LOVELY COMPOSITION: Jamie Bernstein’s Chelsea co-op, a prewar stunner that the concert narrator and daughter of Leonard Bernstein decorated herself, is the combination of three apartments.
Both the kitchen (above) and the foyer have black-and-white tiling that brings back memories of her childhood residence on prime Park Avenue.
Jamie Bernstein was hoping for harmony. It was 2000, and the concert narrator and broadcaster, who’s the daughter of composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, had just separated from her husband and was looking for an apartment. She wanted to stay in Chelsea so that her daughter, Frankie, and son, Evan, could easily travel back and forth between her home and her husband’s.
A bit reluctantly, she went to an open house in a building that she’d passed by many times and never liked. “From the outside, it’s kind of funky-looking,” she says. “I used to see it and think, ‘This building is so shabby, I can’t even look at it.’ But inside it was beautiful. And, funny thing, I ended up living in that very building.”
Designed in 1938 by Horace Ginsbern, the co-op building is rich with Art Deco details like French doors, arched doorways and sunken living and dining rooms with raised areas separated by wrought-iron railings.
Her unit, a two-bedroom with a study, stirred up memories of living with her father and mother (pianist/actress and renowned beauty Felicia Montealegre) in her childhood home on Park Avenue. “When I walked into the foyer, the tile was black-and-white diamonds,” Bernstein says. “We had the same tile in our house while I was growing up. So that was a plus.”
It turned out that the owner had combined two units. Then Bernstein added to it. “I knew my next-door neighbor had a little studio. So I slipped a note under his door and said: ‘If you ever decide to move, let me know.’ One day, in 2004, he said he was moving. So I got a good price, and he got a sale without any hassle.
“Now I have three apartments made into one: 2,500 square feet — seven rooms with three big bedrooms and a study, four bathrooms and 11 closets. I have so many closets, it’s a scandal.”
There’s a raised area in the sunken living room that she calls “the stage.” She explain, “When I have a party with music, the musicians are up here. This is a great apartment for parties. I have a lot of musician friends, and we pick up the rug and dance.”
Bernstein decorated the apartment herself. “It’s less that I have an eye for the whole,” she says, “and it’s more that things wind up here. Paintings, objects, photographs and stuff from my trips all over the world. And I have a lot of furniture and paintings from my parents.”
Paintings like the antique Chinese print from their home in the Osborne on West 57th Street, another painting by a Chilean painter, Nemesio Antúnez, who was a good friend of her mother’s, and one with quite a story: “My mother found a painting of a woman in an antiques shop. After my father died, we had an auction at Sotheby’s. I wanted to keep that painting, but my brother and sister wanted to sell it. OK, it was two against one. But I was so sad to lose it that I got a friend to bid on it for me. That’s how I got it.”
Bernstein’s decorating style can best be described as eclectic.
“What I really love is that it’s an assemblage of all these interesting objects, each of which has a personal meaning,” she says. “It might seem like a jumble, but to me it tells a story of my life.”
And it’s been quite a life. “Music is my first memory,” Bernstein says. “We always had music in the house. It was what we breathed.”
Friends in the arts were also all around. “It was a pretty wonderful environment to grow up in,” she says. “Mike Nichols, Richard Avedon and Stephen Sondheim — they were all very close friends. So you can imagine the fun of it. And the noise! Everyone was loud and raucous. Lots of singing and carrying on and screaming with laughter.”
Today, Bernstein carries on in her father’s musical tradition. She’s co-producing a documentary about an inner-city music program. “We started filming two years ago,“ she says. “We were there on day one with our cameras, and we’re just following along to see how it’s going to develop.”
And Bernstein narrates concerts with conductor Michael Barrett; they started out doing concerts of Leonard Bernstein’s music and now they’ve expanded to other composers as well. “During his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, my father presented four to six Young People’s Concerts a year,” she says. “He wrote and narrated his own scripts, conducted the pieces and played examples on the piano.”
Though she has — and cherishes — her dad’s rare upright Bosendorfer (“They don’t make a lot of uprights [but] it sounds as good as a grand piano”), she can’t play examples on the piano. “I wish I could play it for you, but I can’t,” she says. “I think I just felt discouraged because I knew how music was supposed to sound. And then I would sit down at the piano and these little worms and spiders would come out of my fingers. And I would think, ‘Who am I kidding?’
“Then, I found a really good solution to my loving music and wanting to be in that world. Now what I do — I talk about music. Here I am: I’m on the road, I’m with musicians, I’m on the stage and I’m completely surrounded by the music.”
Jamie Bernstein’s
favorite things
*Her father Leonard Bernstein’s piano:
“Every piano that my father played wound up having a cigarette burn on it because he never stopped smoking.”
*Her orchid plant: Bernstein neglected it, but it sprouted nine new blossoms. “It gives me so much unearned joy,” she says.
* The raised area in her bedroom that she calls the harem, filled with pillows
*Her mother’s antique desk from the 1800s