By JOAN SAYERS BROW; from The Magazine ANTIQUES May 1978. The handsome slant-front desk illustrated here was originally owned by Colonel George William Fairfax (1724-1787), whose estate, Bevoir, was near Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia. In April 1773 Fairfax took his wife, sally Cary, to England, after asking his neighbor George Washington to watch over Belvoir while they were …
Editor’s letter, January/February 2013
In the 1950s Robert Moses, New York’s bully-boy developer (a familiar type in these parts), had a suggestion for citizens who objected when he razed their neighborhoods: “Go to the Rockies,” he told them, implying that city life is bulldozers, cranes, and scaffolding and to resist them is to resist being urban and modern. Moses notwithstanding, modern life in New …