\n<\/p>\n
Last summer, Antonia Steinberg heard chatter on her walkie-talkie that would make any camp director shiver: Two kids hadn\u2019t shown up for the 10 p.m. \u201cput-to-bed\u201d curfew. Ms. Steinberg, then all of 22 and in her first summer as president of the camp, got into her car and drove in the darkness to search.<\/p>\n
At the camp, Buck\u2019s Rock in New Milford, Conn., sought out by generations of outside-the-box kids, put-to-bed is the only nonnegotiable scheduling requirement. At nearly all other times, campers are free to do what they want, when they want.<\/p>\n
When the campers were finally spotted, outside the actors\u2019 studio, one bolted toward the woods. Soon, the camper stopped running and, early the next morning, went home for a week to regroup.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes it feels impossible, the amount of things going on all at once,\u201d Ms. Steinberg said. \u201cI sometimes think this is an impossible amount to carry on my shoulders.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
She first came to Buck\u2019s Rock when she was 10, drawn by its arts resources and its Montessori approach, the same qualities that have attracted alumni like the actress Paz de la Huerta, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Ms. Steinberg has returned every summer since, aging from camper to counselor in training (C.I.T.) to counselor, and now, president. \u201cMy grandmother always joked that someday I would run this place,\u201d she said. That her grandmother is Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer and now busy philanthropist, helps to explain how a casual comment could turn out to be prophetic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ms. Steinberg has been grappling her whole life with the implications \u2014 and obligations \u2014 of her family\u2019s celebrity and wealth. She is strikingly direct when discussing her family\u2019s buying power. \u201cIt\u2019s the truth,\u201d she said. \u201cIt would be weird if I lied about it, and it would be a shame not to use it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
And so, two years ago, with the camp in crisis, she decided to rescue her childhood refuge and transform it into a nonprofit. Forty-three percent of campers are now on partial or full scholarships, the camp said, so they might have the chance to experience summer as Ms. Steinberg always had.<\/p>\n
In 1941, Dalton, the private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was then all-girls, bought land in New Milford. The property was intended as a safe haven for its students to continue their education in case German bombs came to New York.<\/p>\n
Within a couple of years, though, the site passed to the directorship of Ilse and Ernst Bulova, two refugees from Hitler\u2019s Third Reich. The married couple were teachers who had fled their native Austria because of their political beliefs (socialist) and educational philosophy (Montessori).<\/p>\n
They turned the property into a summer camp, but one that would be radically different from the \u201cmilitary style\u201d summer camps they observed on their tour of the American Northeast. They ran Buck\u2019s Rock camp for the next 32 years, putting campers to work growing vegetables, taking care of animals and helping to prepare meals.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was so unhappy in my childhood and so happy there,\u201d said the writer Molly Jong-Fast, who attended Buck\u2019s Rock in the 1990s. Her mother, the novelist Erica Jong, had also attended, back when it was a \u201csocialist work camp,\u201d Ms. Jong-Fast said. By the time Ms. Jong-Fast was a camper, the emphasis was on the arts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI loved to draw, I loved to do batik, I wrote for the newspaper,\u201d she said. \u201cYou could do art in a low-key way. You didn\u2019t have to be Picasso.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The novelist Lionel Shriver was a counselor at Buck\u2019s Rock for three summers in the early 1980s and remembers it affectionately.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not a babysitting service. It had serious aspirations,\u201d she said. \u201cI taught at another camp, too. It was basically crayons and crepe paper, whereas Buck\u2019s Rock took visual arts seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
The day before camp opened this summer, counselors and C.I.T.s ran through their final tasks, checking the ragtag collection of cabins.<\/p>\n
Ms. Steinberg sat outside the wood shop, her favorite place in camp to sit. \u201cThis was my haven,\u201d she said, over the buzz of saws.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
With the curly brown hair and watchful, wide-set eyes of the von Furstenberg women, Ms. Steinberg, now 23, spoke deliberately, as she greeted counselors and heads of shop as they passed by. They are all her employees now, but many have known her since she was 10.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard because of my age to have a sense of authority, to develop it within myself, and for other people to see it and respect it,\u201d Ms. Steinberg said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
She was born and raised mostly in Los Angeles. Her mother, Tatiana von Furstenberg, is a filmmaker, and her father, Russell Steinberg, is a performance artist.<\/p>\n
She attended more than nine schools, including a small Montessori program in the San Fernando Valley and a boarding school in England. She finished high school by collecting credits at Los Angeles Community College.<\/p>\n
But, from age 10, she went to New Milford every summer. \u201cThe one thing that was consistent was Buck\u2019s Rock,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Campers are free to walk into any \u201cshop\u201d at any point in any day, except during meals, trying out glassblowing, metal welding, ceramics, batik, painting, woodwork, music, dance, performance, creative writing, photography and even radio broadcasting. <\/p>\n
During her first summer as a camper, Ms. Steinberg made a pair of wooden clogs for her mother (her mother still has them). Over the years, she said, she \u201caccidentally assembled a portfolio,\u201d which she used in her application to Rhode Island School of Design, from which she graduated in 2022.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
While Ms. Steinberg was still in college, the previous owner of Buck\u2019s Rock, Noah Salzman, contacted her mother to see if a sale might be of interest to them. It was 2020, and the coronavirus pandemic was devastating the camp industry. For the first time in its long history, Buck\u2019s Rock did not open for the summer. Mr. Salzman, an educator in San Francisco, whose tenure as owner had been rocky, recognized that the camp might shut down permanently, he said.<\/p>\n
Ms. Steinberg recalled that when her mother first heard Mr. Salzman\u2019s proposal, she thought that running a camp sounded like a \u201cnightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew the enormity of the undertaking,\u201d Tatiana von Furstenberg said. \u201cAs her mother, I have had to be there as she\u2019s been completely overwhelmed at times. When it started, she had had only 20 years on this earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Since taking over, Ms. Steinberg\u2019s list of problems has included: a lightning storm that fried the camp\u2019s P.A. system; a camp chef who quit at the end of a lunch shift, blocked her number, and left her without anyone to cook dinner that night for roughly 450; the various black bears that wander by; the inevitable need to send certain campers \u2014 and counselors \u2014 packing.<\/p>\n
But when Diane von Furstenberg heard about the potential acquisition of Buck\u2019s Rock, she encouraged her granddaughter, invoking a family tenet: \u201cThere are no coincidences.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ms. Steinberg may not have instantly grasped all that would be required, but the timing of Mr. Salzman\u2019s call was auspicious. She\u2019d recently done a training program offered by the Gates Foundation called Next Gen, aimed at educating young, up-and-coming philanthropists. She finished the program before she turned 21, the age at which she would be eligible to join the board of the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation (her stepgrandfather is Barry Diller).<\/p>\n
Ms. Steinberg knows how all of this might sound: privileged young person gets handed a camp. \u201cI\u2019m very much aware of my position,\u201d she said, \u201cand I definitely feel a big sense of responsibility given my circumstances \u2014 and my experiences at Buck\u2019s Rock.\u201d She added that she didn\u2019t think she would have done something so \u201ccrazy if I wasn\u2019t some combination of na\u00efve and confident.\u201d<\/p>\n
On opening day of camp this summer, Ms. Steinberg walked the grounds with a clipboard, as campers and their parents waited to check in. They clutched portable fans, toiletries and assorted musical instruments, and the vibe was low-key and democratic, even as Ethan Hawke was spotted by the lice-check station.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Jacob Abramovich, 13, from the Upper West Side, was back for his third summer. \u201cI love sculpture, metalwork, welding, blacksmithing \u2014 anything with metal,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Heather Bancroft, a former Buck\u2019s Rock camper, arrived from New Jersey to drop her two teenage children off. She could still remember Ernst Bulova in his 90s, walking through the camp, picking up garbage. \u201cWe were just teenagers, but we could understand this was a unique experience,\u201d she said. \u201cOn the car ride up I said to my kids, \u2018Do whatever you want to do this summer.\u2019 Their lives are so regimented. To have the ability to decide how to spend your day, to have that freedom \u2014 that\u2019s the magic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Bancroft walked her daughter to her cabin, where her bunk mates\u2019 names adorned the door. In choosing bunks, campers specify which gender they identify as.<\/p>\n
Back near check-in, a gaggle of laughing girls arrived together for their first summer at Buck\u2019s Rock. They are students at Success Academy in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, and they each had won a scholarship to camp by writing about why they wanted to come. One girl, 12, said she had written about how, as a city kid, \u201cI have many fears about nature, so I thought that camp could be a good opportunity to get rid of those.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a psychological strategy Diane von Furstenberg could appreciate: Her own mother locked her in a closet to help her overcome her fear of the dark, she wrote in her memoir, \u201cThe Woman I Wanted to Be.\u201d Her mother, Lily Nahmias, operated by the credo that \u201cfear is not an option.\u201d She survived Auschwitz at almost exactly the same age her great-granddaughter is now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThis place is truly too special not to share,\u201d Ms. Steinberg said. \u201cExclusivity is the antithesis of Buck\u2019s Rock. And so for the camp to be prohibitively expensive and that being why it\u2019s exclusive \u2014 it just felt wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
She hired Alex Huber-Weiss, 32, another former camper, as director of development, and brought back Scott Kraiterman, 40, a former camper and now a psychologist at Dalton, as camp director. Mr. Kraiterman had been Ms. Steinberg\u2019s counselor. \u201cThe inmates are running the asylum,\u201d Ms. Huber-Weiss said with a laugh. If parents seem wary of Ms. Steinberg\u2019s age, she directs them to Mr. Kraiterman.<\/p>\n
When the camp reopened in 2022 \u2014 it was closed in 2021 \u2014 mice had taken over the main theater and destroyed the expensive stage lights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But Ms. Steinberg had her new nonprofit infrastructure in place: a tiered tuition system, essentially \u201cpay what you can,\u201d to help remove barriers to access while still operating a sustainable business.<\/p>\n
She said the camp cost just under $3 million a year to run. Tuition for both sessions (an eight-week stay) is $14,000, but many campers come on partial or full scholarships. Buck\u2019s Rock now must secure donations and corporate partnerships to continue on as Ms. Steinberg intends. In the sewing shop, there are bolts of DVF jersey fabric donated by her grandmother.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Diller-von Furstenberg foundation paid for the acquisition of the camp and also provided one year of funding. Buck\u2019s Rock is currently operating at a deficit. Yet because of tuition proceeds, the family foundation and fund-raising, which brought in more than $500,000 in 2022, Ms. Steinberg said, \u201ceven if we operated in deficit for the next few years, we would still be all right.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, she also raised the salaries of the counselors, to cast a wider net of who would be able to work there. One of those who joined as a guidance counselor during Ms. Steinberg\u2019s first summer is Kellsie Mensah, 19. She said that she had been struck by the mental health challenges her campers faced. \u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting them to have so much anxiety,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Those experiences may sound familiar, what the surgeon general has called \u201cthe defining public health crisis of our time\u201d: Among American children aged 10 to 19, rates of self-harm and suicide have soared in the last decade. Summer camps can pose special challenges for children<\/a> who are not accustomed to being away from home, and away from their phones. (At Buck\u2019s Rock, phones are taken away entirely for the first week, and then allowed for one hour each day.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On a fiercely hot, humid day at the beginning of the second session, Ms. Steinberg walked down the long road that runs through the center of camp, from the dining hall down to the field where the vegetable garden was in full bloom. Here, on a wooden platform, campers were rehearsing for the summer\u2019s big musical, \u201cSpamalot.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTake a deep breath in and out, think about who you are and where you are, and get in touch with your internal ridiculousness,\u201d Collins Hilton told his cast. Mr. Hilton, another former Buck\u2019s Rock camper, is the head of drama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The star of the show was Moxie Ewen, a 15-year-old from Los Angeles, and a fourth-generation Buck\u2019s Rocker. In lace-up burgundy combat boots, she was rehearsing, with a serviceable British accent, her King Arthur, although her long blond tresses were more suggestive of Guinevere. \u201cI command you in the name of the Knights of Camelot to open the doors of this sacred castle to which God himself has guided us!\u201d King Arthur said, addressing her French peons. \u201cI burst my pimples at you!\u201d one of them shot back.<\/p>\n The camp has a long list of shows every summer, including two musicals, a dance concert and sketch comedy nights. <\/strong>During her first summer at camp, Ms. Steinberg decided to perform at the Rock Caf\u00e9, where campers showcase the music they have written. \u201cI wrote a song about a breakup, about this girl who is kicking this guy out of her house and he just has to cope,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe partially it was to do with my parents, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Steinberg\u2019s parents broke up a few months later.<\/p>\n As Ms. Steinberg headed back up the road to resume her responsibilities, the \u201cSpamalot\u201d actors were still immersed in their scene. Their show will be performed on the very last night of the session, after dark, the better to display the almost Broadway-caliber lighting design. After the actors have taken their final bows, a different kind of drama will ensue: the epic goodbyes, parents waiting in the wings, just before the drive home.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n