Ralph Gardner Jr. pays a visit to the busy philanthropist and New York fixture
ENLARGE Joan Davidson at her home in Manhattan. PHOTO: KEVIN HAGEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
I know where philanthropist Joan Davidson was scheduled to be at 7 p.m. Tuesday. She would be awarding “The Alice,” an annual prize named after her mother, Alice Kaplan, an art collector and painter, for a distinguished illustrated book. The event was at the Frick Collection.
What I don’t know is what she planned to do before and after the Frick celebration of this year’s winner, David Campany, for his book “The Open Road” (Aperture) about photography and the American road trip.
There had to be something else. Ms. Davidson rarely limits herself to one event a day.
She responded somewhat sheepishly, over lunch at her art-filled Upper East Side apartment last week, when I asked whether she goes out every night when she’s in the city.
On weekends, she is at Midwood, her 85-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River a couple of hours north of the city. There her schedule is hardly less strenuous, though she denies it.
“Sometimes I step out early and come home,” she confided.
Presumably, that didn’t happen a couple of nights before our meeting. She was being honored as the founding chair of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy and seated at the mansion between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and first lady Chirlane McCray.
Mr. de Blasio presented her with the key to the city.
Not letting an opportunity go to waste, Ms. Davidson lobbied the mayor on behalf of Westbeth, artist housing in Greenwich Village for which her family’s philanthropy, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, provided seed money in the late ’60s.
Such a packed schedule would be exhausting for someone half her age. But Ms. Davidson is how old?
I couldn’t guess, even though I’ve known her for more than a decade. I assumed she was in her early 80s, only because that’s what I’d heard. She looks like she’s in her early 70s and acts like she’s in her 30s.
“Eighty-eight,” she said. “It happens. Just wait.”
One resists the temptation to describe Ms. Davidson as a grande dame. She doesn’t dress the part—preferring casual elegance to designer dresses, and artistic jewelry to diamonds. But it dawned on me, over a lunch of chicken salad and asparagus spears, with Tate’s chocolate chip cookies for dessert, that she’s among the last of the breed.
ENLARGEThese are philanthropists in the mold of the lateBrooke Astor who come to personify New York City. Who combine wealth with smarts and personal charisma to leverage the impact of their good deeds.
The J.M. Kaplan Fund—where Ms. Davidson was president from 1977 to 1993, until she became New York state’s Commissioner of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation under Gov. Mario Cuomo and handed over the reins to her children—began in 1945 with $10 million from her father, a self-made financier who reorganized and led the Welch’s Grape Juice company.
The fund has since grown to about $150 million, a significant amount but hardly exceptional in a city of billionaires writing hundred-million-dollar checks to get their names chiseled onto public institutions.
“I loved Mario Cuomo,” Ms. Davidson remembered of her time in state government. “He was the most wonderful boss. He gave you all the money you asked for. He never interfered. He approved of everything. But the state was pretty rich in those days.”
Ms. Davidson appears more hands-on than the former governor was with her. She also created Furthermore, the grants in publishing program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. It has helped fund more than a thousand books, including Kenneth Jackson’s “The Encyclopedia of New York City” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gotham,” by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace.
“We kept those guys going for years,” Ms. Davidson said of the “Gotham” authors in characteristically unembellished fashion.
“We don’t have that much money and the grants are pretty dinky,” she added modestly. “They’re in the $5,000 range. Once in a great while $10,000.”
“The Alice” is a more substantial $25,000.
As I was leaving Ms. Davidson handed me a press kit for the S.S. Columbia, a National Historic Landmark steam vessel whose restoration she’s championing. She hopes it will eventually ply the Hudson, uniting communities along the river and educating the public about their cultural heritage.
It could also travel directly below her Hudson River mansion, providing an apt coda to a career that seems to link New York City, Albany and the mountains and valleys in between.