By Yvonne Vávra
Oh, what a feeling to skip off the stoop of your townhouse and down the street, beneath the autumn trees lining what must be the most beautiful block on the planet. So full of joy this Upper West Side woman is, she can’t even hear the sounds of New York; her heart is beating too loudly. Why? Because of email. Romance in her inbox, her future happiness coming in with a bing and a chipper announcement: “You’ve Got Mail.”
The 1894 townhouse featured in that movie, at 328 West 89th Street, where our heroine lives on the second floor, is now for sale. For $3.95 million, it’s yours. Yours to walk up and down that iconic stoop every day, the very one beloved by fans from all over the world because it gives them that certain feeling.
That feeling, right? You’ve Got Mail must be the coziest and most romantic depiction of the Upper West Side ever put on film. It’s all that orange, the knitwear, the neighborhood looking like it was dipped in hot cocoa and wrapped in oversized socks. Nostalgia oozes out of every frame. Nostalgia for a time when email was a place for intimacy, when having Solitaire on your computer was considered “the end of Western civilization as we know it,” and when getting online meant patiently listening to the soundtrack of beep-beep, krrrrr-CHHHHH-eeeeee-rrrrrr-bleep-bloop-krrrrrr, screeches and squeals, clicks and crackles, and then, finally, silence: You were online. And your inbox was full of promise. And a tall cappuccino was $2.95.
Early in the movie, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks each giddily walk down West End Avenue, which seems positively bustling by today’s standards. The movie theater at 84th and Broadway is showing The Big Lebowski, bundled-up New Yorkers are waiting for the M104, and a store promises that “Pancakes Make People Happy!” The neighborhood is waking up to the sound of metal grates rolling up all along Broadway, at the Eye Man optometry office, still there today at 81st Street, and at pharmacies, nut shops, bakeries, and locksmiths. Our two email correspondents walk all the way down to Verdi Square at 72nd Street, where their paths almost cross. And then Meg Ryan buys a pumpkin.
I often find myself walking through the neighborhood, chasing feelings. Like the ones movies leave me with. Could I walk myself right into the mood of You’ve Got Mail? The streets, the brownstones, and even some of the businesses are still here, after all. But this is no movie, and I’m no well-crafted character. I don’t own a cute little bookstore, and my emails are a disaster. It doesn’t help that the former Cafe Lalo, on 83rd and Amsterdam, perhaps the movie’s most iconic location, now looks more like something out of Ghostbusters, another movie set on the Upper West Side. I walked right past it twice this week before finally recognizing it, relieved to discover that I was indeed on the right block and hadn’t lost my mind.
But even standing right in front of the 91st Street Garden in Riverside Park, just as gorgeous as it was back in the ’90s, if not more so, I’m in the same place, but in a different mood. I just can’t catch the feeling. Do I have to buy a pumpkin?
It’s not just movies. I’m also chasing feelings I once had on this corner or that, and feelings I imagine other people might have had. “New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off,” Dorothy Parker wrote in 1928. I like to think that growing up on 72nd, then 68th, then 80th Street is what gave her that same little thrill I get from the city: “There is excitement ever running its streets. Each day, as you go out, you feel the little nervous quiver that is yours when you sit in the theater just before the curtain rises.”
I’d also love to know where Upper West Side novelist Ed Park was wandering when his mind went rogue, wondering why beginnings have to begin at the beginning and endings have to end at the end — a theme in his intellectual horror story “Eat Pray Click,” my favorite in his latest book. Wherever he went that got his imagination going, I’ll have what he was having.
Strolling along Riverside Drive, I’m looking to pick up a little extra ambition. I stop at 76th Street, look out over the Hudson, and try to channel Robert Moses — the dreamer, not the ruthless power broker. As Robert Caro tells it, Moses would stand right here, looking down at the smoky, garbage-covered railroad wasteland below and imagining it transformed into something beautiful, building Riverside Park in his mind.
But I can’t quite catch that feeling either. I’m not enough of a merciless megalomaniac.
Maybe chasing feelings is all we ever do. The ones we remember, the ones we imagine, and the ones we never had but hope to find around the next corner. This new apartment, this job, this love will finally bring that certain feeling. And when it doesn’t (and it never quite does), we can always trust Dorothy Parker: something good is about to come off. So there’s always a reason to keep on walking. Or skipping, even.
Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.
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