In Sex and the City’s season 3 premiere, Carrie returns home from a shopping spree at Jimmy Choo to find a sexy politician she’d met while judging a FDNY calendar contest. She pretends to be pissed but can’t really be; it’s late-’90s John Slattery in a suit and tie, flashing a vulpine smile from the stoop of her brownstone apartment.
While Carrie Bradshaw doesn’t live in the West Village—earlier she tells Slattery’s canescent candidate for city comptroller that her address is 245 East 73rd Street (and no, she doesn’t vote)—the Instagram-famous façade of 66 Perry, used for exteriors of Carrie’s rent-controlled junior one-bedroom, has become a pilgrimage site for flocks of fangirls and a loaded signifier of the neighborhood’s polarizing new identity. As New York Magazine’s Brock Colyar reported this spring, the pretty, riverine hamlet “has, in recent years, transformed into a fabulous theme park for young women of some privilege to live out their Sex and the City fantasies.” The twentysomething marketing professionals who compose this new demo don’t exactly exude the …