Where Seinfeld Slept

by Brendan O’Connor

2015-06-24 11.56.38

On Wednesday, Hulu made all hundred and eighty episodes of Seinfeld available to watch online, legally, for the first time. In celebration of Seinfeld’s new digital life, Hulu also opened a sort of pop-up Seinfeld museum that includes an immaculate reproduction of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment in the television show; it appears that the only mistake that anyone has found so far is the use of a PC instead of a Mac computer.

Hulu, which is co-owned by Comcast, 21st Century Fox, and The Walt Disney Company, reportedly paid more than a hundred and fifty million dollars for the rights to stream Seinfeld. “We think it’s a one-of-a-kind property,” CEO Mike Hopkins told CNNMoney. “There aren’t too many shows that have a puffy shirt in the Smithsonian, for example. We believe that we’re going to be able to introduce ‘Seinfeld’ to a whole new young audience that’s here at Hulu,” he said. “We also think that Seinfeld will help us attract a new audience to Hulu.”

In the show Seinfeld, the character “Jerry Seinfeld” lives at 129 West 81st Street in apartment 5A, on the Upper West Side. (The person Jerry Seinfeld also lived there, for a time.) Exterior shots of this apartment were filmed at 757 New Hampshire Avenue, in Los Angeles; interior shots were mostly shot on set in California. According to Streeteasy, the real-life building was last sold in 1995 for close to a million dollars; in recent years, the building’s studio apartments have rented for just under two thousand dollars per month. The building appears on the NYC Rent Guidelines Board’s list of rent stabilized apartments in Manhattan, which would explain why the rent, in such a desirable area, is so low. It would also explain why Jerry never moves. We never learn what Jerry’s rent is, but, at one point, his upstairs neighbor dies, and her apartment comes on the market for four hundred dollars per month.

In 1998, shortly after Seinfeld went off the air, Seinfeld reportedly purchased a duplex in The Beresford, also on the Upper West Side, for 4.35 million dollars, into which he did not move until after he married Jessica Sklar in 2000. (He was definitely living there by 2001, when he MC’d the building’s holiday party.) Seinfeld was reported to have been looking at a townhouse on the Upper East Side in 2011, but he remained at The Beresford as of 2013.

A little after 10 A.M. on Wednesday, the line to get into Hulu’s Seinfeld apartment installation at Milk Studios in the Meatpacking District was already more than an hour long. Milk Studios is at 451 West 14th Street, adjacent to the High Line. The three-hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-square-foot, eight-story office building was purchased in 2013 by Jamestown Properties for more than two hundred and eighty-four million dollars. (Jamestown also owns Chelsea Market; a bridge connects the two buildings.) Last October, the Commercial Observer reported that the building’s eighty-four-hundred-square-foot storefront space, which could be divided by up to three long-term tenants, was being marketed at three hundred dollars per square foot. In the meantime, pop-up tenants like Hulu are “breaking in the space,” Jamestown president Michael Phillips said.

In addition to the recreation of Jerry’s apartment, the Seinfeld exhibit contained several installations of memorable props and paraphernalia from the show: the table and seats from the interior diner set, in which visitors were not permitted to sit, and over which was hung a shot of Jerry and George Costanza sitting at the table, in the seats, on the set; the velvet couch on which George posed for his “Timeless Art of Seduction” photos, upon which visitors could pose as well; and Larry Thomas, the actor who played the “Soup Nazi,” was available, in costume, for photos. People in white T-shirts, upon which were printed the approximation of a puffy shirt, handed out posters and Junior Mints.

Once inside the exhibition, there was another, shorter line to get into Jerry’s apartment. Visitors could burst through the door in the manner of Cosmo Kramer, who, in the show lives across the hall from Jerry, in Apartment 5B, and has a proclivity for dramatic entrances. Several people did this. Cosmo Kramer is based on Kenny Kramer, a neighbor of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David’s at Manhattan Plaza, a federally subsidized housing complex at 43rd Street and 10th Avenue. Created in 1977, seventy percent of residents at the forty-six-floor Manhattan Plaza are in the performing arts, fifteen percent are locals, and fifteen are seniors. The building is a hundred percent affordable; residents pay thirty percent of their income in rent. In 2013, Related Companies, the developer responsible for construction of Hudson Yards, secured funding for a hundred-and-twenty-six-unit development at 529 West 29th Street that would mirror — in terms of affordability and resident composition — Manhattan Plaza, where the wait list for an apartment is years long.

In 1996, Kenny Kramer decided to embark, as he was wont to do, upon a new business venture: Kramer’s Reality Tour, a guided tour of Seinfeld-related locations around New York City. “I’ve promised myself that I’ll work hard for two years so I can then officially retire,” Kramer told the New York Times. After that, he said, “My goal… is to have an actor playing my part. That way we’ll have art imitating life imitating art imitating life. And I can sit in the Jacuzzi back home.” Kramer’s Reality Tour is now in its nineteenth year.

One of the walls of Hulu’s Seinfeld apartment is floor-to-ceiling glass. Visitors still waiting on the sidewalk outside peered in at those of us making our way through the space: a recreation, refracted through screens and memory, rendered in immaculate detail, of a fabrication; a three-dimensional advertisement designed to trigger, through obsessive nostalgia, compulsive consumption; advertising imitating art imitating life imitating art imitating life. We were not encouraged to linger.

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