A few years ago, Naomi Blumenthal was in a position not familiar to very many New Yorkers: she owned two mortgage-free brownstones near Gramercy Park, and they were both empty.

“The tenants had all moved on one by one,” Blumenthal recalls, “so…

A few months ago, Lily Tomlin passed on what she considered the opportunity of a lifetime. She turned down a role in Robert Altman’s “Pret-a-Porter.” “I could have got all those clothes!” she says excitedly during a visit to New York. “Every designer…

Patti LaBelle turns 50 today.

“Ah, yes, 50 years…young! Or old, I don’t mind either way,” said LaBelle late last week. “Because I’ll be 50 and I woke up this morning and I will wake up, hopefully, Tuesday morning. And that’s a blessing…

Josh Hamilton is exhausted. He’s spent most of his waking hours the last three weeks at New York’s Lincoln Center, where he and other cast members of Eric Bogosian’s “Suburbia” are preparing for the play’s opening Sunday night.

“It’s one of the…

Valeria Golino wants a cigarette.

“Do you mind?” the Italian actress asks with great trepidation, knowing the feeling about smoking in America. “I’m tired of constantly apologizing and being thrown out of places. I know it’s wrong, but give us…

I was finished with winter about three weeks ago,” says Trudie Styler emphatically. “I’m only going to wear cotton now. No more layers of woolens.”

Spring may be coming along slowly outside, but in Styler’s Central Park West apartment, the…

With the coffee bar craze in full swing, it’s no surprise that tea salons should start cropping up in New York as well. One such spot opened about a month ago in the lower level of the Guggenheim Museum SoHo at Mercer and Prince Streets.

Called…

Model Jenny Shimizu walks into her agency’s loft in SoHo and immediately gets a tongue-lashing from her booker. “What?” she asks coyly. “I’m not bad, I’m good.”

Shimizu knows that she and Kate Moss — who is also repped by Women — were, in…

NEW YORK — Le Colonial has been open less than a month, but the new Vietnamese restaurant on East 57th Street already seems like it’ll be the uptown Indochine.

Barry Diller has begun migrating. So have Uma Thurman, Lee Radziwill, Nina Griscom…

In discussing her new film, “The Paper,” Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei reveals a vivd imagination and a fondness for the neighbors.

What goes through an Oscar nominee’s mind as she sits in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, before a TV…