Buttafleye Ministry remembers Barbara Smith. Preserve the memory of your loved one FREE on our Memorial Page. We Will Always Remember You! Add a Memory or Message to the Memorial page Here. Celebrate and honor the legacy of your loved one's life and inspire family and friends to do the same.
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B. Smith
Buttafleye Ministry remembers Barbara Smith, a fashion model who created a business empire by catering to the tastes of aspiring black professionals with her restaurants, television shows, bedding and furniture collections and books on entertaining, died on Saturday at her home on Long Island. She was 70.
The cause was early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, her family said. Ms. Smith had waged a long and public battle with the disease, which was diagnosed when she was in her 50s.
Ms. Smith was best known for her popular Manhattan restaurant, B. Smith’s. Located at the edge of the theater district, it opened in 1986 and almost immediately attracted a following among affluent black New Yorkers, who welcomed it as a stylish gathering spot. Essence magazine, in 1995, described it as the place “where the who’s who of black Manhattan meet, greet and eat regularly.”
Image Ms. Smith became only the second black model to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle, in July 1976. Ms. Smith opened a successful offshoot in Union Station in Washington, D.C., in 1994 and four years later in Sag Harbor, N.Y., where she and her second husband and business partner, Dan Gasby, maintained a summer house. Read More
She will be deeply missed.