There’s a genre of rom-com that, yes, makes New York its main character. Not the real New York but a cinegenic, perennially autumnal isle of brownstones and boutique bookstores, where every white woman works in publishing and love lurks in the checkout line at Zabar’s. Historically, the pillars of this genre have squeezed New Yorky authenticity from floating signifiers of Jewish culture—see the aforementioned Zabar’s cameo in You’ve Got Mail (1998) or Katz’s in When Harry Met Sally (1989), both canonical classics by Nora Ephron. A deep-cut gem in this lineage has just received a Criterion reissue with an essay by The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme, rhapsodist of fountain pens and tuna melts. Set on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and released a year before Sally’s orgasmic encounter with sliced turkey (Harry orders pastrami on rye), Crossing Delancey captures the twilight of an earlier, actually Jewish milieu. Directed by Joan Micklin-Silver, the film follows Amy Irving as Isabelle Grossman, a thirty-three-year-old bibliomane whose bubbe wants her to get married, and a snacky Peter Riegert as Sam Poser, the Essex Street pickleman she thinks she’s too good for. At one point, our heroine and her grandmother (Borscht Belt headliner Reizl Bozyk) kibitz with a matchmaker in Seward Park, where I long ago attended an Art Against Displacement meeting. Alas, I could only dream to have Izzy’s nimbus of chestnut curls, her rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment, or her cushy bookstore job. (“I organize the most prestigious reading series in New York!” she parries when nagged about her about her romantic foibles.)
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
A few years ago, Crossing Delancey brought me and my boyfriend together, both of us moonstruck by its bouncy retro soundtrack by the Roches and romantic mythology of Manhattan’s literati. The opening scene reveals this fantasy to be already fragile, when Izzy’s boss, the tweedy proprietor of “New York’s last real bookstore,” throws a party after a close brush with eviction. In a toast that today seems like a rejoinder avant la lettre to the corporate apologism of You’ve Got Mail, he exclaims, “They want to pull us down and make something clean and ugly and obscenely tall and profitable. But here we are!”
Much of the Lower East Side in Crossing Delancey has been lost, of course, to gentrification and redevelopment. Guss’ Pickles (posing as “Posner’s Pickles” in the movie) today peddles Gulp Hablo, and Essex Street Market has, in fact, crossed Delancey to the clean and ugly megacomplex Essex Crossing. The Judaica shop Zelig Blumenthal is a Café Grumpy, and Bubbe’s apartment, the NYCHA tower at 154 Broome Street, has been absorbed into the city’s PACT/RAD program, seen by many as a gateway to privatization. Shapiro’s Kosher Wine, with its signboard advertising “Wine You Can Almost Cut with a Knife,” is now a New American eatery with three and a half Yelp stars that touts the distinction, equally dubious but less charming, of having invented the bottomless brunch. The vegan burger comes with house pickles.