth Street, where he studied bronze casting. Eventually he dropped out of Columbia and interned with Gutzon Borglum, who said he would never amount to anything as an artist. (Noguchi soon eclipsed this sculptor of Mount Rushmore.) In 1927, a grant took Noguchi to Paris, where he apprenticed with Constantin Brancusi and learned the art of stone crafting. As an artist later known for his Eastern influences, Noguchi was almost exclusively Western trained.

Curated by the Noguchi Museum’s Kate Wiener, the exhibition picks up as Noguchi first returns stateside in 1929. Here an early selection of portrait busts from the 1930s might seem to be an odd choice to introduce a show about the sculptor’s New York. But in fact they help underscore the social quotient in much of his work. Noguchi’s art was not meant to be inert. It was designed to engage its observers. “If sculpture is the rock,” he once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” (Hayden Herrera’s excellent 2015 biography of Noguchi is appropriately titled Listening to Stone.)

From an early age, Noguchi surrounded himself with artists, mentors, patrons, and paramours. He could be part Horatio Alger and part Rudolph Valentino. One story has him jumping out of Frida Kahlo’s bed and scurrying up a tree and over a rooftop to escape Diego Rivera.

Noguchi thrived in New York’s urban tableau. Where they could not appear in person, he crafted the people around him as portrait busts. Working out of his MacDougal Street studio in Greenwich Village, Noguchi in rapid succession sculpted busts of the art dealer J. B. Neumann (1932, Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum), the dancer Michio Ito (1926, Noguchi Foundation), the journalist Clare Boothe Luce (1933, on loan from the Henry Luce Foundation), the art critic Murdock Pemberton (1931, Noguchi Foundation), the muralist José Clemente Orozco (1931, Noguchi Foundation), and the futurist Buckminster Fuller (1929, cast ca. 1965, Sharp Museum, Southern Illinois University Carbondale).

What is most remarkable in all this is Noguchi’s startling range of materials and finishes. As was reflected later in his easy movement between metal and stone, or representation and abstraction, or lampshades and playground design, Noguchi was not beholden to any particular medium or manner. Instead he found expression in the materials themselves. His bust of the comely Luce appears in classical marble; the clotted Neumann is in mottled plaster; meanwhile, the resplendent Fuller—Noguchi called him a “messiah of ideas”—radiates in polished chrome.

Isamu Noguchi, R. Buckminster Fuller, 1929. Bronze, chrome plated. 3 1/4 x 7 7/8 x 10 in. Photo: Kevin Noble. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

“Noguchi’s New York” then takes us through the artist’s many city commissions. A display about his 1930–40 stainless-steel reliefs of heroic journalists, crafted for the entrance of the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, leads on to more than one gallery of his unrealized or destroyed installations: ceiling designs for the Time & Life Building and 666 Fifth Avenue, sculpture gardens for Lever House and the Museum of Modern Art, and playgrounds for the United Nations Headquarters and the Bronx Zoo. Here the city planner Robert Moses plays the role of the exhibition’s bogeyman, but, as we have seen with Riverside Playground, Moses was not Noguchi’s only antagonist.

Isamu Noguchi, News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1938–40. Photo: Miguel de Guzmán & Rocío Romero.

Noguchi could shift scales with ease. A plan for a contoured landscape might do double duty as a bronze wall relief. Stage-set collages could inspire the forms of freestanding aluminum sculpture. A slate statue of a bird might reappear as a plexiglass chess piece. The museum matches these works with the blueprints, letters, photographs, and articles that surrounded each commission. Here the innovative playground designs come forward the most. Could there be some psychological reading of Noguchi, abandoned by his father, designing play spaces within sight of his father’s old Riverside Drive address? To envision these designs better, the museum commissioned new hand-drawn animated films, directed by Nicolas Ménard and Jack Cunningham, that feature children swinging and sliding on play equipment. (I would have liked to have seen these playful videos up front, rather than buried at the back of the exhibition, and more features in general for the museum’s younger visitors.)

Isamu Noguchi, Stage Set Collage, ca. 1946, Chalk & colored paper on paper, Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble.

There is much to be said for reviving some of Noguchi’s unexecuted urban proposals, particularly Riverside Playground. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, which Louis Kahn designed for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River in the early 1970s, was only built five decades later, opening in 2012.

Even if Noguchi’s playgrounds are never realized, his influence has nevertheless set the standard for successful public design, though it is largely unacknowledged. After all, just a few years after thwarting his plans in Riverside Park, John Lindsay and Thomas Hoving promoted their own open-ended play space—featuring ziggurats, tunnels, and water courses—for Central Park’s Adventure Playground. That innovative precinct on West Sixty-seventh Street, underwritten by the Estée Lauder Foundation, was designed in 1966 by Richard Dattner, but it might as well have been a smaller, toddler-sized version of Noguchi’s Riverside Playground.

Half a century on, the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation funded Little Island, on tulip-shaped piers above the Hudson River. For this artificial landscape of undulating hills and surprise assembly spots, Heatherwick Studio closely followed Noguchi’s urban sensibility.

Two years ago, after the institution banned employees from wearing keffiyehs and other political paraphernalia, Palestinian agitators attempted to disrupt the Noguchi Museum. Activists defaced the walls. Staff members resigned. The museum refused to back down. It is noteworthy that Noguchi in life worked with the state of Israel. Between 1960 and 1965, he created his first realized earthwork for the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.

Through its permanent collection, with its indoor and outdoor spaces and parts in between, the Noguchi Museum continues to be an uncompromising memorial to the artist. One of his rock-garden sculptures contains the artist’s ashes. The sale of Noguchi’s Akari lanterns, which still generates millions of dollars annually, helps keep the lights on for the small institution. This museum Noguchi opened across the street from his studio in 1985 remains an oasis of calm in a bustling corner of Long Island City—a living testament to Noguchi’s New York.

1. “Noguchi’s New York” opened at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Queens, New York, on February 4 and remains on view through September 13, 2026.