Thing-a-day.com

Today, a photo. It was bright and clear, so I snapped a photo while walking by the Empire State building:

cross-posted to lekkercraft.

This is part 2 of a small 3-part project on New York apartments I started yesterday.

I thought it would be interesting to figure out the address of various characters’ apartments in New York-based TV shows (related to the actual building shown in establishing shots on the program and/or the address referred to on the program) and do a comparison with equivalent apartments posted on craigslist. Today, I did some research on Jerry’s apartment on Seinfeld.

On the show, Jerry lives at 129 West 81st Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The exterior shot of the building that they used on the show (see below) is actually located in Los Angeles.

The real 129 West 81st Street, where the real Jerry Seinfeld actually lived at one time, is the building below.

On the show, Jerry lives in a 1-bedroom apartment with a pretty large living room and kitchen area. The whole apartments seems to be about 800 square feet. Though sizable by Manhattan standards, Jerry’s apartment is not as obscene as Monica and Rachel’s place on Friends. Here is an interior view from the Seinfeld set.

I did a search on craiglist for a 1-bedroom, 1-bath apartment on the Upper West Side, and then filtered for apartments in the vicinity. The price range seems to be around $2300-3300. The images below are from a place at 89th & Broadway for $3200. Not horrible, but kind of stodgy. Looks like a place some of my great-aunts used to live.

But this place below is the kind of super depressing posting that craiglist searchers are often faced with. The link says it’s a 1-bedroom, but then you go to the page and it says “spacious studio” for $2400. Kill me now.

There was a running joke on an episode of Seinfeld about New Yorkers obsession with their apartments and finding good deals in the face of the city’s continually skyrocketing rental costs. This observation is definitely true. But what is even more amusing about Seinfeld (and really, every other television show situated in Manhattan) is how far off base they are in terms of actual New York apartment square footage.

I thought it would be interesting to figure out the address of various characters’ apartments in New York-based TV shows (related to the actual building shown in establishing shots on the program and/or the address referred to on the program) and do a comparison with equivalent apartments posted on craigslist. Today, I did some research on Joey and Chandler’s apartment on Friends.

Here are a couple of shots of Joey and Chandler’s apartment. The exterior view is the actual building shown on the program. It is located at 90 Bedford Street at Grove Street in Greenwich Village. The two interior views of the kitchen and living room are from the Friends set. The two rooms, which are not really separate rooms but continuous, seem to be about 600 square feet. The entire apartment is probably around 1000 square feet with 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom — this is quite large by Village standards.

So I did a search on craigslist for a 2-bedroom, 1-bath apartment in Greenwich Village, and then filtered for apartments in the vicinity. I found one on Bedford at Carmine (4 blocks away) for $2700. Here are some pictures:

The living room is listed as 12 x 11′, one bedroom is 11 x 9′, second bedroom is 9 x 7′. Relatively speaking, the price doesn’t seem too outrageous as far as Greenwich/West Village goes, but man, those bedrooms are small…this place is about half as big as Joey and Chandler’s.

In general, the apartments were around $3000-$4500, but one can always pay more. For comparison’s sake, here is what you get for $6400. Actually, with those parquet floors, it kind of looks a lot like Joey and Chandler’s place…

A use for my old contact sheets! The ones from the road tripping days. Matchbox magnets, little picture frames that tell stories of Salinas at night, Kansas (midway) midday, Montana at sunrise and Utah by the side of the road.