On November 14, 1996, there was an article buried deep inside the Home section of the New York Times that was so crammed with cultural import it made your head spin. The story was about Jane Amsterdam, the onetime media Pooh-Bah who edited both Manhattan, inc. and the New York Post in the 1980s. She’s left her fast-paced media life and has moved to the Finch Farm estate in North Salem, N.Y.
Amsterdam now devotes much of her time to the amateur sport of driving horse-drawn carriages. She owns five horses, one named Bradlee for the former executive editor of the Washington Post. The carriages cost up to $ 20, 000 apiece; one of them was built by an Amish maker. Amsterdam recently flew to Toronto to purchase lamps to go with her turn-of-the-century Stanhope rig, but succeeded only in procuring a 19th-century horse collar on the trip. Her husband, Jonathan Z. Larsen, is independently wealthy; though he edited the Village Voice from 1989 to 1994, he now devotes himself to environmental and charitable causes.
