The green cast-iron door at 20 North Moore Street still closes the same way it did in 1996, with a heavy metallic clap that echoes off the cobblestones. Paparazzi used to camp across the street and wait for that sound, because what followed was always worth the stakeout: Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy stepping onto the sidewalk in sunglasses and a tortoiseshell headband, JFK Jr. half a stride behind in a T-shirt and khakis, and the two of them walking a gauntlet of motor-driven shutters to get blueberry pancakes around the corner, or wherever you go when you’re the most watched couple in America and the entire neighborhood already knows your breakfast order.
In those years, Tribeca was an entirely different neighborhood. The waterfront was industrial rubble and chain-link. A top-floor loft on North Moore cost $600,000, and nobody on the block thought that was a bargain. John and Carolyn moved through this neighborhood on foot, on rollerblades, on bicycles, visible and exposed in a way that no public figure would volunteer for today and that Carolyn—who had spent seven years building a serious career at Calvin Klein, rising from a suburban mall sales floor to dressing Annette Bening and Diane Sawyer for runway shows, before the tabloids reduced her to a photograph—arguably never learned to survive. The restaurants they loved were not velvet-rope establishments with publicists and door policies. They were the places where the couple could sit in a back booth and eat without performing, or couldn’t, and went anyway because the food was good and the walk was short and the alternative was hiding in the loft until the photographers got bored, which they never did.
Evan Agostini/Liaison John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in their Tribeca neighborhood.
Ryan Murphy‘s FX series Love Story—more than 25 million streaming hours and counting since its February premiere, with Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon playing the couple and Naomi Watts as Jackie O—has turned those places into pilgrimage sites. Fans line up at Bubby’s, photograph the North Moore Street door and buy out the tortoiseshell headbands at a Greenwich Village pharmacy Carolyn used to walk to. Not everything made it. The Calvin Klein flagship at 654 Madison, where Carolyn helped build the house’s celebrity-dressing operation before the fame swallowed her whole, shuttered in 2019. Tribeca Grill closed in 2025. Da Silvano and Chanterelle are both gone. But 13 places the couple actually frequented are still open, still serving—and in most cases, still recognizable from the photographs.