Elizabeth Fasolino, 61, The Star’s arts editor for nearly two years, died of a heart attack on Nov. 5 in Gulfport, Fla., eight months after being diagnosed with a glioblastoma, for which she was being treated.
Ms. Fasolino left Sag Harbor eight years ago for Colorado Springs. Although she made a home in the mountains there for a little over five years before moving to Florida in early 2020, her heart remained in New York — Manhattan and Wallkill, where she grew up, and here on the East End, where, “for more than a decade, she cut a stylish and singular swath in her L.V.I.S. finery, zipping from one art opening or reading or benefit or beach picnic or thrift store or yard sale to the next,” recalled her friend and former partner, Adam Green, a writer for Vogue and The New Yorker.
“She was beautiful, elegant, smart, and funny in an offbeat way, and at the same time down to earth and lacking in pretense, with a gift for talking to pretty much anyone,” he wrote. “She read voraciously and could hold forth on her wide-ranging passions, from art history and interior design to the horrors of war and the lives of the people who had lived through them. She was the only person I knew who kept extra copies of Vera Brittain’s World War I memoir ‘Testament of Youth’ to give to friends and name-dropped the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and the gardening writer and Hungarian baroness-by-marriage Eleanor Perenyi as if they were current A-list celebrities.”
Though she “could be mercurial, with a flair for melodrama and a sharp tongue,” Mr. Green wrote, Ms. Fasolino had a “gift for kindness, fun, and generosity, for entertaining and making moments, for loving without reservation.”
She was born at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan on June 7, 1961. Her father, Matthew Fasolino, ran a family real estate business and her mother, the former Patricia O’Neil, was a social worker. The family (later joined by her sisters Brigit and Margaret) divided its time between a New York City apartment and Breezy Hill Farm, in Wallkill, which had been in her mother’s family for several generations.
She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school on the Upper East Side. The writer Christina Haag, who was a class ahead of her, remembered her in an email as “both studious and wild” and “lit from within by intense curiosity . . . outwardly expressive and in possession of a deep interior life, as if there was a secret that she might or might not share with you.”
When she was 11, she suffered the defining loss of her life when her mother, with whom she was fiercely close, was hit by a car while crossing Madison Avenue at 86th Street on her way home from grocery shopping. She was in a coma for over a month before she died.
Her father moved with his daughters to the farm in Wallkill and enrolled them in the New Paltz schools, where the home economics class gave Ms. Fasolino the cooking and sewing skills that would serve her throughout her life. “She would often spend all day cooking elaborate Italian meals before decking herself out in ensembles culled from her mother’s closet and serving as hostess for her father’s sprawling dinner parties,” Mr. Green wrote.
Following a series of business reversals, her father lost the family farm, and, at 13, Ms. Fasolino began working as a maid at a hotel on Lake Minnewaska and, later, as a waitress at the Mohonk Mountain House. Finances prevented her from attending Williams College, to which she’d been admitted, and forced her to withdraw from Skidmore after a few semesters. In 1992, at age 30, she finally got her B.A. in art history from the State University at New Paltz, where she was also a member of the women’s track team. She went on to receive a master’s degree in journalism from New York University in 1995.
She married Eric Hobday, whom she met when they were both waiting tables in Brooklyn, in April 1982. They divorced in 1986. She later married Eric Horsbol, with whom she discovered a love of foreign travel. They separated in 1997 and divorced in 2003. In 1997, she met Adam Green on the message boards of a now-defunct online community called Echo after striking up a conversation about pentimentos on the sides of buildings in Times Square.
After several years running a catering business, selling real estate, and working as a secretary, Ms. Fasolino landed at HBO, where she worked as a documentary film publicist. She left in 2004 and went on to handle public relations for N.Y.U. Law School, before joining The Star’s staff in January 2007.
Ms. Fasolino and Mr. Green lived on West 17th Street, but he missed the East End, where he had spent summers at his family’s house in East Hampton. In the summer of 2002, his parents rented a house in Water Mill, where he and Ms. Fasolino spent weekends, “and she, too, fell in love with it out here,” he wrote. They stayed on to rent the house in the off-season, when it was emptied of all furniture. Ms. Fasolino drove east from the city and in one afternoon furnished it, complete with artwork, all bought from the Ladies Village Improvement Society furniture barn. She would do this again and again as the couple moved from one rented place to another between 2002 and 2014 — living in Sag Harbor, Springs, Northwest Woods, East Hampton Village, and then back in Sag Harbor. “Elizabeth used her sprezzatura eye for design, gift for stretching a buck, fearlessness with power tools, and those home ec sewing skillsto somehow make each place look fabulous and feel like home,” Mr. Green recalled.
Ms. Fasolino found her greatest career satisfaction, and an outlet for her literary and people skills, during her tenure as The Star’s arts editor. “On her first day on the job, she called me in a panic because she’d been assigned a piece about that winter’s unseasonably warm weather that she needed to turn in by noon. She made the deadline and went on to write other general features — including a wry and affectionate (and secretly autobiographical) piece about the annual panic that set in among devoted patrons of the L.V.I.S. thrift store when it shut down for a month every February” before becoming the paper’s arts editor.
For the next year and a half, she threw herself into the job with everything she had, waking up at 6 on Sunday mornings to write the following week’s “Art Scene” column. She put thousands of miles on her gold 1998 Mercedes wagon, crisscrossing the towns to interview artists, artisans, writers, gallerists, actors, entrepreneurs, chefs, musicians, and surfers. She was “an instantly recognizable figure at gallery openings and post-opening dinners in her smashing, almost-over-the-top outfits, brandishing a digital camera and a reporter’s notebook,” Mr. Green recalled.
In addition to her sisters, Brigit Vucic of Buffalo and Margaret Gullickson of Colorado Springs, her nephews Joseph Vucic and Sam Vucic, and Finn Gullickson and Leo Gullickson, survive.
Ms. Fasolino was cremated. Some of her ashes will be buried next to her mother in a family plot at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Gardiner, N.Y., at noon on Saturday, followed by a small memorial at 2:30 at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz. A South Fork memorial is being planned for the near future. The rest of her ashes will be buried under a tree on Mr. Green’s property, next to the ashes of Quincy, the dog they had together.
--
Adapted From an Essay by Adam Green
