Pack a Picnic Basket and Your Dancing Shoes for the Jazz Age Lawn Party

Jazz Age Lawn Party through June 16, 2019

Almost a Century Later, the Allure of the Roaring 20s Lives On: 14th Annual Jazz Age Lawn Party

If you, like Daisy Buchanan, find large parties intimate, consider the 14th Annual Jazz Age Lawn Party. Celebrate the zeitgeist of the 1920s in all its glistening grandeur on Governors Island June 15-16 and August 24-25. The event is escapism twice over: cloistered on an island steeped in history, bustling with the devilish details of the Forgotten Decade. Whatever lives party goers lead across the East River are shed in exchange for drop waist beaded numbers and dapper suspenders. While costumes aren’t required, (and available for rent) a willingness to surrender to founder Michael Arenella’s steamy fever dream is.

The event attracts an earnest, light-hearted crowd, bursting with nostalgia. There’s a pie eating contest, a vintage portrait studio, croquet, even. But most importantly, there’s jazz. And what good is any daydream without a proper score? The howling of trumpets and crooning of the iconic lyrics of the decade animate the weekend, resurrecting the true spirit of the Jazz Age. Aperol Spritzes flow. Blankets are kicked up by the wind, fluttering into tiny islands of partygoers.

Jazz Age Lawn Party through June 16, 2019

The Charleston is danced while the parasols are spread under the unrelenting summer sun. This year’s later hours (extended to 6 pm) boast reduced ticket prices and drink specials. But just like every year before, Michael Arenella & His Dreamland Orchestra can be expected to transport attendees.

The optimism and rebellious glint in the eye characteristic of the era run through every inch of the production. What made the 20s unsustainable makes the infamous Jazz Age Lawn Party unforgettable. A march into the sunset as the weekend’s grand finale, reminiscence of a Southern burial march, signifies the waking that comes with even the most visceral of dreaming. From the soft pink skies drifting past the Manhattan skyline, under the mesmerizing spell of jazz and libations, it’s easy to understand how even Gatsby himself could feel “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life,” at the Jazz Age Lawn Party.

 

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn   “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air