She bid at Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS auctions for walk-on parts in shows like “The Will Rogers Follies,” “Carousel” and “Hello, Dolly!” and struck up a friendship with the jewelry designer Larry Vrba after buying Carol Channing’s necklace from “Dolly!” She said Vrba had made the necklace she was wearing, the one she had expected to be noticed. Not far away are her carnival chalkware - Snow Whites, Charlie McCarthys and Donald Ducks - and her carousel artifacts.Īnd there is her collection of Broadway theatrical memorabilia. “Isn’t that amazing? And I’m saying, ‘Who would do this? Who would desecrate this?’ But that’s what everybody did back in the 60s.”

“I pulled it off, pulled it all off, and uncovered the original door frames with the wooden pegs,” she said. Vinyl, linoleum and “1960s molding” were everywhere. When she saw it on the second date, the floors had wall-to-wall carpeting. What the visitors and the photographers saw was an ugly duckling that she had transformed. She first encountered it on a second date that left her thinking: “I’ve met the man of my dreams who has the house of my dreams.’”įor decades she worked to make the house a destination, charging for tours of the first floor, the cemetery and the garden - and renting them out for photo shoots. There had been things to notice before the necklace, like the cemetery in the backyard. “Rikers Island used to be part of the farm,” she said. It was built by Abraham Riker, a Dutch settler whose family name haunts the neighborhood and the city’s consciousness: The road to the city’s troubled Rikers Island jail complex is about 1,500 feet from Smith’s back door. This was an hour into a visit to the oldest house in New York City that is still a private home - hers, the Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead, a 17th-century farmhouse in East Elmhurst, Queens.

Wind and weather wall art