“Like any great love,” Taylor Swift once sang about New York, “it keeps you guessing. …But you know you wouldn’t change a thing.”
Well, at least you won’t. New Yorkers have long had what might be called an indifferent, if not openly skeptical, relationship with Swift.
When the pop star and Travis Kelsey get married in the city’s second most famous building, Madison Square Garden, on Friday night, it will be cemented, at least one gets the meaning in her mind, and the romance she has for the city. Saying “I do” there on 34th Street in the heart of it all (if one can’t be sure behind too many curtains) gives her the fairy-tale ending she’s long imagined. One also feels that he is giving in his mind as well we Fairy tale we I’ve long fantasized – “Taylor Swift! Got married here! At our most precious landmark!”
Swift has always been knocking on Gotham’s door, seeking to join a group of famous musicians associated with the city, such as the Lou Reeds, Lady Gagas and every third jazz great. But despite purchasing a place here for the first time in twelve years, and releasing that ode to the five boroughs, “Welcome to New York,” later that same year, things did not go as smoothly as she had hoped.
At first, New Yorkers (and I’m not talking on behalf of nine million people, just a lively atmosphere) were amused, even adored, that she had come here from Nashville. When Swift went up to David Letterman — an easy-to-citizen New Yorker — in 2014 and told us she’d recently gotten an “apartment in Tribeca” after “obsessing” about moving here for a year, we smiled. “It’s like, ‘You don’t understand, you have to go there now!’ You have to go to New York! Just leave what you’re doing! You have to go there. It’s amazing, it’s the greatest place ever,” she told Letterman. She was telling everyone, appropriately. Who was this leggy, blonde girl, long famous as a country star and newly emerging as a pop star, who also wanted to be a part of it? We were open. The city had a history of accommodating such eager people, most notably Madonna, Swift’s predecessor and her Central American transplant success story. (Madonna has released a new record, Complete with a Times Square pop-up, on the same day as Swift’s wedding (which underscores the point).
Of course, Madonna came of age as a teenager with nothing more than a fickle dream. Swift was already well-established when she arrived — that “apartment in Tribeca” was two adjoining apartments that cost $20 million. Her rants about New York could range from cute to clueless, and at times became a bit like notorious celebrities carrying around, “explaining things everyone already knows as if they were the first to discover them.” Daily show Liz Winstead, co-author and New York-based activist, said specifically about one of our other landmarks, which is… New York Times. When Swift took to TikTok to explain our most cherished building — “You can get almost anything at the bodega; bodega are our friends” — it became alarmingly clear that this relationship was headed for bumps.
In the years since, our fears have intensified. Swift made her fair share of appearances in New York, but usually only at trendy West Village restaurants or meatpacking clubs, more Leo DiCaprio than Leo Durocher. Swift is someone we’re now more likely to see at The Corner Store (a place in Soho that waits for two weeks and turns away anyone not wearing “smart smart clothes”) than, you know, the corner store.
Yes, there’s an argument to be made that this is what the city itself has become, a place for the rich and $15 lattes, a pit stop for downtown influencers and downtown tourists from whom money can be extracted before the flight back to Barcelona (a belief borne out by one look at the bewildered World Cup currently wandering around). But even though a certain type of New Yorker has disappeared from Manhattan and Brooklyn, they’re still present everywhere else — and, after all, even aristocrats carry a bullshit detector.
In fact, many New Yorkers are privileged and come from elsewhere, but they still fall into the rhythm and vernacular that has long defined the city. The latest example lies not in New York’s current leader, Zahran Mamdani, who arrived as an elementary schooler and grew up wealthy on Riverside Drive but who innately understands how to talk to the Knicks and the bodega proper.
There are many answers to the question of what makes a real New Yorker. (You certainly don’t have to be born here, as JLo’s recent review said.) But it comes with a kind of authenticity, and the ease of integrating into the rhythms of the city, especially after staying for a few years.
And Swift never did, unlike many of our beloved celebrities, born and naturalized, like Spike Lees and Julianne Morris and Timothée Chalamets, and Robert De Niro and Sarah Jessica Parkers and Jerry Seinfelds. These people might be on the street, at the next table, or just doing things that suggest someone has moved into the casual atmosphere very close by which is presumably the reason why someone would want to live here in the first place. Swift has never seemed part of this fabric.
The paparazzi and paparazzi certainly restrict her. We can’t pretend this isn’t real. But Swift would never give someone the chance to do normal things even if she could. Moreover, it’s not as if De Niro and Chalamet don’t have photographers who want to take their picture.
The truth is, in the 12 years since Swift moved here, we’ve mostly forgotten about her — not that she ever existed, but that she really wanted to be here, or even was here, more than any rich, globe-hopping icon anywhere. New York, of course, is different from Los Angeles because it’s not so vast and not so car-constrained; If you’re here, we’ll see you. But we don’t see Swift. Which pharmacy do you go to? Are you walking in the street? Does she leave her house during the day? Did you support or vote here?
These are all things we can imagine about our most famous celebrities because we’ve seen them do; Heck, Paul Rudd is standing at the election lines handing out cookies. This all seems strange to Taylor Swift, and her apparent belief that she can join the pantheon without this basic ritual seems like just another example of why she’s not getting it.
That’s why the appearance of Swift jumping up and down the court in Game 4 seemed so jarring. For her, it was just what a celebrity in New York would do: go to a Knicks game. But to us she wasn’t a New York celebrity, which is why people in sports bars showing the game stopped cheering and booing loudly, causing the cameras to cut to her excitement. It was almost touching, she wanted so badly to be one of us, and a lot of us say you’re not, saying love is unrequited. It was almost like…a Taylor Swift song.
And now the wedding at MSG. As you may have gathered from all the eye-rolling and goofy chatter over the past month, New Yorkers still aren’t sold on the park. Despite its ubiquitous presence over the decades in our lives and our iCals, the building has often evoked negative feelings. Sure, it housed the Knicks, Billy Joel, the Big East, and the Islanders when they played the Rangers, but it was also a neighborhood bully, a longtime subject of ugly, eye-rolling renovations, and a James Dolan who used the place as an expensive weapon to settle grievances. That Swift does not seem to understand this sentiment is further evidence of the imbalance between the New York she so desperately hopes to embrace and many residents for whom the jury is still out.
Because the truth is, we don’t always throw stones at things that shine. But we like to see them at the bar once in a while.
