‘I Actually Felt Like I Knew Him’
The first thing I notice is how quiet it is. Walking north of Bedford Street to, as Google Maps calls it, “Friends Building,” I don’t register any unusual sounds as 7th becomes Morton and Morton becomes Barrow. There’s got to be people here, right? Aren’t we celebrating the life and times of Miss Chanandler Bong? It’s 4:30 p.m. on October 30, two days after Matthew Perry, the sarcastic beating heart of Friends, died at his Los Angeles home at the age of 54. The neighborhood’s damp, leafy cobblestones offer the only sign of the day’s earlier rain. Then the sight hits me: Scores of mourners gathered on the four corners of Bedford and Grove to pay their respects. Standing. Reflecting. Looking at that famous building. Lingering at a makeshift lamppost memorial, which is festooned with bouquets of flowers and personalized notes and poems. It felt like a noise edict had fallen over the West Village, preventing anyone from saying the word “Rembrandts” above a whisper.
This lower-Manhattan enclave is an obvious pilgrimage: The southwest windows of 90 Bedford Street served as the exterior for Rachel and Monica’s apartment on the L.A.-shot NBC sitcom, which ran from 1994 to 2004. Since news of Perry’s death broke Saturday night, tributes to the comedic talent from collaborators and admirers alike flooded the internet. But for grief-stricken viewers who made the trip, their motivations were personal. “I’m about to cry,” Marjolein, a 56-year-old vacationing from Amsterdam, tells me. “I’ve been a fan since the beginning. Me and my friends already planned to come here, but now it has a double feeling. Yes, the show is over, but now it’s actually ended since one of the friends is missing.” She wrote a message to Perry on a piece of sturdy white cardboard brought to the lamppost, along with a few markers, by a young man who didn’t want to be identified. “People have been busy with it,” he says. “I love it.” Two New York University undergraduate students stick a few Post-It notes with their favorite Chandler quotes to the lamppost. “It’s for our own closure. Every time I used to get a headache, I’d watch Friends and I’d be fine,” one tells me. The other notes, “I haven’t seen the Friends building before, so this was the right time.”
Derin, a 23-year-old who lives a few buildings down on Grove, was one of many who brought flowers. “I grew up watching Friends because it was a bonding thing for my mom and two aunts. We actually named our first family cat Chandler Bing,” she says. “Some of my family lives in Turkey and Germany, so I wanted to bring flowers for all of us to mourn him. He was a special character for us.” The corner has been busy for the past 48 hours, she adds. “It’s never been like this before. The flowers started appearing on Sunday. There’s always been people here taking pictures of the apartment, but this escalated quickly after the news.”
A couple in their early twenties, Trinity and Arian, traveled from New Jersey after the Perry news took over their social-media feeds. “I’ve been watching since I was a teenager,” Trinity says. “Every two scrolls on TikTok was either a video of this corner or a fan edit. I like all the hugging compilations of Chandler and Joey.” Arian was particularly fond of the show’s depiction of male friendship: “That’s also why we wanted to come here today. It’s heartwarming to see a bunch of people who have nothing in common except that they watch the show and want to mourn the loss of someone. It’s really sweet.”
Another couple made the subway journey from an unspecified outer borough to check out the scene after work. “I felt like I genuinely knew Matthew over all these years of watching him and everything he’s been battling,” Ryan, 31, tells me. “It hurts so much more because of everything he was dealing with.” Cecilia, 32, found herself “heartbroken” over Perry’s death. “When I was younger I used to watch the show every day,” she says. “It was an escape from the world. I feel a hole right now. I actually felt like I knew him.”
The Little Owl, an upscale Mediterranean restaurant nestled on the corner’s ground level, has dealt with enthused Friends fans — good and bad — for years. While several signs are plastered on its windows to encourage visitors to “respectfully” congregate across the street to maintain a clear sidewalk, few grieving took notice as the lamppost tributes grew in scale. (I overheard one woman say she spent $75 on her bouquet, while another said she commandeered her work’s lamination machine to ensure her homage wouldn’t get ruined by the rain.) “It’s been a somber and reflective mood,” one Little Owl employee tells me. “It’s crowded, but the vibe is very respectful. We’ve gotten traffic from it, but we always get a lot of traffic because of Friends.” A resident of 20 Grove, however, muttered “dear God” under her breath while passing the crowd on her way home from work. “I find it really odd. Could they go to Los Angeles? He lived in L.A.,” she says while rummaging for her keys. “I’m not a fan of the show. It’s sad, it’s horrible, but he never lived here. They just shot the outside of a building. The apartment is not as big as it was on the show. It’s fake, you guys. There’s a war going on.”
Several hours later, the five surviving Friends cast members issued a collective statement to say they’re “going to take a moment to grieve and process this unfathomable loss” in private. Kelly Kopp, a tour guide and photographer, says he was disturbed by certain media responses to Perry’s death. “It’s crazy that the New York Post today published a piece online that was like, ‘David Schwimmer walked out of his apartment this morning.’ What dumb news was that?” He takes a beat, and we watch yet another person write a message of gratitude on the white cardboard. “The whole world seems so moved. Everybody loves Friends,” Klopp says. “It’s meaningful to come down here. I’m kind of getting chills talking about it.”
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