Drop by to visit Kathleen Kelly

2024-04-02 21:26:50

the film You’ve got mail of Nora Efron Celebrating its 25th birthday this year, but this post is not about the movie, it is a recommendation post about New York.
Recommendations about New York – Just what the world needs right now, I know. But this isn’t really a recommendation post about New York either, it’s a report post from my last visit to the city, during which I dropped by to visit old friends like Kathleen Kelly and Carrie Bradshaw.
Because this visit was one of those times when you (meaning me) simply don’t have the patience to look for another restaurant that you shouldn’t miss, or go into another store that is simply a must, or drop by a cafe that your life won’t be alive if you don’t try their French toast. On this visit I mostly wanted to feel things, and the best way to do that was to look for movie locations that I like. I only had three days and I didn’t have too much patience, so this is the loot:

01 Kathleen Kelly’s apartment

West 89th Street, I photographed in the middle of February 2024

Kathleen Kelly lives in the Upper West (328 West 89th St. I tried to write it in English but WordPress doesn’t support it, try copying: 328 W 89th St), in one of the beautiful houses that haven’t changed since the movie came out. I arrived in a not very photogenic season, but still, the magic is there.

02 Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment

Above: Curry on the stairs. Below: Warning sign, February 2024

According to the script in the series, Carrie lives in the Upper East Side, but the location we all know is at 66 Perry Street in the West Village. The tenants were fed up with legions of female visitors dressed in tutu skirts trooping on the steps of their house to take pictures and they destroyed the frame with an iron chain and a sign warning that it was private property. The stairs next door look exactly the same, if you include the picture of you eating a magnolia cupcake on the stairs.

03 The carousel from the poster of the movie past lives

Above: The most famous image from the film. Below: My son is waiting for me, February 2024 (in winter the carousel is closed and the effect is less impressive)

Jane’s Carousel is a carousel built in 1922 in Ohio, and landed in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2011. Not long ago I saw an interview with Celine Song, the director, and she said that the original plan was to shoot the scene at sunset, but the shooting day fell on a gray day with an unphotogenic sunset, so in the end the actors were positioned on the steps in front of the carousel whose lights had just turned on. This compromise became the poster of the film.

04 The window in the museum, when Harry met Sally

I am ashamed to say that we had a hard time finding the location. I mean, we knew (me and my oldest son, a film student) that the scene was filmed at the Metropolitan Museum, and we knew that the window looked out onto the park, so we decided to “just walk around there and find it.” After walking around there for an hour and not finding him, we decided to ask one of the guards. Since we both suffer from an excess of fashion, we were ashamed to say that we were looking for the location from the movie, and we asked for a vague reference to “the big window you can see from the park”, so the guard eager to help directed us to the cafeteria. There was indeed a large window in the cafeteria, but even though we tried we couldn’t convince ourselves that it was the window we were looking for. At this point we gave up and left the museum. Outside we sat down for a moment on the stairs, and a short roll made it clear to us where we were wrong: Harry and Sally’s window is not in the American wing, where we walked around, but in the Egyptian wing (exact location: The Temple of Dendur).
Of course, in the end it turned out that every delay was for the best, and thanks to the fact that we were closed we arrived at the window in question exactly at sunset.