T Magazine: The Scene | Shelter From the Storm

Written By Unknown on Senin, 05 Mei 2014 | 17.35

The seaside neighborhood of Rockaway, Queens, still piecing itself together a year and a half after Hurricane Sandy, has found its patron saint in Klaus Biesenbach, the most hospitable grill master in the art world.

On a warm afternoon late last summer, the party that Klaus Biesenbach threw at his home in Rockaway, Queens, was just like any other American cookout. The orange glow of the sunset bathed his moss-green garden filled with the sounds of chattering friends. The smell of grilling and American beer wafted through the air. The artist Terence Koh laughed with a male friend on the front porch of the house, itself wrapped in sun-faded yellow siding. The Visionaire magazine co-founder Cecilia Dean sipped from a plastic cup in the backyard, next to the musician and performance artist Casey Spooner, while Biesenbach, the Museum of Modern Art's chief curator at large and the director of its Long Island City outpost, MoMA PS1, manned the barbecue, handing out food and playing the role of host. The yard was filled with nearly 80 guests, a discrepant, boisterous mix of artists and curators, models, local surfers, stray celebrities and children. There was a hopeful, easy sense of fun that felt like some glowing charcoal briquette that could not really, truly, ever go out.

And yet for a time it had. Nearly a year earlier, in October 2012, a good deal of the vulnerable Rockaway peninsula was destroyed when Hurricane Sandy slammed into the region, sparking a fire that razed more than 100 homes and twisting the beloved Rockaway boardwalk into miles of Tinkertoy wreckage.

Biesenbach had first visited Rockaway around 2000 and was charmed by its shabby grandeur. When the 2008 financial crisis focused attention on the auto industry, he started thinking about the neighborhood as a miniature, beachfront analogue to Detroit. He struck up friendships with the locals, like David Selig, Dean's longtime boyfriend and the co-owner of the summertime hipster magnet Rockaway Taco, and brought friends like Patti Smith with him to look at real estate.

In the spring of 2012, he bought a place that was, for him, a modest refuge from the round-the-clock-and-world lifestyle that comes with his job. In keeping with his austere persona, he stripped the interiors of everything extraneous — which is to say, everything — combining three ground-floor rooms into one big space, opening up the kitchen and painting all of the walls white. He bought queen-size beds for the five bedrooms and covered them in plain white sheets. Also white: the window curtains, the shower curtains, the kitchen cupboards, the painted radiators and the banister that leads to the second floor. In fact, the only interior color comes from a mint-green picnic table that occupies a good chunk of space in the living room.

The morning after Sandy hit, Biesenbach began emailing his contacts, asking them for aid. Supplies were scarce; Cindy Sherman contributed 150 space heaters. Biesenbach's roster of performer friends — Madonna, Michael Stipe and Kim Cattrall among many others — visited the neighborhood and helped rally volunteers and enthusiasm.

Biesenbach continues to support local organizations, like the nonprofit Rockaway Artists Alliance. And he's turned his attention back to his garden, which had been ravaged by the storm. To his surprise, about half of the trees and plants — the magnolias, the red maple, the golden cedar, the rose of Sharon, the wisteria — recovered the following spring. He has added new plants and trees that are saltwater resilient: a golden dawn redwood, three willows, a bald cypress, a white oak, a live oak and bamboo.

But if he's managed to tame the garden's flora, the same cannot be said for the fauna who come from all over to attend his weekend parties. "I thought it was going to be my quiet spot, where I could come and read and be alone," he says, chuckling. "Somehow it's taken on a life of its own."


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