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MAGAZINE (HTTP://WWW.VOGUE.COM/MAGAZINE/)

A Die-Hard New Yorker
Leaves Manhattan and
Embraces the Country Life
OCTOBER 6, 2014 6:00 AM
by J O N A T H A N V A N M E T E R
(HTTP://WWW.VOGUE.COM/CONTRIBUTOR/JONATHAN-VANMETER/)

Van Meter, in a Burberry London suit and a
budd shirt, on his property in upstate New York.

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Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman
Photographed by Jason Schmidt, Vogue, October 2014

At the risk of sounding appallingly pretentious,
it was Cate Blanchett who made me realize it
was time to leave New York City. It was a year
ago, last October, and we had just finished a
leisurely interview over a late dinner in a
London restaurant when we found ourselves
standing on a rainy street corner, not quite ready
to say good night. She asked what I was doing
the next day, and I said I had no plans because I
have no friends who live in central London
anymore. Like my friends in Manhattan, most of

them have moved somewhere less ruinous.
Blanchett, who’d left London herself a few years
earlier, looked a little wistful and said, “It’s a
different place.” Having recently turned 50, I
muttered something about being older—maybe
that’s what had changed. “No,” she said firmly.
“The world’s changed. It’s very difficult to know
where to be.” Then she compared giving up
one’s chosen city to a drunk going dry. “Because
sometimes life is so fast and so absolute that the
only way you can change things is by actually
shifting your life utterly and totally to a different
hemisphere. You can’t partially change. There’s
no semi-revolution.”
That was the moment, right there, the speech
delivered toward the end of the story by the
passing character in the protagonist’s life that
turns on the light and shifts everything. As I said
goodbye and walked away, my heart pounding, I
was filled with a rush of certainty about
something I had been puzzling over for years:
Where should I be? I hopped in a cab and called
my boyfriend, Andy, back in New York: Quit
 

your job, and let’s move upstate.
Leaving the life I knew was a terrifying thought,
but then again, I’d done it before. When I was
24 and living in Atlantic City, my parents helped
me pack up what little stuff I owned into the
back of their pickup truck and dropped me off

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of One-hundred-second
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and Broadway, where I had found a sublet for

$575 a month
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in the classifieds of The New

York Times. I wanted to be a writer, and New

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COUNTRYYORKNEWCITYLIFE2

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York was calling.

Never mind that I knew

exactly one person in the city, a waitress/actress
(http://subscribe.vogue.com//ams/amsClick?
named Cristine,

and she was barely speaking to

me.

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Twenty-six years, eight apartments, one book,
and dozens of
new-york-city-country-life-woodstock)

magazine cover stories later,

Manhattan had become not just the place I’d
lived my whole adult life but my identity. My
career, my social life, my love life had all taken
place within four square miles. And for the
better part of two decades, that was good

enough for me. But sometime in the last few
years I began to hear a faint hissing—the sound
of air leaking out of the dream.
What had changed? New York, for one. Far too
much has been written about this already, but
suffice it to say that the street I lived on for
many years—once a sublime combination of
urban lumberyard, artists’ studios, and a fifties
diner—is now a high-end shopping mecca with
four-star pizzerias and a Kobe-beef emporium
selling Wagyu for $130 a pound. It’s the story of
so much of Manhattan, but when it happens to
your street, it’s heartbreaking. My friend Ellen is
still the co-op–board president of the loft
building Andy and I called home. She emailed
me the other day to say that the ground-floor
commercial space, once home to a kooky
antiques shop run by an eccentric pain in the
ass, has been rented out to Phillip Lim, who is
opening a new store during Fashion Week with
a big party at which Banks will perform.
Nothing against Lim or Banks, but who other
than a groupie wants to live above that? We sold
our loft in that building a few years ago and, in a
final attempt to find a place to be in the city,
bought another loft in Alphabet City, where I
had lived in the late eighties. But I could not
shake the feeling that I had become a ghost,
wandering around the streets of my salad days,
stalking my younger self.
When I told a friend, a grande dame in her 80s,
that Andy and I were thinking of leaving
Manhattan, she implored me not to tell anyone.
They will think you are out of the game, she
said. But that’s the other thing that’s changed:
There is no game. The New York media
complex has atomized and scattered to the
winds. If Glenn Greenwald, the guy who broke
the Edward Snowden story, can shake the U.S.
security apparatus to its very foundation from
the top of a mountain in Rio, it’s clear that you
can change the conversation from pretty much
anywhere. It was time to shove on, and, luckily,
we already had a place to go.

About five years earlier, during a rare but keenly
felt rough patch in Andy’s and my relationship,
we made the fairly rash decision to buy a house
in Woodstock, one of the most well-known
small towns in the world, where the 1969 music
festival famously didn’t take place. It was rash
not just because we had visited Woodstock only
once before, in the middle of February, but
because we also already owned a country house,
a twelve-acre farm in a small town in New Jersey
called Woodbine, not far from the horse farm
where I grew up. Long story how it came to be
ours, but bottom line, it was both a wreck and
cheaper than a Porsche Carrera, the monthly
mortgage payment not much more than our
parking space in Manhattan.
I have a lot of family in South Jersey, and our
little farm very quickly became the Van Meter
compound. It wasn’t until that rough patch that
Andy finally told me he wasn’t thrilled to be
spending his weekends witness to, but never
truly a part of, all the highs and lows of a family
dynamic that had been playing out for decades
before he arrived on the scene. I finally
addressed what had, until that moment, been
swept under the rug: We needed a place of our
own, away from my history and out of the city,
with its co-op and condo boards, where
ownership still feels like sharing, where nothing
is ever truly yours. We needed a place where we
could be alone, together, where every decision
(and all of its ramifications) would be ours and
ours alone.



Manhattan had become my identity. My
career, my social life, my love life had all
taken place within four square miles.”
— JONATHAN VAN METER

It was right around this time that our friend
Abbe, who lived in our building in Manhattan
with her husband and eight-year-old son, and
who spent her summers in Woodstock, decided

that there would be no semi-revolution for her,
either. She left her husband for a woman and
then pulled up stakes and left New York
entirely: Just like that, she was gone. It was
jarring, to say the least. I had always thought of
Abbe as being more like me than not: hopelessly
urban. We were both given to quoting lines
from Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m
Nothing: “New York, New York . . . if you can
make it here, you will fail. every. where. else!” I
needed to investigate what was going on in this
little town that had so ensorcelled my friend, so
that February, with three feet of snow on the
ground, Andy and I drove up to Woodstock to
spend the weekend with Abbe, a weekend
during which she threw a fortieth-birthday party
for herself and nearly 100 people showed up,
many of them expats from the city, including a
couple dozen happy gay men, and we all danced
in her living room until 4:00 a.m. It was the best
party I had been to in years. Andy and I both felt
something click that weekend, and so we went
back and looked at real estate and promptly fell
in love with the second house we walked into: a
100-year-old shingle-style cottage on five acres, a
half mile up the mountain, just outside town.
The house had only two previous owners. The
first was an army nurse who built the original
structure herself out of wood from
decommissioned barracks in New Jersey that
she had shipped up the Hudson River. The
second was a woman named Johanna Vos, who
bought the place in 1963 with her husband,
Aart, and over the years expanded it into a
rambling, sneaky-big warren of wonderfully odd
proportions; there are four bedrooms, four
bathrooms, five porches, an oversize Federalstyle fireplace, and three sets of French doors
that open out onto a huge, private oasis of a
backyard. The writer John Bowe declared the
house to be “nook-tastic” when he came to visit
one day that first summer.
Johanna Vos had worked as a journalist in Paris
in the thirties. Living in Holland during World
War II, she and Aart rescued 36 Jews, hiding
them in their home and in a tunnel that Aart

built under their backyard. After the war they
moved to Woodstock and started a summer
camp for the children of U.N. employees. Aart
died in 1990, but Johanna lived until 2007.
There was a strange office cubicle in one corner
of the living room—presumably where she wrote
her book, The End of the Tunnel. We learned
some of this history at the closing from
Johanna’s daughter and her husband—and some
from her lengthy obituary in The New York
Times. When Johanna’s son-in-law handed over
the keys in the parking lot of the bank, he said,
“Make sure you walk far enough into the woods
and find the waterfalls.”

A waterfall near the house brought
back boyhood memories.

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Photo: Courtesy of Jonathan Van Meter

The minute Andy and I got settled into the
house, I set about building a trail that begins at
the back of our yard and goes deep into the
woods, all the way to the big stream that runs
down Mead Mountain. The trail ends at three
preposterously beautiful waterfalls that have,
through centuries of constant splashdown,
carved out lovely little swimming holes, just big
enough for two people to float around in, which
is exactly what Andy and I did every chance we
got that first summer. When I built the trail, I
did it with such a freaky intensity, such
monomaniacal focus, that Andy had no choice
but to mock me by naming the path Jonny’s
Way. I did not stop to think much about why I
became so obsessed, what sort of primeval urge
was in play, as I raked and mowed and cleared
rocks and fallen trees and lopped off branches
and plowed through the woods until I made it
to the stream. It wasn’t until a year later, feeling

lonely and bored one day after a relentless 48hour August rain, when I walked the trail back
to the waterfalls and sat on a big rock and stared
into the churn, that I stopped to think about it: I
was re-creating—reclaiming—my most
fundamental, and in some ways most
complicated, boyhood memories, those middle
years between seven and ten when I spent a lot
of time by myself in the woods, building a fort,
catching frogs and turtles—lonely and yet
somehow exhilarated by a newfound sense of
freedom. As I sat there, I realized I had finally
found what I had hoped to find on the farm in
Woodbine: a place to be.
One day the Woodstock building inspector said
to us, “Mrs. Vos was very frugal.” Is that why the
house wasn’t insulated? Was warmth seen as too
indulgent? She lived in a cold house for more
than 40 years! How could we have known that a
year-round home within 30 miles of three ski
resorts would have no insulation? For the next
five years, we meticulously renovated every
square inch: replaced every window (but in the
exact six-over-six, mullioned style of the
originals), took down and put back up every
single wall (replastered just as they were before).
For some reason, we felt it was important to
hew as closely as possible to her vision—but
warmer.
We quickly discovered that renovating to create
the illusion that everything has always been there
requires a thesis-like amount of research. One
day, while interviewing someone at the Rose Bar
at the Gramercy Park Hotel in the city, I
inquired about the beautiful wood covering the
walls and discovered that it came from the
Hudson Company, a reclaimed-lumber mill not
far from our house upstate. If it’s good enough
for Ian Schrager . . . , I thought. A small fortune
later, we have new-old floors and new-old beams
in the ceiling that look like they’ve been in place
for 100 years. When we finally found a source
for handmade encaustic cement tile for the
kitchen and dining room and then fell in love
with a pattern that was already in stock
(cheaper), we hesitated a moment too long and

Zac Posen bought out the entire lot. We
eventually swallowed hard and custom-designed
our own batch—and then had to wait three
months for it to arrive on a ship all the way from
Morocco. When the interior was finally finished,
we painted the exterior, trim and all, a spooky
gray-green color that looks almost black, called
New York Café Noir (very Woodstock), which,
ironically enough, we found at Walmart (not
very Woodstock). Our contractor refuses to
shop there, so he had it mixed somewhere less
offensive to the local anti-corporate sensibility.
Oh, the hippies. It permeates everything here:
the endless yoga options, the crystals and
healers, the tie-dye shops, the Buddhist
monastery on our road at the top of the
mountain, the place to get your teeth cleaned
called Transcend Dental. It’s ripe for mocking,
but it’s also kind of great. Nobody’s trying too
hard. It’s uncool here, and that’s not a
complaint. People are nice. At four-way stop
signs, no one wants to appear pushy by going
first. (As opposed to New York, where everyone
has to be first.) I once honked my horn at the
proud gray-haired hippie lady in the Subaru
station wagon ahead of me at the stop sign in
front of the village green. She probably lives in a
purple house. I felt guilty for weeks.
Visitors from the city often ask if we “have any
friends” upstate, which makes us laugh out loud.
We’ve never had more friends! We turn down
dinner-party invitations every weekend because
we’re always booked. Even though most of our
friends in the city had moved to big town houses
in the New Brooklyn Suburbia—where they no
longer had the excuse of a too-small apartment—
they still weren’t exactly fighting over us as
guests to all the dinner parties they hoped to
have because they’re too exhausted from
demanding jobs and chasing after five-year-olds.
I never thought I’d say this, but we were bored
in Manhattan.
We’re continually amazed by the oddball
menagerie we’ve accumulated, the unlikely
social orbit we’ve been pulled into. There’s
Karen, the tennis pro at the Woodstock Tennis

Club whom we play with regularly. We call her
Vegetable Princess of Ulster County—for 80
years her family owned Gill Farms, a 1,200-acre
produce farm that they just sold to Warren
Buffett’s son’s foundation for $13 million.
There’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge
Pierre Leval and his wife, Susana, who was
nominated by President Obama to be on the
National Museum and Library Services Board.
They live nearby on an old bluestone quarry,
where they have the best pool parties in town.
At one of our earliest gatherings, new friends
Stéphane and Alison, an NYU professor and a
family mediator, brought along Alison’s mother,
the photographer Gay Block, who published a
book and had a show at MoMA called
“Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the
Holocaust.” Sometime in the eighties, Gay had
photographed Johanna and Aart’s portrait in
what is now our living room, and she wanted us
to see it. Minus all the macramé and spider
plants, it looks pretty much the same now as it
did then.
We moved into our not-quite-totally-renovated
house on April 1, and the digging of the pool
began on April 2. The noise and the dust and
the carpenters and the painters and the
landscapers are all gone now, the house
finished, the pool a marvel. Andy does laps in
his Speedo every morning. I walk into the
woods and out to the waterfalls when I am
feeling stuck or bored or anxious. It beats
wandering around the East Village, feels easier
to hit the reset button, refresh the page. I am
not a fool, however. I know that our existential
worries follow us wherever we go, though some
of them take on a slightly different cast. What
was once OMG, what if a bomb explodes on
the subway when Andy is coming home from
work in Times Square? is now Please let Andy
not hit a deer on 375 when he’s driving home
from getting the groceries.
And, sure, there are things I will always miss
about living in Manhattan: barbershops on every
other block; Asian delivery that arrives in seven
minutes; walking home tipsy through the West

Village at midnight after a particularly raucous
dinner party; my shrink’s couch. But so far, I am
mostly getting what I need up here in the
Catskills, including, for lack of a better phrase,
the occasional sense of well-being that, for
whatever reason, seemed to escape me in the
city. It’s that anxious, bored, alone, but happy
thing I felt when I was a kid, on my own, in the
woods. My friend Diane recently said to me
during one of her weekend visits upstate, “You
are your best self here.” Isn’t that what everyone
wants?
I can’t explain exactly why I am paying $20 a
month to Verizon to hang on to the 212 phone
number I had in the city for more than 20 years.
Every once in a while, I dial it, just to make sure
it’s still mine. I find it perversely amusing that it
rings forever, into nowhere. A Manhattan friend
recently called to chat and as the conversation
was winding down asked, “How’s life in the
country?” Well . . . , I said. It’s summer. “You’ll
be back,” she said, laughing, and then hung up.

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