Bond No. 9 - Astor Place
[Bond034100]

Bond No. 9 - Astor Place

Back in the day, when Downtown was Uptown, nowhere in New York was grander than Astor Place—the enclave stretching between Broadway and Third Avenue, and floating between 14th and Houston Streets. Here, where much of the land was owned by the early 19th century fur-trading philanthropist John Jacob Astor, were situated the city’s greatest theaters, a row of colonnaded Greek Revival townhouses to rival Regent Park’s in London, the hallowed neo-Romanesque Great Hall of Cooper Union, the Renaisance-Revival Astor Library (now the Public Theater), and the neo-Renaissance shopping emporium John Wanamaker.

Bond No. 9 decided it was time for a namesake eau de parfum. Hence Astor Place, the scent, an intoxicatingly fresh spring floral that starts out with a bold and unapologetically seductive freesia-poppy-violet leaf composition, and then simmers down into the smooth, steady notes of teakwood and musk. It’s contemporary Downtown all right, with a lot of grace.

The surface design of the Astor Place flacon echoes the angles and cubes of the Rosenthal sculpture, but renders them in a range of triangles displaying the richest array of colours ever seen in the Bond No. 9 bottle repertory. These triangles also recall Astor Place’s lampposts, curbs, and even cracks in the pavement which are lovingly decorated with mosaic tile shards by local denizens. Art abounds on Astor Place—and now it’s in liquid form too.