“Everybody told me when I came to this neighborhood that I was crazy—that it was full of drag queens, that it smelled awful because of all the butchers,” says the Brussels-born designer, who moved to New York in 1969 with her first husband, Fiat scion Prince Egon von Furstenberg. (They had two children, and divorced in 1983; in 2001 she married media mogul Barry Diller.) “All of that is true,” she continues. “And yet in a weird way the cobblestone streets remind me of Belgium.”