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The article focuses on an old-style walk-in phone booth which was discovered in New York City by a work crew on February 10, 2016. It states that the phone booth became famous for being the last of its kind, and it was once ubiquitous on city sidewalks and a staple in films and on television. It mentions the installation of a new phone booth by technicians in the area where in old phone booth was found.

The article offers the author's insights concerning how he valued the antique hand-carved dinning table and chairs he inherited from his parents.

Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, an impulsive and imperious railroad heiress, defied convention in the 1890s by dumping her unfaithful husband and running off with a neighbor. Although her feminist streak led her to battle for women's suffrage, she forced her daughter Consuelo into a stiflingly conventional marriage to a philandering English duke who needed Vanderbilt money.Mrs. Belmont, who lived in New York, Long Island, northern France and Newport, R.I., also collected antiques on impulse. At her Versailles-inspired Newport home, called Marble House (it contains 500,000 cubic feet of marble), she filled an 1890s Gothic reception room with pinnacled oak paneling, medieval stained glass, statues of saints, rock crystal watches and Roman cameos made of amethyst and carnelian. Much of the room's contents, which she tired of and sold for $125,000 in 1927, has been reunited for an exhibition that opens on Saturday at Marble House. The show's cumbersome title, ''Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Ringling-Vanderbilt Collection,'' refers to Mrs. Belmont's favorite Paris dealer, Emile Gavet, and her 1920s buyer, the circus tycoon John Ringling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR many, it seems, the smooth surfaces of modern design have lost their allure. Hollister and Porter Hovey, sisters age 30 and 26, used a chain from Home Depot to lash a crystal chandelier to a crossbeam in the ceiling of their loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But it is one of the few contemporary objects in a habitat that embraces, among other cultural touchstones, W. Somerset Maugham's last days of colonialism, Victorian memento mori and the Edwardian men's club. There are also apothecary cabinets, fencing masks and pith helmets, stacks of antique luggage and a taxidermy collection that would make Teddy Roosevelt proud. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]