{"id":378309,"date":"2026-10-20T22:04:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T22:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/378309\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T22:04:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T22:04:28","slug":"the-midtown-office-thats-also-a-leonard-bernstein-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/378309\/","title":{"rendered":"The Midtown Office That\u2019s Also a Leonard Bernstein Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stu <\/p>\n

\n Stu Loeser in front of his office\u2019s fireplace. You can see the same fireplace in the photo (above his head) of Leonard Bernstein and Marc Blitzstein as they discuss Blitzstein\u2019s The Airborne Symphony \u2014 for a performance that was released on an LP that also hangs on the same wall.
\n Photo: Christopher Bonanos\n <\/p>\n

Two years ago, Stu Loeser was looking for new office space. Loeser \u2014 former press secretary to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and before that comms director to Chuck Schumer \u2014 had been running his namesake political consultancy and PR firm out of the Chrysler Building, which he liked because, he says, nobody ever had to be reminded where his office was. But it was time to expand and relocate, and a place with a terrace would be useful for book parties and other events. As Loeser remembers, \u201cOur broker said, \u2018Come see this place \u2014 it has roof decks.\u2019\u201d It was a big, bright, top-floor loft at 1239 Broadway, just south of Herald Square. Then the broker dropped a minor detail: It had been the apartment of \u201csome musician.\u201d Who, Loeser very soon discovered, wasn\u2019t any old guitar player: In 1945 and 1946, Leonard Bernstein had lived there. The previous tenant, an architecture firm, had spiffed the place up but it was still fundamentally the space it had been 80 years earlier, with a fireplace at its center and rough brick parapets outside. Lenny, were he able to drop in from the great beyond, would not fail to recognize it.<\/p>\n

Most everyone in media or government seems to know Stu, a classic Gladwellian connector<\/a>. (I should disclose that I am among that \u201ceveryone\u201d; he and I are friendly enough to have met for lunch a couple of times over the years.) If you live in New York, you probably have a friend who\u2019s a city-lore guy, and Stu is absolutely that guy \u2014 a seriously fast-talking, warm if also tough version of that guy. The bookshelves in his office don\u2019t max out with Robert Caro\u2019s The Power Broker; they start with Caro and proceed from there. Bernstein is his kind of character, too: compelling, high-energy, dazzlingly deft with language, forthrightly Jewish. (Loeser is observant; his associates know that he doesn\u2019t take calls on Shabbos.) The Lenny connection may not have been the main reason he liked the space, but it sure didn\u2019t hurt. He signed.<\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

\n The sign that greets you as you exit the elevator at 1239 Broadway.
\n Photo: Christopher Bonanos\n <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you ever take an office of your own, try to take one from an architecture firm,\u201d he says when I come by to visit. \u201cThey figured out the bookshelves, the built-ins.\u201d Still, a new office needs d\u00e9cor, especially if you\u2019re planning to hold receptions and parties there. The Bernstein connection supplied a theme, and very quickly, Loeser became a self-taught exhibition designer. Library trips, eBay searches, dives into various archives \u2014 all of it bore fruit that soon filled up a bunch of display cases and frames. Much of what he found got edited into big illustrated posters of wall text. Pause next to that central fireplace now, and next to it is an oversize photograph of Lenny at the piano, in front of the same fireplace, looking at the score for a Marc Blitzstein piece called the Airborne Symphony. An LP of the performance he conducted shortly thereafter, with Orson Welles providing narration, is framed and hangs under the photo. As you step out the door to a terrace, you see another pair of photos of Bernstein by the parapet, which has barely changed.<\/p>\n

Turn around, and in one niche, there\u2019s a blown-up image of one of Bernstein\u2019s first interviews, published in Seventeen, in which the reporter meets the charismatic young conductor at \u201chis apartment, which is a stunning penthouse on top of a tall office building in a business section.\u201d There are framed concert-ticket stubs, Playbills, LP jackets. Visual jokes, too: A unisex restroom door has icons indicating not men and women but a shark and a jet<\/a>. Another is marked in all-caps \u201cLavatory Bathroom,\u201d with the initials L.B. emphasized. Dotting the shelves around it all is a pleasing little array of media hardware from the Bakelite-and-vacuum-tube era, not , not Bernstein-specific but definitely appropriate to a comms office: a movie projector, press cameras, vintage radios. \u201cThe first time Kathy Wylde<\/a> came and visited,\u201d he says, \u201cshe\u2019s like, \u2018I knew you\u2019d have an office like this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n The terrace, seen with Bernstein and today. The brick parapet wall behind him has been skim-coated but remains recognizable. Photographs: Christopher Bonanos.\n <\/p>\n

\n The terrace, seen with Bernstein and today. The brick parapet wall behind him has been skim-coated but remains recognizable. Photographs: Christopher … more
\n The terrace, seen with Bernstein and today. The brick parapet wall behind him has been skim-coated but remains recognizable. Photographs: Christopher Bonanos.\n <\/p>\n

This \u201cstunning penthouse\u201d was not, I should clarify, either of Bernstein\u2019s two most famous homes. In the 1960s and early \u201970s, he and his wife, Felicia, lived with their family on Park Avenue<\/a>, where, in 1970, Tom Wolfe attended That Party and covered it, savagely<\/a>. A few years later, the family moved to the Dakota, where Bernstein spent the remainder of his life (and, if you believe the billionaire crackpots who live there now<\/a>, continues to hover). This instead was a young artist\u2019s apartment, his first after he moved to New York, the place he moved into about a year after a legendary call came in 1943, his first real moment of international recognition. Bruno Walter, scheduled to conduct the New York Philharmonic, had come down with the flu, and Bernstein stepped onto its podium, age 25, on just a few hours\u2019 notice. It was so late that the programs had to be corrected by typewriter<\/a>. He wore his one good suit, a gray sharkskin, because he didn\u2019t have time to get the full eveningwear rig. A little over a year later, he moved into this apartment. On the Town, his first musical-theater hit, had just opened.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n Signage with a sense of humor. Photographs: Christopher Bonanos.\n <\/p>\n

\n Signage with a sense of humor. Photographs: Christopher Bonanos.\n <\/p>\n

Loeser is an animated, chatty tour guide, and it\u2019s pretty entertaining to just let him run, skipping from anecdote to anecdote The RCA Victor console radio-phonograph unit by the door? \u201cMade in Long Island City! It was in Yonkers, and then I brought it back here. Its entire life has been within ten miles of where it was built.\u201d An end table with a Bernstein LP as its top was custom-built by an Etsy maker; Loeser went out of his way to find a damaged record to give to the carpenter,\u00a0because \u201cyou don\u2019t want to have someone\u2019s perfectly good one. So you\u2019re on eBay and they say, \u2018It\u2019s scratched \u2014 it doesn\u2019t play.\u2019 \u2018No problem.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Christopher Bonanos\n <\/p>\n

He seems most tickled as he walks me through one corner\u2019s worth of displays, probably because it echoes his own experience of managing City Hall battles in the press every day. In 1943, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia \u2014 an opera enthusiast \u2014 had directed some public funding to a new institution, the New York City Symphony, housed at City Center. (It\u2019s unrelated to the orchestra of the same name that operates today<\/a>.) It was meant to be a people\u2019s institution, more accessible and with cheaper tickets than the Philharmonic up at Carnegie Hall. Bernstein was, during the time he lived at 1239 Broadway, the NYCS\u2019s conductor, and made some slightly inaccurate remarks to a reporter about its level of subsidy, after which La Guardia publicly corrected him. It was a minor tiff, a day\u2019s scuffle at most, getting a brief bit of attention in the Times<\/a> \u2014 and, now, rediscovered, it fills up an entertaining niche in what Loeser has started calling the Leonard Bernstein Microseum.<\/p>\n

\"Bernstein's <\/p>\n

\n Bernstein\u2019s first musical-theater smash, On the Town, was playing at the 44th Street Theatre when he lived in these rooms.
\n Photo: Christopher Bonanos\n <\/p>\n

My experience of people in high-profile jobs suggests that most of them look forward, seeing the past mostly as it pertains to their own narratives. Loeser, though, has a historian\u2019s long view, an appreciation for a city as it exists in the river of time. I asked him how he thinks he got that way, and he thinks for a moment. He mentions having immigrant grandparents who had been uprooted from Europe, and yearning for a sense of connection to place. Say you spend a day around the Seaport, as kids on field trips do: \u201cYou\u2019re a block from George and Martha Washington\u2019s house \u2014 but it\u2019s gone, and the street doesn\u2019t exist. It\u2019s under the Brooklyn Bridge.\u201d Whereas in, say, Athens, you\u2019re surrounded by antiquity, here glass towers stand right next to historic sites: \u201cIn a city that\u2019s constantly re-re-rebuilding, renewing, you have this extraordinary ability to be in the present and in the past. I liked the space because it was that. I like that it\u2019s the only museum to Leonard Bernstein anywhere in the world. And I like that it\u2019s a fun place to visit, because if you\u2019re a wallflower or don\u2019t have anyone to talk to at a cocktail party, there are things to look at.\u201d Oh yeah, I say: You\u2019ve got 200 icebreakers in here. \u201cRight. Or just something to read on your own, if you don\u2019t feel like talking to anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

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