16 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
1
KIDSTO DAYDEPT.
BEAUTIFULSOUP
K
im Hastreiter, a co-founder of Paper
magazine and a mother hen and
mentor to generations of downtown art
kids, has thrown tons of parties over the
years: there was the birthday in Harlem,
where she learned to play cymbals (twelve
red velvet cakes, food cooked by her
friend Marcus Samuelsson); there was
the neighborhood party at the Odeon
just after 9/11 (French fries, chocolate
pudding, poetry, champagne). But the
best parties are the ones that she hosts
at her apartment, in Greenwich Village.
And the best of these are soup parties.
The last soup party was a year ago, in
February, a mere incubation period before
the end of parties for a while. Five soups,
forty friends, two hundred paper bowls.
Danny Bowien, the chef at Mission Chi-
nese, made vegan congee. The cookbook
writer David Tanis made posole. There
was a minestrone and a red-lentil-and-
bulgur. Hastreiter made her mother’s
mushroom soup. Debi Mazar and JohnKim Hastreiteraesthetic and historic grounds. “I’d hate
to see it go,” he said, adding that, what-
ever one thinks of Trump’s Administra-
tion, “he didn’t build this building as
President. He didn’t try to foist it on any-
one as a solution to immigration.”
But what of the former President’s
birthplace, in Jamaica Estates, Queens?
Richard Nixon’s and Bill Clinton’s child-
hood homes have been preserved and
landmarked—so why not Trump’s? Since
his election, the five-bedroom Tudor
house has been sold twice, to speculators,
most recently for $2.1 million (roughly
double the value of comparable houses
nearby). It was briefly listed on Airbnb
for seven hundred and twenty-five dol-
lars a night; a sign directed pilgrims to
the very bedroom where Trump was
likely conceived. The current owner tried
to auction it last fall, but bids (if any)
failed to meet the reserve price. A Go-
FundMe has been set up to raise three
million dollars to buy the house and give
it back to Trump or to a charity of his
choosing. As of Trump’s last full day in
office, only $6,728 had been pledged.
When Donald was four, the Trump
family moved around the corner to a
Colonial with more elbow room, where
he lived until he was shipped off to mil-
itary school. In 2018, the landmarks com-
mission received a formal “request for
evaluation” of the house. Its verdict:
thumbs down. According to the com-
mission’s director of communications,
Zodet Negrón, the organization prior-
itizes “properties in which a public fig-
ure lived at the time he or she made a
significant and noteworthy contribution
to culture, society, or politics.” Young
Donald’s gluing his brother Robert’s
blocks together doesn’t count, even
though he bragged about it in “The Art
of the Deal.”
Back in Atlantic City, officials over-
seeing the Trump Plaza demolition had
planned to raise money for the local
Boys & Girls Club by auctioning off
the right to press a button that would
initiate the implosion. Bidding had
reached a hundred and seventy-five
thousand dollars ($168,272 more than
was raised for Trump’s birthplace). The
auction was called off after the owner
of the property, a company controlled
by the billionaire Trump supporter Carl
Icahn, objected—allegedly on safety
grounds—while offering to make good
on the lost charity money. Where this
President is concerned, the countervail-
ing forces of preservation and contempt
remain to be balanced.
—Bruce HandyWaters were there, as were the jewelry
designer Ted Muehling, Hastreiter’s “re-
ally tall friend, Ford,” Tauba Auerbach,
Chloe Wise, and a bunch of the twenty-
something artists she knows.
Then came the lockdown. Hastreiter,
who is sixty-nine and lives alone, stayed
in her apartment through March, April,
May. The kids checked in and dropped
off groceries, but she was miserable.
She had a book project to work on, but
couldn’t bring herself to write. She made
soup, but didn’t enjoy it. “All I did was
feel horrible and beat myself up every
day because all I’m doing is I’m making
soup every day,” she said, over Zoom. In
the background: Heath crockery, wooden
spoons. “You’re locked in, locked down,
and you can’t even write your books—
what’s wrong with you? And then I re-
alized, my epiphany was, it’s because you
don’t even know where we are. We don’t
know what we’re starting from. Noth-
ing made sense anymore.”
She began calling friends. “Everyone
was, like, mental, right?” she said. “All
my friends are experiencing this and
going through trauma and acting weird,
being super depressed, crying, or super
hyper, or super crazy, or withdrawing.”
What everyone really needed was a place
where they could brainstorm, exchange
ideas, noodle on the specific strangeness
of this time, right now. They needed a
soup party. But how?
Hastreiter decided to make a news-
paper, and call it The New Now. When
the weather got warm, she set herself
up on a bench in Washington Square
Park. Her nephew made her a sign that
read “Kim’s Office: Art, Trouble, Ideas,
Schmooze.” Friends and colleagues came
to see her, by appointment. The conver-
sations on the park bench became con-
tent. She interviewed Michael Stipe, of
R.E.M., about creative renewal and Time
Remaining, and assigned James Mur-
phy, from LCD Soundsystem, to write
an essay about his Covid-era obsession
with fishing. Caridad (La Bruja) De La
Luz contributed a poem called “W.A.P.”
The designer Andre Walker wrote about
magic mushrooms and finding God.
There are typographers, photographers,
an artist whose medium is bread.
“When I was young, I used to hate
adults,” Hastreiter said. “I was the first
generation of the revolution people. Now
the children, the kids, they love the adults.