You’ve Got Mail filmed on the Upper West Side. Image source: Moda Chicago. “Do you know what? We are going to seduce them. We’re going to seduce them with our square footage, and our discounts, and our deep armchairs, and…our cappuccinos!” – Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) in You’ve Got Mail. This was Fox’s animated strategy for attracting customers to his big bookstore, modeled after the Barnes & Noble’s on 66th Street and Broadway, in Nora Ephron’s 1998 film You’ve Got Mail, a version of the play Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo. By the end of the film Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan’s character) shuts down her small bookstore, “The Shop Around the Corner,” because she cannot compete with Fox and Son’s. The influx of big businesses into the Upper West Side is an important string of narrative in You’ve Got Mail, secondary only to the love/hate relationship between Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox. The battle between small… Read More