You Can Go Home Again

So here we are.

So happy to be back here, meaning here on this platform and here in NYC. Last night, we had a magazine issue release in NYC at the Il Bisonte store on Bleecker St, where the nicest group of people came out in the cold to celebrate the launch of our YOLO Journal Fall/Winter print issue. We gave out magazines, Il Bisonte generously gave out some very chic wallets, and Il Buco and Franciacorta provided the lovely aperitivo. Being in that room with new friends, and so many people I love, felt really good.

Our Yolo Journal launch at Il Bisonte, and my friend Adam put the wallet to use the next morning

It’s officially four months since we moved out of the city, and it has been an interesting process. Building up to our move, we couldn’t wait to get out of our apartment. After many storms and flooded basement situations over the years—a tree even fell on our car—we were ready to move on. Also, we were just sick of the city, the commute to Brooklyn, how impossible it is to be spontaneous—especially at dinner hour. My friends were so annoyed with how much I talked about how great everything was everywhere else but here. Of course I was going to miss my friends, family (yes, my brother and his family on Long Island), and my wonderful YOLO team, but it was time to finally move on after 25+ years of living in the city. We came back several times in October, then over Thanksgiving and this week, each time staying in a hotel in very different neighborhoods. Hotel Fouquet’s and the Greenwich in Tribeca, the Aman and the Peninsula in Midtown, the Lowell on the Upper East Side, and I just checked out of Nine Orchard on the Lower East Side this morning. I made a point of walking as much as possible in all of these neighborhoods, seeing the city in a very different way. Yesterday, I found myself having a melancholy moment, and an epiphany—I had fallen in love with the city again. And far faster than I ever imagined.

A similar thing happened with Substack. Yes, I loved a lot about the platform, but after three years, I found that its structure wasn’t fitting our content/purpose. Articles were hard to find, you couldn’t bundle subscriptions to our print/digital—so we made the move to our website. But pretty quickly, I realized that I missed our community—and having a direct dialogue with you! Four months in, I started talking to our friends at Substack, figuring out the best way to do both the site and Substack, and how to be very clear about their differences. Last night, multiple guests told me that they were so happy to see us back on Substack—which was so nice to hear, especially from our IRL community. We can’t wait to start doing more here on Club Yolo—very different from what we do on our site, and from what we did before, bringing together our friends who are experts in the worlds of style/food/travel to share their insights… and all of our other hopes and dreams.

Thank you for being here, for being patient with a major flip-flopper… and let me know if you have any intel on a great NYC pied-a-terre. I’m looking.

xx Yolanda