I was landing in Austin at sundown, staring out the window and thinking about nothing in particular. That’s when, for some reason, I started thinking about how cool it’d be if there was an app that one could use in NYC that would point out all the random cool places that are out there. Not sure what the trailer parks in southeast Austin have to do with Manhattan but who am I to question the creative process?
When I give first timers my NYC tour I always make sure to point out certain things, like the building on St. Marks that served as the cover to Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti album and Allen Ginsberg’s old apartment building in Alphabet City. I make sure we go to one of my favorite bars ever, Vazac’s Horseshoe bar on 7th and B. Famous scenes from Sex and the City, Crocodile Dundee, and The Godfather 2 were shot right there.
If we’re on the west side I’ll point out the Friends’ apartment and tell them the story about Dylan Thomas and the White Horse Saloon and mention the bathroom graffiti directed towards Jack Kerouac in the same bar. Of course we’d spend alot of time talking about all the history of the Chelsea Hotel on W. 23rd and if Sid really killed Nancy.
In Soho it’s always fun to point out the Sam and Molly’s loft from Ghost, the fake orgasm location from When Harry Met Sally, and the Ghostbuster’s headquarters.
From there my tour includes the subway grate where Marilyn Monroe’s dress blew up in The Seven Year Itch and the intersection where Ratso Rizzo gives his famous, “I’m walkin’ here!” line in Midnight Cowboy. Nearby is the infamous Studio 54’s former location.
Since it’s directly across the street from my ex-girlfriend’s place on W. 69th, I know all about where Meg Ryan’s The Shop around the Corner bookstore from You’ve Got Mail. From there it was a short trip further up the Upper West Side to Tom’s Diner, which served as the facade for Monk’s from the Seinfeld Series.
Everyone knows all about John Lennon’s murder outside his residence at the Dakota, but it surprises me how many people didn’t know that building was also used in Rosemary’s Baby. The dude that was executed for kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby helped build the building across the street from the Dakota!
Near my old apartment on the Upper East Side is a bar that I knew served as the bar where Tom Cruise served drinks in Cocktail. Serendipity 3 was very close by on 225 E. 60th Street and Holly Golightly resided around the corner and down the street in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
That’s where my personal tour of trivial things would start and people seemed interested. I was thinking about all of this when I landed in Austin that fateful day and that’s when the plan was hatched. How cool would it be if every semi-interesting spot and hidden gem in Manhattan was all in one place in an app that would tell you when you were walking by one of the spots?
Immediately I started to collect as many books about significant spots in the city as I could, from Black History in New York, to Movie Locations, to books about specific neighborhoods. My girlfriend Amanda and I would take walking tours of places like Chinatown, the Lower East Side and Five Points, take meticulous notes from our young guide, secretly knowing that our ultimate goal was to make his tour obsolete.
I got my friend Colin involved since he has made an app or two and knows how these things get done. Almost overnight we were set up and I just needed to input the locations into the database which would immediately be turned into a pin for our GPS-based map. I love that the map also includes bus and subway stops, that was a nice bonus I wasn’t counting on.
Not only did we get every tv and movie spot as we could, we also found historical spots, like the oldest bar in NYC, the birthplace of the gay rights movement, the first speakeasy in Harlem back in the Prohibition days, where Edgar Allen Poe once lived and hung out, and where the world’s largest cast iron bell resides (Riverside Church).
By the time I had my list, I had over 200 notable spots. Amanda did some research on her own and came up with even more. Colin came up with the brilliant idea of having “haunted” locations so I got to work researching those. Now we’re over 300 locations and there are still some walking tours we plan on taking.
I’ve learned so much about NYC in the last two months, it’s ridiculous. It’s impossible for me to walk down any Manhattan street without wondering if there’s anything significant nearby. I wish to God this app existed when I lived in New York full time and walked the streets every single day.
I have a list of dozens of buildings I want to see again for the first time and haunted places I want to check out. Now I know the locations of: the Cosby Show brownstone, where James Dean lived before he left for LA, where Humphrey Bogart grew up, where Marilyn Monroe supposedly contemplated jumping out of a window on the Upper East Side, the bar that inspired The Lost Weekend, the original factory for Nabisco, Count Basie’s lounge, where Malcolm X was shot, where the Titanic was supposed to arrive, where Andy Warhol’s factory was, the narrowest building in the city, where the Marx Brothers were brought up, the first skyscraper, where Joey Gallo was shot, where Jack Kerouac met Neal Cassady, where Robert DeNiro contemplated murdering Palatine in Taxi Driver, the apartment from The Apartment, Winkie and Blinkie’s flat in The Basketball Diaries, and just about anything that every happened in a Woody Allen movie.
As of two days ago the app is now available from Apple App Store. As much as I think New Yorkers and tourists will love it as much as I do, I have absolutely no idea how to get the word out on a large scale other than taking out a billboard in Times Square or having Ashton Kutcher tweet about it. And so this is where I’m at.
I haven’t watched Wheel of Fortune on purpose since I was eleven, but every now and then I have to watch it in the Flight Attendants Operations area at the airport because everyone I work with is over sixty years old. I try not to pay attention but sometimes I can’t help it, like today. Their Before and After category is probably my favorite. You have to think a little bit for that one.
I’m sitting here listening to my coworkers scream out “New York Mets” when it’s obvious it’s “New York Jets” because the real contestants already guessed an “M” and they lost their turn. I started a list of Before and After puzzles I’d like to see but never will.
Straight Guy in the Queer Skies 