Cosmofurs
Luxury Furrier Opens Its First American Retail Store on Boston’s Newbury Street

When CosmoFurs opened in mid-December at 224 Newbury St. in Boston, John Pavlou knew the location would soon become a hot spot. The family-owned company has been in the wholesale business for the past 50 years but has ventured into retail over the last five, offering every fur imaginable from mink and chinchilla to fox and raccoon.

“Our main factory is in Greece and we buy our designs from Italy,” said John Pavlou, director of CosmoFurs. “We have three retail stores overseas in Greece, Tunisia and Serbia but this is the first location in the United States.”
Pavlou knew the transition from wholesale to retail may be a difficult one but he was prepared for the challenge.
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Calvin Ayre
With An Entrepreneurial Roll of the Dice, Calvin Ayre Became a Self-Made Billionaire

What started out 10 years ago as a community for those who enjoyed the thrill of online gambling, has emerged into a billion-dollar global entertainment empire. Calvin Ayre, founder of Bodog.com Entertainment, was featured last year on the cover of Forbes magazine’s best-selling “Billionaires” issue. He was also named one of People magazine’s “Hottest Bachelors,” making him the first individual to be featured in both magazines the same year.
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Federal Hill
The Taste of Culture

You can’t always get what you want, the song says. But on Federal Hill, you can pretty much always get what you want to eat. And then some.
Long an Italian stronghold in the country’s smallest state, Federal Hill in Providence, R.I., still maintains a powerful ethnic charm, largely Italian but interwoven with a unique blend of other cultures that have called this fabled area home in more recent years.

Though other businesses do exist here, food is far and away still king, with dozens of restaurants on or around Atwells Avenue, the main drag that cuts through The Hill, as it’s locally known. Old and new mix well, from the legendary Old Canteen on one end of The Hill with its distinctive old world Italian flavor to Don Jose’s Tequila on the other, offering Mexican fare.
The food does draw the people, without question, says Carmela Natale, owner of Spezia Foodsmiths, a natural and organic food market/café on The Hill.

“That’s part of the charm of The Hill, always being associated with food,” she says. “And it’s definitely a tourist attraction, people come to Providence and ask for the Italian section. This is it.”
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Don CeSar Beach Resort

Sitting pretty in pink on the pearly sands of the Gulf of Mexico, the grand Don CeSar Beach Resort, a Loews Hotel, gathers in guests from near and far with its fetching location, amenities and history. This towering Sleeping Beauty castle, built in 1928, can be seen from miles away and has served as a navigational landmark for ships for many a year.  Florida’s legendary Pink Palace, famed as the playground of America’s rich, also has a background as a military convalescent center and of mysterious hauntings. With its dramatic Mediterranean and Moorish architecture and superb cuisine, The Don, as it came to be called, attracted to its premises Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Al Capone and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentioned the hotel in several of his popular novels.
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The Renaissance Providence Hotel
New Luxury Hotel marks continued renaissance in Providence

For the past 10 or so years, Providence has been known as a renaissance city, due to its dramatic turnaround from a rundown, hard-scrabble city to a destination point, home to phenomenal restaurants, a world-renowned art scene and some of the finest shopping in New England.

It is a renaissance that borders on magical, considering what the city had been. Now add to that magic a magnificent Neo-Classical building that was begun in 1928, deemed so architecturally superb it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1933 — and never saw completion, nor the light of day as what it had been intended to be: A Masonic temple.
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