Housing
Of Storefronts, Soulless Banks, and the Slow Death of Nora Ephron's Upper West Side
A walk down Broadway used to be all jangle and buzz, an urban improvisation of sound and action. Now it’s more like a prerecorded loop that repeats block after block.
That’s from the 1998 Nora Ephron romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, in which the owner of a sweet children’s bookshop on the Upper West Side of New York is forced out of business by a juggernaut chain bookstore, a thinly veiled version of Barnes & Noble.
Well, this last week, we lost Ephron herself, and her finely tuned ear for the gestalt of this particular corner of Manhattan. She was right about the way New York breaks your heart, the way she was right about so many things. The Upper West Side that she studied and documented with the acuity of an anthropologist and the wit of Oscar Wilde has changed, and changed, and changed again over the last generation. And that change has hurt.