To Chris Who fixed my computer, made my telephone calls, crashed up my car doing errands for me—and brought me red-and-white striped tulips when the deadlines seemed unbearable. Contents Introduction Chapter 1 Clothing Bargains for Men and Women Cheap clothes (and shoes) that look like a million: Inside Manhattan; the discount outlets like Daffy’s, Loehmann’s, T. J. Maxx. How to shop them; what to look for; the rules. Shopping on Orchard Street. The fancy shops. The sales: When and where. The sample sales. Why having your boots and shoes made can be better and cheaper; where to get them made. Outer boroughs, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the rest of New England. How to get there. (Don’t even think of a bus …) List of sources. Chapter 2 Diamonds and Other Baubles Bargaining for sapphire rings and diamond ear studs. Advice on emeralds and rubies and pearls. What you need for your search: a 10X jeweler’s loupe. The diamond buyer’s chart. A wholesale dealer gives up her secrets. “Enhancements” and why they’re not always a good thing. (Watch out for steam cleaners.) List of sources. Chapter 3 Gourmet Food Fit for a Millionaire Where to get caviar, smoked salmon to serve as appetizers. Blood and butchery on Ninth Avenue. Cheese in the East Village. Ordering wine by the case—or by the under-$10 bottle. Cheap wine that tastes like double the price—and wines to stay away from. List of sources. Chapter 4 On the Town: Stepping Out to the Bars and Clubs Hanging out for $10 at the Carlyle. A platter of salsa and plantains in Gramercy Park for $5. The (velvet) rope trick. When is a $12.50 martini worth it? Swinging at Birdland. List of sources. Chapter 5 Where Are the Chocolates on My Pillow? Fancy Hotels with Deals During the week. On the weekends. Small boutique hotels and deals under $100. Talking with Bernard Goldberg, the man who invented the Cheap Hotel that Looks like a Million. Plan A: How to make reservations like a millionaire (how to get the best room—with no fibbing). Plan B: How to change rooms like a millionaire (for use only after Plan A has failed). List of sources. Chapter 6 How to Find Your Dream Bargain Apartment An insider’s glossary for reading between the lines. To rent: Reading the Village Voice. Surfing the Net. Playing the odds. Surfing the streets: Checking out the signs, greasing the palms of the doormen and supers. To buy: The real secrets in a hot market. “Dead listings.” The advantages of using one broker vs. many. The advantages of using no broker: Going direct. The disadvantages. Bargaining like a millionaire. List of sources. Chapter 7 Outfitting Your Apartment Furniture: Discount outlets and designers’ warehouses. Antique shops. The 26th Street antiques market. The pier shows. Going to the Armory (The Winter Antiques Show) not to buy. Auctions in New York City and its environs. The best auctions in Connecticut and New York State. Brimfield, Massachusetts, and Renninger’s Extravaganza in Pennsylvania. What to look for; how much to pay. List of sources. Chapter 8 Fabrics Galore Silk taffeta from the Orient—on 39th Street. Finding Brunschwig et Fils in Westerley, Rhode Island. Wallpaper for $2.99 a roll. William Morris from England. Blinds from South Carolina at half the price of the city’s “discount” stores. List of sources. Chapter 9 Having Them Made: Curtains, Upholstery, Cabinets Draperies. Upholstery. Raw materials: Paint and lumber. How to light everything. How to hire craftsmen. List of sources. Chapter 10 Kitchens and Baths Worthy of a Millionaire Kitchens and baths. Shopping the Bowery. Having a sink custom-made and other adventures. Ordering your brass hinges from England. Vintage plumbing fixtures: Pros and cons. Picking up your granite countertops in Long Island City (and saving thousands of dollars) and buying your soapstone sink in Vermont. Buying pedestal sinks at Home Depot ($99 vs. $429). What you should buy cheaply and what you absolutely can’t. List of sources. Chapter 11 You Knew You Wanted It— But You Didn’t Know You Could Afford It All the luxuries to make your life complete: From engraved stationery to pedigreed puppies to vintage Rolls-Royces to a bargain hair coloring at one of the city’s premiere salons. Chapter 12 The Best Travel Deals Where to go when you’ve bought it all? How about London? Cheap travel. Using the telephone, the Net, or the Courier services. The best deals. (You’ll be amazed.) A short list of places to stay in London. Buying West End theater tickets. List of sources. Conclusion: Thinking Cheap How to show it off: A blend of modesty and self-satisfaction. Should you spread the word or just keep quiet? Your next project. Introduction o you don’t have a million dollars. Join the crowd. But you don’t want to be like the S crowd; you want to live, dress, eat, and, well, exist like a millionaire. Or maybe you actually are a millionaire, but you’re a cheapskate. It doesn’t matter which you are. As long as you have style, this book is for you. There are plenty of books about bargains in New York City. The problem with them, as I found out a while back, is that most of them give only the cheap stuff—not the cheap good stuff. So one guide might have an extensive listing of cheesy boutiques on 14th Street, plus a variety of discount stores and by-the-hour flophouses. But what millionaire would be caught shopping there? Or staying there? And yes, the book might tell you that at a particular store, you can find a man’s sport jacket by a famous designer, but the book doesn’t tell you that (a) it’s purple-and-orange plaid or (b) it’s only in size 38 Short or (c) it’s the same price as it would be at a fancy store on sale. The Cheapskate Millionaire’s Guide to Bargain Hunting in the Big Apple will tell you how to live like a millionaire—without paying the price. This book will tell you where to find the best designers’ clothes at 40 to 75 percent off. It will show you where to find stunning wall sconces for $49—about one-sixth of their retail price. It will tell you where to find fabrics for $5 a yard—fabrics that look like $100 a yard. It will tell you where to find spices for 50 cents a bagful. It will tell you where to find a gorgeous sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds—for about one-fifth the price of the same ring in a posh Fifth Avenue emporium. But more than that, this book will show you strategies: how to negotiate with the leather merchants on Orchard Street—and with the antiques dealers at a 26th Street open-air booth! How to get a busy real estate agent to call you back. And how you can save hundreds of dollars on airfares, engraved stationery, and custom-made cabinets. That’s important. Because to a true cheapskate, getting 20 percent off isn’t worth leaving one’s ten-room (dirt-cheap) Park Avenue apartment for. The game is to buy things for 20 percent of the retail price. This guide will also tell you how to find a cheap rental in a city where the average studio rents for $1,300 and the average one-bedroom goes for $1,800. And if you’re going to stay a while and want to actually make some money too, the book instructs you, step by step, in how to find an incredible buy on an apartment in a fancy neighborhood (the Upper East Side—not the Upper End of Hell’s Kitchen). The book is much more than a compilation of listings. You’ll be guided through the process of tracking down a bargain on something really desirable, not just a “famous brand name” label stuck on an item everybody else has rejected. Do you love William Morris wallpaper by the English firm of Sanderson’s? If you go into an American store, you’ll pay $96 a roll. But what if you know how to send away to England? Oh, right, the English distributors won’t ship when there’s a U.S. distributor. But the London paint shops will. So with the names of the shops in this book, you can telephone your order, give them your credit card—and get as many rolls as you want for about $35 apiece. The same works for fabrics. So go into the Sanderson’s showroom here—or easier still, a Janovic Plaza paint store where they have the wallpaper books— pick out what you want, make a note of it, and call London. As someone who has worked as a general contractor, buying wrecks in both New York City and Connecticut—as well as being a reporter for the House & Home section of the New York Times—I have lots of experience. I also spent a summer dealing antiques, exhibiting and wheeling and dealing at places like the Brimfield, Massachusetts, weeklong antiques extravaganza. I’ve bought old doors at United Housewrecking in Stamford, Connecticut, and more than paid for my flight to England with the savings on brass hardware I bought at J. Shiner on Windmill Street. My house in Connecticut has been photographed for House & Garden—and it’s full of cheap stuff. Besides that, I just bought two apartments, one above the other, in a landmarked mews on the Upper West Side, both for $80,000—in the midst of a white-hot real estate market. How I found them—through a real estate agent’s brilliant idea of canvassing “dead listings”—is in the book. Remember that millionaires are notorious cheapskates. No, that’s not how they got their money. But it’s definitely how they’re keeping it. Note: Most books don’t give prices because authors are afraid they’ll make the book outdated sooner. I always find that frustrating: just saying a store “offers significant savings on Army boots,” say, means nothing to me. So I’ve peppered these pages with real prices I gathered from the shops, hotels, and services at press time in fall 1999. Take them for what they are, and place them in their proper time frame. But I think they give the reader a good handle on exactly what’s being offered, a chance to really size up whether something is a bargain. Cheapskate millionaires rarely waste their time —they have too cushy a life for that! Clothing Bargains for Men and Women: Strut Your (New) Stuff like a Millionaire hen you think of shopping in New York City, you may well think of W clothes shopping. Maybe you’re thinking of a grand magasin like Bergdorf or Henri Bendel or even Saks. Or maybe you’re thinking of thousand-dollar-a-square-foot Madison Avenue, with its Italian shoe stores like Tanino Crisci and Fratelli Rossetti, its luxurious children’s emporiums like Bonpoint, and its fin-de-siècle mansion that Ralph Lauren transformed into the world’s preppiest showcase. Or good old 59th Street and Lex, where certain people have always been attracted to Bloomingdale’s. And the shops along 57th Street, including Hermès, the den of $2,500 handbags; Burberrys, home of plaid doggie coats; Prada; Louis Vuitton—down with Vs!—Turnbull & Asser; Celine; and more. And Barneys, which started out as a cheap men’s store but now features some of the most expensive ways in the world to drape your body. These stores, frankly, are all musts. Take a look through Barneys if you want to see clothes on the cutting edge. Tour Henri Bendel, one of the great department stores of all time, with its Lalique second-floor window, almost destroyed but for one lone preservationist who spotted it underneath layers of grunge. It was the first to create famous-name boutiques within a larger retail setting. A sublime experience. Check out the shearlings and the silky smooth, quilted, tomato red barn jackets at Searle. Examine the scarves at Hermès. (Why not? Everyone else does. Feel them—are they really worth $275?) Pay particular attention to the leather in the shoes at Tanino Crisci; the styles at Rossetti—you will see those styles in lesser leathers at places like Ann Taylor: Is one worth $284 and the other $149? (I say yes, but it’s up to you.) Then spend a lazy afternoon in SoHo cruising the clothing stores, and