Thursday thoughts #14: New Yorker musings
also: celebrity encounters & that time I touched Paul McCartney's foot
I’m a New Yorker. I’ve lived in Manhattan for almost 19 years now, and the things I love about this city are endless. Still, I find myself perusing Zillow in various upstate suburbs quite often, wondering what it would be like to… live in a house? Have space? A car??? But then I start missing the city in these theoretical moves, and shift back to my StreetEasy searches of 1,000 square feet for eleventy billion dollars (which I would gladly pay for an in-unit washer/dryer).
Central Park at sunrise… nothing beats it
There are a lot of special things about New York that makes living in a small space worth it. I wouldn’t put celebrity encounters anywhere near the top of my list, but it’s probably one of the most common things I’m asked about from friends/family who don’t live here. As a seasoned New Yorker, I mostly ignore them now, or at least pretend I don’t care about them. But it wasn’t always like that.
There was that time when I first moved here and I was walking to the gym early one weekend morning up First Avenue; the streets were deserted except for Matt Damon filming a scene for a Bourne movie outside of a pub (Finnegan’s Wake) on 74th street.
Or that time Sarah Jessica Parker walked in for dinner with her gay besties at a restaurant I was at (Perilla in the West Village, long gone)
Cameron Diaz shopping in the West Village; Blake Lively at the Chanel in SoHo
Which reminds me of the Gossip Girl scene I saw filmed early one morning at the old Tony’s Di Napoli on Second Avenue (which was demolished to make room for the Second Avenue Subway)