Walking Tour: Following In the Footsteps of Nora Ephron’s UWS

It was straight out of a big-screen romcom: a middle-aged couple walking arm-in-arm, chatting and giggling like a pair of high school seniors. The irony is, Ellen Yaffe and Rick Kalson, who met on Match.com in 2022 after he was on the dating site “for literally eight minutes,” were on a walking tour called “Nora Ephron’s Upper West Side.”

It was one of dozens of tours offered by the Municipal Art Society as part of its annual Jane’s Walk NYC Festival. And Nora Ephron, of course, was the queen of romcoms.

Online dating wasn’t a thing back in the “When Harry Met Sally” era, but Ellen and Rick are thankful for it. “Best 36 dollars he ever spent,” quipped Ellen.

Held the first weekend of May every year in hundreds of cities around the world, Jane’s Walk is named for the urbanist, author and activist Jane Jacobs. The free festival encourages participants to view their own communities through a different prism, enabling them to see their streets in a new light and connect with neighbors in ways they might not ordinarily think of.

“Everyone say hello to someone next to you,” encouraged volunteer tour leader Katie Devin Orenstein, 26, a bubbly Dartmouth grad and aspiring theater director. After the briefest of pauses (because, after all, part of the allure of being a New Yorker is the anonymity), hands were shaken and hellos were exchanged.

Katie’s tour was off to a very social start. This was Katie’s second year leading the Nora Ephron tour, which she said she does as “a personal obsession.”

The tour featured stops at various Upper West Side landmarks from Ephron’s life and movies. Many of the two dozen or so participants were equally enthralled with Ephron, prolific writer of such books and movies as “Silkwood,” “Heartburn,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail,” and “Julie and Julia.”

“If anyone is related to the Ephrons, now’s your time,” Katie told the group. “If anyone is good friends with Carl Bernstein, today is not your day.” Bernstein was Nora’s second husband, who was notoriously unfaithful, as chronicled in her book and movie “Heartburn.”

No one was related to the Ephrons, but someone on the tour does work with one of Nora’s sons. Mike Wilson, a newspaper editor, said he’s interested in the subject matter because “Nora Ephron has done amazing writing, and I work with her son Jacob at The New York Times, so I have a little bit of a personal interest in just knowing about her milieu.”

Wilson was with his wife, Alisa, who has been a fan of Ephron’s for decades. “When I was in graduate school studying magazine journalism, a friend of mine ended up getting me a first edition copy of “Crazy Salad” [Ephron’s 1975 book] as a gift. So I’ve just been a fan for years, and I associate her with this part of town.”

The tour met up at 106 West 69^th Street, which until 2008 housed Maya Schaper’s cheese-and-antique store. Producers of the movie “You’ve Got Mail “ paid the owner to relocate for the entirety of filming,” Katie recounted, and it was converted into The Shop Around the Corner, “the bookstore Meg Ryan was so sad about closing.”

The tour mixed Nora’s filmography with biography. Born in 1941, she was the eldest daughter of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, prolific screenwriters most famous for the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn romcom “Desk Set.”

They schlepped the family to Hollywood in 1946 and Nora “spent her entire childhood plotting how to get back.” As Katie told it, Nora drove to New York the day after graduating from Wellesley College in 1962.

There was a stop at 70^th and Broadway, to look west toward Café Luxembourg, where the scene in which Harry and Sally (Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) try to fix each other up with their respective best friends, Jess and Marie (Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher).

The plan backfires, and Jess and Marie fall in love. An iconic scene, but nothing compared to the faux orgasm scene shot in Katz’s Deli.

From there the group converged on Verdi Square at 72^nd and Broadway, where Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks kept missing each other in the opening sequence of “You’ve Got Mail.”

Then it was onto “the building that saved her life,” according to Katie: the Apthorp, at 79^th and Broadway. It was 1980. Nora was living in Washington, D.C. with her second husband, Carl Bernstein, the journalist who broke the Watergate story for The Washington Post. The story was optioned and eventually adapted into the film “All the President’s Men.” Seven months pregnant at the time with her younger son Max, Nora was punching up the script, her first stint as a screenwriter. “She finds out he (Carl Bernstein) is having an affair. She comes back to New York and moves into the Apthorp,” recounted Katie. Nora lived there from her 1980 divorce until rent hikes and disputes with building management drove her out in the mid-1990s. One year later, the New Yorker published an essay about the building, called “Moving on, a Love Story.”

What’s an Upper West Side tour without a stop at Zabar’s? That’s where Meg Ryan gets stuck in the cash-only checkout line, only to be rescued by a dashing Tom Hanks in “You’ve Got Mail.” (Sidebar: The cashier may look familiar because she’s played by the actor Sara Ramirez, a/k/a Callie from “Grey’s Anatomy,” and Che Diaz in “And Just Like That.”)

After a quick stop at the onetime popular dessert spot Café Lalo on West 83^rd Street, where another scene was shot for “You’ve Got Mail,” the group headed up to the 91^st Street Garden in Riverside Park, where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan share that romantic kiss in the final scene of “You’ve Got Mail.”

The Jane’s Walk mission had been accomplished: people knew their neighborhood a little better, they certainly knew Nora Ephron a little better, and—even if they don’t stay in touch with their fellow tour participants—they felt connected with one another for those 90 minutes. Nora was the glue that held it altogether. Katie ended the tour by reading a pair of Nora’s most iconic essays, published in her 2010 book “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.” In them she laid out all the things she would–and would not–miss when she’s gone. In the positive category, among other things: her kids, waffles, the concept of waffles, reading in bed, and Nick (screenwriter Nick Pileggi, her third husband). After two failed marriages, Nora found her true love, a fact not lost on the Match.com couple, who are getting hitched this summer. Nick found his Nora; Rick found his Ellen.