On Sept. 29, 1973, Peter Schjeldahl and Brooke Alderson, who had met the previous spring at an opening at the Whitney Museum, moved into an apartment on the top floor of a walk-up at 53 St. Marks Place. It was the day W. H. Auden died, a fact that seemed to portend the lush bohemian life that followed. Mr. Schjeldahl, a poet and art critic, would go on to write for The Village Voice and for The New Yorker, where he has remained for two decades; Ms. Alderson was an actress and comic. They had a daughter, Ada Calhoun, who grew up to be a writer herself. She dedicated her recent book, “St. Marks Is Dead,” a history of the street where she grew up, to them: “To my parents, who looked at the apocalyptic 1970s East Village and thought, What a great place to raise a kid.”

That chaos found counterbalance in a rural idyll. In the 1980s, Mr. Schjeldahl and his wife purchased many acres of mountainous land in the town of Bovina, a little more than three hours north of Midtown Manhattan. For more than a quarter-century, the property served as the site of a Fourth of July celebration that has maintained a singular place in New York’s social history, drawing friends, and friends of friends, from the city — artists, writers, musicians, academics, gallery owners, movie stars — and a considerable segment of the surrounding population of Delaware County. At its most constrained, the event attracted as many as 300 people, who gathered not only for the kind of ecumenical fellowship rarely found in the modern world outside an A.A. meeting, but, above all, to experience Mr. Schjeldahl’s mythic, untamed fireworks.

“We were strictly illegal, until the end,” Mr. Schjeldahl told me recently. “The cops and firemen brought their families. This is libertarian country.” Last year, the pyrotechnics hewed more closely to legitimacy — a technical supervisor was even on the premises — but that party turned out to be the last, after approximately 2,000 people showed up, word of it having reached a vast universe of Brooklyn millennials via social media, a means of communication Mr. Schjeldahl and his wife have never employed.

“It was 300 hipsters from Bushwick coming down the driveway, and I nearly died,” Ms. Alderson said. Last year, guests, most of them not known to their hosts, could be overheard arguing about whether the property was a state park or a municipal park. One generation’s utopia had encroached upon another’s.