13 Going on 30 | 444 Madison Avenue — Where Poise Went to Press

The hardest thing about waking up thirty is not the apartment. It is being handed a job you cannot remember earning. Jenna arrives at Poise magazine with no idea which elevator to take, and the building she walks into is 444 Madison Avenue, the setback tower on the west side of Madison between 49th and 50th Streets.

It is a knowing bit of casting. This block is Midtown magazine country: 444 Madison carried Newsweek's name for decades, and for most of the twentieth century the editors, ad men and photo desks that decided what America looked at worked within a few hundred feet of this corner. Poise is invented. The world around it is not. When Lucy Wyman talks about circulation and the competition, she is standing in the building where those conversations actually happened.

Nothing about the exterior announces itself. Limestone, bronze doors, a lobby you can see into and mostly cannot enter. That is the point — the film needed a place that looks like real work rather than a movie office.

Come at one o'clock on a weekday and watch the sidewalk. Half the people carrying coffee back to their desks look exactly as certain of themselves as Jenna is pretending to be.

Photo: the view toward Rockefeller Center taken from 444 Madison Avenue, from the New York Public Library's public-domain collection — roughly what the Poise windows would have looked out on.