Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times Editta Sherman inside her Carnegie Hall Towers studio in 2010.Someone had gotten a large black hat made of flowers and displayed it with a jaunty tilt - just the way Editta Sherman wore hers â€" next to the coffin, as if to set a “Let’s Party!†tone for the wake and funeral of Ms. Sherman, the 101-year-old portrait photographer who was known as the Duchess of Carnegie Hall.
Ms. Sherman became a grande dame of the Carnegie Hall Towers, a unique set of studio living spaces above the concert hall, and of the extended family of quirky, talented artists living and working there.
The crowd of friends and relatives at the service, at St. Malachy’s Church, known as the Actors’ Chapel, on West 49th Street on Tuesday, was as an artsy group. One man was dressed as a gentleman cowboy; another had angel wings strapped to his dark business suit. Everyone was laughing and hugging and backslapping.
Ms. Sherman’s closed coffin was flanked with photographs of her doing her two favorite things: taking pictures and posing for photos.
This duchess was hardly demure. She was a flamboyant dresser who left strict instructions that she look good, even in death, which meant being dressed in the vintage white wedding dress she had bought recently, just for kicks.
Ms. Sherman moved into her rent-regulated, 12th-floor studio in 1949 and raised five children there and also photographed some of the most famous people in the world, including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman and Marlene Dietrich.
“In that studio, she was right in the middle of a beehive of activity on top of Carnegie Hall,†said Josef Astor, 52, a photographer and fellow tenant in the building who made the documentary “Lost Bohemia†about the tenants of the studios.
“Yes, she was the duchess of Carnegie Hall, but she also made a great lentil soup,†he said, adding that she cooked her famous soups on a stove in her photography darkroom.
After 61 years in Suite 1208, Ms. Sherman moved in 2010 into an apartment on West 59th Street, displaced, along with the other tenants, by a renovation plan to build new studios and offices at the location.
Next to her coffin was a prototype for a large book of her portraits, which her friends and family plan on publishing in coming months. The images varied from Carl Sandburg to a local homeless man.
In a eulogy, Ms. Sherman’s son, Kenneth Sherman, 77, a Lutheran pastor, said his mother loved “life in all its forms.†Afterward, he told of how he took her to a Christmas party last year at the White House, hoping to introduce her to the president, but she wound up introducing him.
“She got in the room, and immediately said, ‘I’m going to meet him,’ and at 100 years old, she made a beeline straight through the crowd toward the president,†Mr. Sherman recalled. “No one was going to stop her.â€
When the coffin was finally placed into a waiting hearse, someone set the large flower-woven hat temporarily on a street trash can nearby. Some passers-by began taking snapshots of this stylishly topped trash can. Everyone agreed: the duchess would have found it hilarious.
