STILL ‘GOT’ IT
Two decades after ‘You’ve Got Mail’ first made filmgoers smile, it’s time to revisit the real New York spots Nora Ephron made stars in her movie
TWENTY years ago, the Internet was an unexplored, foreign land, not yet an addiction or a matchmaking service. And the Big Apple was still filled with mom-and-pop shops — a landscape threatened by corporate giants like Fox & Sons Books.
OK, Fox Books is fictional — part of the world of “You’ve Got Mail,” rom-com queen Nora Ephron’s cinematic love letter to New York City, which was released Dec. 18, 1998.
“New York was her soul and it was her place and her people,” Randy Sokol Sweeney, the film’s location manager tells The Post. In the movie, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star as Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly, two New Yorkers who fall in love online during the earliest days of dial-up Internet, but unbeknownst to Kelly, they are actually business rivals. It was filmed primarily on Ephron’s Upper West Side — centering on Ryan’s tiny bookshop, which was set up at a real store on West 69th Street. Ephron, a former New York Post reporter, wrote and directed “Mail,” which captured the quirk and charm of the neighborhood that she called home by filming at stalwarts such as Zabar’s, Gray’s Papaya and Cafe Lalo. But Sweeney had a tough job. Because Ephron lived on the Upper West Side, she already knew exactly what she wanted and was more involved in the location-scouting process than most directors.
“In some cases it was easier, but a lot of times she would get her heart set on a place and they didn’t let us shoot there. That didn’t go over so well with her,” Sweeney says. “She was the only director I ever worked with who would call [a location]. She’d get on the phone and charm them. Her passion was so infectious. That’s how we got a lot of our locations.”
While today some of these storefronts and shops have long closed their doors, and Fox & Sons would now be under assault by Amazon, the New York of “You’ve Got Mail” endures.
Here are some of the iconic locations that you can still visit.