Lifestyle
How a Driving Instructor to the Stars Spends Her Sundays
Shanti Gooljar recently got a $2,000 tip.
She runs a driving school in Manhattan that caters to a high-end clientele, and only works on referrals. She says she has taught the offspring of a few names you might know:
Jerry Seinfeld. Rupert Murdoch. Vera Wang. Katie Couric.
She had initially worked as a paramedic. But after two years, she decided she did not like it and turned to a driving school in the Bronx. Ms. Gooljar quickly realized she had found her calling.
“I just got real good at what I was doing,” she said. The teens she taught connected with her unfiltered, no-nonsense style, and they soon began giving her number to their friends. So she bought her own car and went freelance. Ms. Gooljar, 62, opened her own school in 2014.
“That was 10 years ago,” she said. “And look at me now.”
She owns the Empire State Driving School on the Upper West Side, which has five other instructors. Behind-the-wheel lessons go for as much as $200 per hour, and she works eight hours per day, seven days a week.
Ms. Gooljar lives in a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, near where she lived when she immigrated from Guyana with her four siblings in 1972. After the births of her sons — Philip, 43, and Michael, 38 — she and her husband,Vinny Gooljar, upgraded from a studio to a ground-floor space next to a police station, where she now lives alone. Mr. Gooljar, to whom she was married for 43 years, died of a heart attack in 2022.
“After he died, my family wanted me to go to Florida — my mom is there, and my brothers and sisters,” she said. “But I’m at the age where I like the same routine.”
ON AUTOPILOT I wake up at 5 a.m. I don’t need an alarm — it’s all in my head.
Depending what time my first lesson is, I’ll usually stop by Dunkin’ for a small hot coffee with cream. I’m a regular at a few of them — the one in the Bronx on Webster Avenue, and the one in Harlem near 122nd Street. They all know me — or rather, I make myself known to them!
FIRST PICKUP I often have my first lesson at 8 a.m. I’ll either meet the client at their house, or they’ll come to the school in Lincoln Square. I get a lot of prep school students, but also some older people. I’m teaching a 94-year-old right now!
I often take people up, around and through Harlem. I don’t teach downtown, especially not now with congestion pricing — you can’t get anywhere.
BACK TO BACK I roll straight into my next lesson at 10 a.m. I usually fit in four two-hour lessons per day.
The key is to build up their confidence right away. Driving in Manhattan is like driving anywhere. You have to know what you’re doing. If the driver behind you is beeping their horn, move around and let them go.
I don’t allow my students to argue with me, because I’m more experienced. I’d never gotten a speeding ticket in 45 years of driving until September, when I was driving to my girlfriend’s funeral in Virginia on the highway. The officer told me I went 10 miles over the speed limit — really?!
PIT STOP Around 12:30 p.m., I grab another coffee from Dunkin’ and take a pee break. Sometimes I’ll have a salad, and then when I come home I get something to eat. I don’t eat a lot — I need my coffee, though!
THERAPIST HOUR When I’m teaching these kids, I’m not just their driving instructor — I’m also their therapist. They tell me things they’d never tell their mothers.
One of the girls I’m teaching right now, her boyfriend broke up with her last week. She’s 27. It’s better they break up now than they wait until they get married. She’s young. She can move on. I know it’s hard when you’ve been with someone for that long, but it’s better to have it happen now than later.
HEAD ON A SWIVEL Don’t think I’m distracted, though! I’m so good at what I do that I can sit there and have a conversation and still grab that steering wheel out of your hands, stop the car and move across all the lanes to save you.
This time of year, it gets dark around 4:30, so my last pickup is around 3 p.m. When it comes to taking the road test, I’m very proud of my track record. I can count on one hand the number of people who failed last year.
My last lesson ends around 5 p.m., and my drive home is about half an hour, depending on where I end up.
DINNER PLANS I’ll often grab dinner with my son Philip, who lives in Connecticut. Sometimes we’ll go to a place on City Island — the Original Crab Shanty — and eat lobsters and crabs.
Or sometimes I’ll cook for him at home. I can cook real good. I can cook anything. He likes beef curry. Or, if he’s busy, I’ll eat alone. If it’s just me, I’ll have a bowl of oatmeal for dinner, or Cream of Wheat. I love that. I’m very easy to please.
WASH IT OFF I’ll hop in the shower around 7 or 8. I have always been and always will be a night shower person. Especially when it’s so cold, who wants to get up at 5 and take a shower and have your hair all wet?
SADDLE UP I love “Yellowstone” with Kevin Costner. I don’t know what I’m going to do now that it’s ended. His character’s daughter, Beth — she’s the bomb. I’d love to meet her. Maybe Kelly Reilly, who plays her, needs driving lessons — you never know!
RINSE AND REPEAT I crawl into bed between 8 and 8:30. When Vinny was alive, we used to go places. Now, I don’t go anywhere. What keeps me going is work: I get up and go to work, take a shower, come home, eat dinner, then wake up the next morning and go again.
I’m not ready to retire yet, but I’m laying the groundwork. My son Philip is learning how to run the school — scheduling, how to hire the right people, monitor the money, pay the bills. I’m proud that I’ve hired good people and made such a name for the school. That’s most important — getting good people to work for you.
EARLY TO BED I’m asleep by 8:30. I have to be ready to go at 5 a.m. for another full day of lessons.
Lifestyle
Allison Holker's Daughter Defends NDA at tWitch's Funeral
Allison Holker‘s daughter is shedding some light on the NDA people going to Stephen “tWitch” Boss‘ funeral had to sign … and, she claims it wasn’t meant to stop people from talking about the late star.
Weslie Fowler — Holker’s 16-year-old daughter from a previous relationship — took to Instagram Live Friday and talked for 30 minutes about her mom and tWitch.
One of the big topics she confronted … Weslie explained why an NDA at tWtich’s funeral was necessary — saying it’s not about preventing people from talking about the star, but instead it was in an effort to keep people from photographing the body.
Fowler says, “God forbid somebody that went to that took a photo of Stephen and put it on the internet or shared it with somebody else.”
In addition, Weslie says her mom was lenient on the rules … and claims people needed to sign NDAs when they attended any event with tWitch when he was alive — a regular precaution taken by many stars.
As for talking about tWitch’s alleged drug stash … Weslie says her mom is just going through all of the factors that may have contributed to his suicide — and, that includes thinking about the substances, like weed, she says he put in his body.
tWorth noting … Weslie was never formally adopted by tWitch — but, she says he was always there for her, and she considers him a father figure.
We’ve told you all about the family in-fighting this week … after Allison announced she was writing a memoir, several of tWtich’s family members came out and slammed her as a money-hungry opportunist.
tWtich’s mother, Connie, came out and — though she didn’t make a direct reference to Allison — she promised to defend his legacy from those trying to tarnish it.
Sounds like Holker’s daughter has a totally different view of events … and, she’s putting her story out there.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
Lifestyle
Bucks County, Pa., Is Now a Celebrity Hot Spot
It’s hard to pinpoint when things began to change around here but you might start with the arrival of Yolanda Hadid in 2017.
Ms. Hadid, a onetime regular on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” bought a farm just outside New Hope, Pa., to be closer to her daughters, the models Gigi and Bella Hadid, who were then living in New York City.
The 32-acre property, with its stone farmhouse, horse barn and formal garden, became a family retreat, and the Hadids’ social media feeds filled with pastoral images: Gigi in a two-piece bathing suit, posing with a bowl of newly picked vegetables beside a patch of basil; Yolanda in black boots, bluejeans and a puffer vest, showing off a heap of fresh-cut lavender.
“We ride horses, we have a vegetable garden,” Yolanda told The Toronto Star in 2018, describing her life in the countryside with her famous daughters, who between them have 140 million followers on Instagram.
The presence of the Hadids attracted other famous people to Bucks County, a woodsy area known for its rolling hills and 12 covered bridges. In 2018, Zayn Malik, the British pop singer who was in a relationship with Gigi, bought a farm there. “It is quiet,” he said in an interview with British Vogue. “There are no human beings.” People magazine shared the news that Gigi gave birth to the couple’s daughter at home in Bucks County in 2020.
Tranquil Bucks County was back in the media spotlight the next year, when TMZ and Billboard reported on an altercation involving Mr. Malik, Gigi and Yolanda that took place at one of their country homes. Facing four charges of harassment, Mr. Malik pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 360 days of probation; he and Gigi broke up after the incident.
In 2023, the actor-writer-director Bradley Cooper, widely reported to have succeeded Mr. Malik as Gigi’s love interest, paid $6.5 million for a 33-acre gentleman’s farm close to Yolanda’s property. Then came local sightings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin and Hailey Bieber. Just across the Delaware River from New Hope, in Lambertville, N.J., Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney were filming a movie.
Suddenly, New Hope and the quaint neighboring towns were becoming a celebrity enclave. While a census might reveal fewer famous people per acre than in the Hamptons, Malibu, or Aspen, the area’s glamour quotient was on the rise.
Located between Philadelphia and Manhattan, New Hope has long been a haven for wealthy part-time residents. The surrounding countryside has been compared to that of the Cotswolds in England, and the artists and artisans living in the area add a touch of bohemia to the rusticity. But in past decades the weekenders tended to be lawyers and executives from Philadelphia, not supermodels, Hollywood actors and pop stars.
Michael Arenella, a musician and the founder of the annual Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governors Island, bought a weekend house in Bucks County in 2014, when he was living in Brooklyn. He started living there full-time two years later in the belief that he had chosen a place well off the cool map.
“Beacon is like Brooklyn 2.0,” Mr. Arenella, 46, said, referring to the Hudson Valley town that has been nicknamed “Bro No,” an abbreviation of Brooklyn North, because of the many former Brooklynites residing there. “I wanted to get away from New Yorkers. Bucks County is not quite as pretentious.”
Lately, though, Mr. Arenella has been seeing plenty of New York license plates in and around New Hope. Beyond sightings of Gigi Hadid or Jakob Dylan, another famous transplant, there are other signs of change in the area.
Humble inns have been refurbished to attract a new clientele, and several luxury hotels have sprung up, including River House at Odette’s, where the average nightly rate for a Saturday in November was $560 and the private rooftop club charges members $1,250 a year.
Philadelphia magazine cited the hotel and its in-house restaurant as the most glaring example of “the new New Hope.” Opened in 2020 by a group of investors that includes Ed Breen, the executive chairman of DuPont, it was built on the former site of Chez Odette’s, a restaurant and cabaret presided over by an eccentric French actress and poet, Odette Myrtil.
Along with Bucks County Playhouse, which opened in 1939 and drew such stars as Grace Kelly and Robert Redford, Odette’s came to symbolize New Hope’s bohemian culture. It closed in 2007, after three consecutive floods struck the town, and the stone building that housed it was painstakingly relocated to another lot, where it now sits empty.
Just up the Delaware, in Stockton, N.J., population 494, the historic Stockton Inn recently reopened after a two-year renovation. Its owners hired a James Beard Award winner to manage the property and its two restaurants. They also opened Stockton Market, a gourmet café that sells Frankies 457 olive oil and matcha tea made on site. Nearby, another high-end dining establishment, the Northridge Restaurant, opened last month after a three-year transformation of a weathered barn on the property of the Woolverton Inn.
Real estate values have soared in the area as the ultrarich supersize musty, low-ceilinged 19th-century abodes. “The old Bucks County farmhouse is now being blown out and expanded into true estates,” said Michael J. Strickland, a real estate agent with Kurfiss Sotheby’s International Realty who moved from Manhattan to Bucks County full-time in 2000.
Part of the appeal, he added, is that “property values are still accessible here, versus the Hamptons.”
‘Everyone Is From Brooklyn’
Mira Nakashima has seen the changes up close. She moved to New Hope as a child, in 1943. Her father, George Nakashima, was a woodworker and designer whose sculptural tables and chairs were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and today fetch thousands of dollars at auction.
Mira took over George Nakashima Woodworkers after his death in 1990 and still runs the complex of workshops he built on a tree-lined property above the town. Sitting at a walnut table made by her father, Mira, 82, recalled the old New Hope as low-key and artsy.
“A lot of landscape painters came because the landscape was so beautiful,” she said. “There was fishing on the river. And there were canals running both sides of the river. And it was quiet and peaceful.”
For years, Nakashima Woodworkers held an open house on Saturdays. Recently, Mira said, the grounds became so overcrowded that she now offers guided tours by appointment only.
“Everyone is from Brooklyn. I can smell Brooklyn on them when they arrive here,” added Soomi Hahn Amagasu, Mira’s daughter-in-law and the studio’s sales manager. “So many young people are coming here.”
They won’t find Williamsburg-on-the-Delaware, however. New Hope’s commercial drag still has a hippie vibe distinct from the increasingly refined retail atmosphere of that Brooklyn neighborhood, with its Hermès and Chanel stores.
Mainstays include Witch Shop Gypsy Heaven, MagiKava teahouse and Love Saves the Day, a vintage bric-a-brac emporium formerly located in New York’s East Village. Another store sells tie-dye rock T-shirts. Those places, along with the homey bars and reasonably priced restaurants, bring in the suburban teens, twentysomethings and other day-trippers who clog the streets on weekends.
The lack of luxury stores of the kind you might find in East Hampton is by design, said Larry Keller, New Hope’s mayor for the last 27 years and an antique dealer in town. The town is also not so hot on national chains: After Starbucks and Dunkin’ moved in, the council revised zoning laws to favor local businesses.
“You don’t have the square-footage,” Mr. Keller said, referring to the tiny storefronts. “Where is Ralph Lauren going to have a store and sell enough gear to make sense? These are boutiques.”
One of New Hope’s shops made the grade for Gigi Hadid: Ditto Vintage, on Brick Street. Last winter Ms. Hadid stopped in and bought a Nahui Ollin handbag, a leather jacket and a necklace.
There are some upscale shops in nearby Lambertville: Albucker Gallery sells contemporary art and an assortment of found objects; Ten Church offers vintage clothing; and Rago Arts and Auction Center sells works by Nakashima and other design goods. Lambertville is also on the foodie map: Canal House Station, which serves American fare in a converted 1870s train station, earned a Michelin star.
Back on the Pennsylvania side of the iron bridge, there are signs that New Hope is in the early stages of a makeover. The building that houses Farley’s Bookshop, which opened in 1967, was recently renovated into a bright, modern space. A few doors down, a scruffy indoor mini mall was turned into a Ferry Market, a food hall. A high-end eyeglass store, Kitto Optical, opened on the same block.
“The French fries the restaurants serve are now truffle fries,” joked Katsutoshi Amagasu, 21, a Nakashima family member who grew up in New Hope.
Some of the town’s structures date to the colonial era, like the circa.-1727 Logan Inn. But on the residential north end, beyond the protected historic district, a Victorian house overlooking the river was bulldozed and replaced with a modernist compound befitting Bel Air. On an adjacent empty lot, a builder promises four luxury condominiums, each with a terrace, elevator and private dock. The asking price for one unit is $3.5 million.
Lorraine Eastman, a real estate agent at Berkshire Hathaway, said the riverfront has been built up to the point that portions of the Delaware are no longer visible to passers-by. Ms. Eastman lived in New Hope back in the ’80s, before moving to Los Angeles and eventually returning seven years ago.
“I bartended with Big Sue, who was 6-foot-1, wore size 13 motorcycle boots and smoked a cigar and sang jazz,” she recalled of her time working at John and Peter’s, a bar and rock club on South Main Street that’s still in business. “I lived in a loft on Ferry Street, which is now the Nurture Spa. New Hope was very artsy, gritty, very bohemian. It still has a little bit of all those qualities, but it is changing.”
Eat, Pray, Spend
Like many picturesque small towns, New Hope seems to have been discovered during the pandemic by urbanites who gobbled up property and drove up real estate prices.
“People are always looking for a place to go that’s a hidden little storybook town,” said Ms. Eastman, who recently listed a renovated 1769 farmhouse with a pool and “party” barn on 37 acres for $4.5 million.
Celebrity residents aren’t exactly new, either: Paul Simon had a weekend house in Bucks County in the early ’70s; more recently, the “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert lived in Frenchtown, N.J., 16 miles north.
But the presence of the Hadids and Mr. Cooper, who grew up in suburban Philadelphia, has lent glamour to the area and whetted the appetites of developers and entrepreneurs.
A few miles from Yolanda Hadid’s estate, in the hamlet of Carversville, Pa., another hospitality project is nearly complete.
Milan Lint and his husband, Mitch Berlin, each of whom have had finance careers in New York, are renovating the Carversville Inn, a circa.-1813 stone building that the couple bought in 2020.
Standing amid the construction one morning last month, Mr. Lint, who has owned a weekend home with Mr. Berlin in Bucks County for 20 years, described the plans for the space, which is slated to open soon.
The new Carversville Inn will be a European-style boutique hotel with six rooms priced around $500 a night, Mr. Lint said. Its 65-seat restaurant will have “a French brasserie menu, in the Pastis or Balthazar style,” Mr. Lint added, name-checking a pair of Manhattan stalwarts.
Asked why he and Mr. Berlin had chosen Bucks County as the place for their venture, rather than, say, the Hudson Valley, Mr. Lint shared a memory of a boring, rainy summer spent in the area.
“The Hudson Valley is very pocket, and weather-dependent,” he said. “Here, the towns dot up and down the river. You can have a full weekend four seasons a year.”
Lifestyle
'It’s been insane': Amid fires, hotels from O.C. to Palm Springs see a rush of Angelenos
January is usually an easy month to book a Southern California hotel room. Not this year.
Driven by the fires that have uprooted hundreds of thousands of L.A. County residents, legions of displaced families and individuals are grabbing rooms in surrounding counties, especially along the coast and in the desert. Beyond those under mandatory evacuation, many more, including many families and anxious pet owners, have left because of poor air quality or general wariness of the county’s precarious state.
“It’s been insane,” said Marie Corbett, group sales manager at the 14 West boutique hotel in Laguna Beach. “I’ve had people in tears… You can see their emotions are so raw. And then they’ve got their animals. There was one lady whose dog was biting her hand. The stress.”
Corbett said that by 2 p.m. Friday, 14 West’s 70 hotel rooms were “pretty much booked out” for the night. She guessed that 80% or more of the guests had come from Los Angeles in the last few days.
Because the region’s hotel inventory is so large and January is usually so slow along the coast, many lodgings do say they still have rooms to offer, in many cases at emergency discounts. And some Angelenos who left town midweek are beginning to come back.
For information on available hotels, Discover Los Angeles has compiled a list that includes dozens of L.A. County properties. The city of Anaheim has a list with 39 hotels. The San Diego Tourism Authority has a list with more than 40 more. VisitGreaterPalmSprings.com has a list with more than 30 hotels. There’s a Santa Barbara list, too. Some of these lists include detailed rate information, and all are subject to change as rooms fill. Meanwhile, Airbnb is teaming with the group 211LA to provide free emergency housing to many people who have been displaced and first responders.
The sudden L.A. diaspora has already filled many lodgings and pushed occupancy rates skyward. And in desert communities like Palm Springs and Joshua Tree, this was already a busy season. The result is a flood of reluctant travelers — people who are fortunate enough to afford to book hotels at short notice but would still rather be home.
“We couldn’t really go outside,” said Mike Muney, 33, of Mar Vista, explaining his family’s departure on Friday.
“We just feel so lucky. We know so many people who lost homes,” said his wife, Libby Muney, 35.
As they spoke, they stood with their son Nate, 1, and their yellow labrador, Winnie, near the entrance to the Marriott Laguna cliffs Resort in Dana Point. The sky above was a brilliant blue, empty of helicopters and ash. Inside the hotel, staffers had converted a conference room into a play area for children, with “Bluey” on a big screen and a Twister game laid out on the floor.
The hotel’s marketing director, Andrew Sutrisno, said this was supposed to be a slow weekend, with occupancy likely under 50%. But the fire-driven exodus basically filled the property’s 378 rooms for the weekend. Sutrisno estimated that most of the hotel’s guests are from Los Angeles. The hotel’s January rates typically start around $300.
“Wednesday night was the biggest jump,” Sutrisno said. “Until you see it in person — you see your hotel suddenly fill up — it’s hard to imagine.”
“This hotel has been amazing,” Mike Muney said later.
“Two people I know went to Palm Springs. Another friend is coming here,” said Libby Muney.
On Ocean Avenue in Laguna Beach, Ansgar Fremiel, 27, and Julia Fremiel, 32, and their children — Emely, 7; Liam, 3; and Hailey, 2 — may have looked like any other family ambling toward the beach on a Friday afternnon. But they were only in town, Ansgar said, because “we were evacuated from the Hollywood Hills,” about 60 miles to the north.
“We just got the most distanced we could make,” Ansgar Fremiel said. “With three kids, we aren’t that fast when it comes to getting in the car.”
The Fremiels, relieved by the subduing of the Sunset fire, were hoping to return home for the weekend. But many families will be staying away longer. As these emergency travelers make short-notice decisions on when to go, where to stay and when to return, hoteliers are juggling more variables than usual.
The hoteliers are also bound by state anti-gouging laws, which limit prices hikes to 10% beyond the rates that were in place before a local or state emergency was declared. Even if an emergency is in one county and a hotel is in another, that law may apply, officials at the California Hotel & Lodging Assn. said.
At the 120-room Pacific Edge Hotel, also in Laguna Beach, a desk clerk reported Friday that “we were at 18% occupancy on Tuesday. We’ve been at 100% the last two nights.” Guests who were displaced by fire, the clerk said, are generally paying 25% under usual rates, with resort fees and pet fees waived.
For Fairfax Buchanan Banks, 36, who lives near USC and West Adams, the decision to leave “came down to quality of air…. It was raining ash.”
And pets were a factor. Buchanan Banks has a dog and a 16-year-old male cat (named Dad) struggling with viral bronchitis. Her best friend had two dogs. Both pet owners liked the idea of clean air, open spaces. They had doubts about squatting indefinitely at a friend’s home — and, Buchanan Banks noted, “we’re lucky enough to have the means to relocate.”
They tried Joshua Tree and couldn’t find anything that fit their situation. But in nearby 29 Palms, they grabbed an Airbnb rental house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, washer, dryer and a fenced yard. On Thursday they laid plans.
On Friday they drove out, coping with pet accidents as they went. Still, Buchanan Banks said, “by the time we passed Redlands, I noticed that my sinuses and throat were clearing up.”
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