Gloria's Granddaughter Marries

Aurora Stokowski would be Anderson's step-niece. I am sure Gloria, Anderson & Benjamin were there, I hope.

---

Vows

Aurora Stokowski and Anthony Mazzei


MANHATTAN, MAY 26 Aurora Stokowski prepares for her marriage to Anthony Mazzei.
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

ANTHONY MAZZEI didn’t begin his romance with Aurora Stokowski by asking her on a date. They were on the carousel at Bryant Park when, out of the blue, he confessed that he loved her — risking not only his heart, but also the business it had taken them more than a year to build.

“I said, ‘There’s not really any better place for me to tell you this, but I’m in love with you,’ ” said Mr. Mazzei, who with Ms. Stokowski founded Fair Folks & a Goat, a coffee shop with a subscription business model that sees nurturing an artistic and design community as essential as the espresso.


The couple’s first dance as newlyweds.
Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
Art and creativity in general were shared passions long before any passion between them emerged.

Graceful and slender, Ms. Stokowski, now 29, studied art at Smith College after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science. A granddaughter of Gloria Vanderbilt, whom she calls “a great role model,” and the conductor Leopold Stokowski, she was born in Saugerties, N.Y., and grew up in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Washington State before settling in New York. Her father, Stan Stokowski, owns a landscaping service in the Hamptons. Her mother, Ivy Strick, works in international arbitration as a paralegal in New York.

Ms. Stokowski worked for five years at the Museum of Modern Art, most of that time as an assistant buyer, but said she felt “antsy to do something more exciting.”

Mr. Mazzei, now 31, was raised in a Philadelphia suburb and Florida and graduated from Vanderbilt. He moved to New York to become a managing partner at National Financial Network, an investment and financial advisory firm (his father, Anthony T. Mazzei Sr., is the chief executive).

Over the years, the younger Mr. Mazzei formed a picture in his head of an ideal place to hang out but said he “just couldn’t find it.” He began dreaming of opening a cafe in which patrons could pay a monthly fee for unlimited coffee in an artsy milieu.

“Investors, clients, friends told me I was crazy,” he said.

Yet one friend knew a woman who might be good to talk with about the idea. She gave him Ms. Stokowski’s e-mail address.

He contacted her, saying that he was looking for someone with an artistic sensibility to help start a business. Amanda Cynkin, a close friend of hers, said that Ms. Stokowski had confided to her shortly before that she had dreamed of meeting a man who was “passionate, interested and interesting: basically, Anthony.”

They met for the first time in September 2009 at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village. Mr. Mazzei said he thought Ms. Stokowski was “a mega babe.” She said she felt a premonition that, “if this works out the way I think it could, it could change my life.”

He noticed that within minutes, she began using the word “we” when talking about the business. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I have a partner,’ ” he said.

Joseph Doran, one of Mr. Mazzei’s best friends, said the two “just clicked.”

In November 2009, they opened a prototype of their cafe in Mr. Mazzei’s Upper East Side apartment. He moved out, and they turned the place, Ms. Stokowski said, into a “concept shop, gallery and event space,” where guests would be offered tea or wine.

According to a description of it on the Apartment Therapy Web site: “It’s the kind of place where art doesn’t merely hang on the walls, but fills the entire space. Everything is available for purchase, including items in the fashion closet, the furniture people sit on, and various other objects.”

In early 2010 they opened a Fair Folks & a Goat cafe in New Orleans (the name, they say, comes from a painting with a mythological theme; Ms. Stokowski added in an e-mail, “It also happened to have great Googleability.”)

Though they grew close managing their operations, both were in other relationships, and neither dared to consider romantic feelings for the other, lest it jeopardize the project. “It created a distance of respect between us,” he said. “And allowed us to get to know each other in a different way.”

Fair Folks & a Goat soon attracted notice. With the business picking up, Mr. Mazzei, who continued to work at the National Financial Network and is now a senior vice president, was often in New Orleans, with Ms. Stokowski in New York. He began to feel what he called “a sweet melancholy” — glad about their success, but sadness at his being apart from her. “I realized that what was pushing the business idea forward was wanting to spend time with Aurora,” he said.

By fall 2010, their other relationships had ended. On a rare day when both were in New York, they went for a walk in Central Park, not unusual for one of their planning sessions. They meandered down to Bryant Park, where he suggested a ride on the carousel. There he asked her if their relationship could be more than professional. “I thought, If she goes for this, I’ve got another question coming soon,” he said.

She said that while she had long been fond of him, she found his declaration shocking. While she added that she was “really flattered, and I giggled a lot,” she also told him that she was “going to need some time to think about this.”

About a week later, when they next met, she said, she told him she had feelings for him, too, but for the sake of their employees and investors, they had to proceed with caution. For about nine months, they kept their relationship secret, even going so far as to deny it to anyone who would ask. They also continued working in different cities most of the time.

“It was tough, but it made us stronger,” Ms. Stokowski said.

Last spring, after meeting again at the Cornelia Street Cafe, he suggested that they take another ride on the Bryant Park carousel. There he presented her with an engagement ring, the same one his father had given his mother, Margaret M. Mazzei.

The couple both said that their decision to marry was based on what they had accomplished by sharing a vision. “We can make our lives into something really interesting and amazing,” Ms. Stokowski said. Mr. Mazzei said he became so enamored with her that she “smacked my world upside down and backwards.”

Once engaged, they began spreading the news. They closed the New Orleans Fair Folks, and in the fall they plan to open a new coffeehouse in Greenwich Village so they can live and work in the same city.

They were married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on May 26 by the Rev. Robert J. Bubel. Ms. Stokowski wore a silky Vera Wang dress. The night before, she had fashioned a long white veil and the comb that held her hair back into a single piece.

At the reception at the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street, Mr. Mazzei, in a black suit, sang “I love you,” into his bride’s ear as he twirled her around the dance floor, no longer in need of a carousel.