13 Going on 30 | 51 Fifth Avenue — The Apartment She Wished Herself Into

Jenna Rink falls asleep thirteen years old in a New Jersey basement and wakes up thirty in an apartment she has no memory of paying for. The building the film uses for that morning is 51 Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner of East 12th Street, and the choice tells you what kind of adulthood the movie is selling. This is not a glass tower with a lobby full of security desks. It is a pre-war co-op on the lower stretch of Fifth, the part that runs down toward Washington Square rather than up toward the department stores — an address a magazine editor in 2003 would have wanted precisely because it looks like it has always been there.

Everything the scene needs is on the outside. The limestone base, the awning, the doorway a barefoot Jenna eventually bolts through in a towel while a doorman pretends not to notice. Greenwich Village begins one block south and Union Square is three blocks north, so the sidewalk here is never empty and never quite a tourist crowd either.

Stand at the light on 12th and Fifth. It holds long enough to look up and count the floors, which is the only part of this apartment anyone gets to keep.

Photo: lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, a few blocks from the building (Wikimedia Commons).