Peter Kaplan, ex-NY Observer editor, dies

Peter W. Kaplan, the former New York Observer editor who cast a sardonic lens on Manhattan's ruling-class while still evincing a romantic's view of the city, has died. He was 59.

Kaplan died Friday in Manhattan, his brother James said. The cause was cancer.

Kaplan's wry and quixotic take on New York was ever-present in the pages of the Observer, the salmon-colored broadsheet for which he was best known.

As its longest-serving editor, from the 1990s and into the next decade, he crafted its clever tone, an intelligent and muckraking style that became irritatingly familiar to Manhattan's elite -- whom he saw as both his subject and reader.

They included real estate billionaires, municipal pols, old-money socialites, restaurateurs, movie stars, investment bankers and, perhaps most critically, the knot of editors, producers and publishers who sat at the helm of some of the most powerful media organizations in the country.

In Kaplan's eyes, they all congregated regularly at the same bars and restaurants.

"You could follow them week-by-week like characters in a 19th-century novel published in weekly installments, showing up, disappearing for a few weeks, returning much changed with a new wife or a business triumph or a nice embezzlement," he had written in the foreword to "The Kingdom of New York," a compendium of Observer articles published in 2009.

Kaplan saw the Observer as a necessary alternative to The New York Times' dominance, and it offered competing interpretations on the city.

Kaplan was also inspired by the point-of-view reporting espoused by legendary editor Clay Felker, the founder of New York magazine and one of Kaplan's mentors. To that end, he crafted a contemporary template for Felker's New Journalism, publishing smart, punchy headlines and fully reported stories in which the writer often entered the narrative.

Perhaps Kaplan's best-known protege was Candace Bushnell, a freelance journalist who began writing for the Observer in 1993. Kaplan devised a column based on Bushnell's dating life he called "Sex and the City." The column later became the basis for the hit HBO series and a pair of Hollywood films.

His stewardship of the Observer ended three years after Arthur L. Carter, the Manhattan businessman who founded it in 1987, sold the newspaper to real-estate developer Jared Kushner in 2006 for $10 million.