New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

Lakewood's location close to the Atlantic Ocean via the Metedeconk River sparked an early rise in enterprise in the vicinity. Some of the earliest businesses in Lakewood included a lumber mill, bog iron mining operations, and a blast iron furnace. During the latter half of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, Lakewood served as one of the premier winter resorts in the United States. The hotel industry in Lakewood was comprised of several elaborate architectural masterpieces, some of which were believed to be the grandest in the world at the time. Lakewood's reputation as a "winter sanitarium" attracted the rich and famous from far and wide. Lakewood is an in-depth pictorial history of the metamorphosis from sleepy mill town, to spectacular resort and entertainment haven, to a bustling industrial center. Lakewood is a journey to places that have disappeared and an introduction to residents and visitors who have long gone. John D. Rockefeller, whose estate later became Ocean County Park, and George Jay Gould, who resided at a two hundred-acre estate called Georgian Court, are just two of the prominent townspeople of Lakewood. The heroism of firefighters during the 1967 Laurel in the Pines fire, Jimmy Foxx and the 1934 Philadelphia Athletics in action at Princeton Avenue, and a look back at the early days of the annual Ocean County Fair give the reader an awe-inspiring view of Lakewood's past.

"In 1957, Mary Alice McDonnell was a rebellious teenager in love with a rich Yankee boy, Michael Harrison, who had just moved to her small Virginia mountain town - much to the chagrin of her strict God-fearing mother, Lavinia. By 2004, Mary Alice has become a sixty-three-year-old spinster biology teacher who hasn't spoken to her mother in over forty years." "When Lavinia dies, Mary Alice's graduate-student niece, Claire, inherits the family house and moves to Virginia, bringing along a deep curiosity about her family's dark past, as well as news of the long-lost Michael Harrison."--BOOK JACKET.