13 Going on 30 | MacDougal Street — The Newsstand Sabotage

Somewhere in the middle of the film Jenna does something no thirty-year-old executive would risk in public. She stops at a street newsstand, glances around like a kid stealing candy, and quietly shuffles every copy of the rival magazine Sparkle behind the copies of Poise. It is the clearest evidence yet that a teenager is still driving.

The scene was shot at MacDougal Street and West 3rd, at the seam where New York University spills into the older Greenwich Village. It is a good corner for petty crime. Nobody here is watching anybody: the falafel counters and coffee windows keep a permanent queue, Washington Square Park is a block north with its chess tables and its noise, and the sidewalk moves too fast for anyone to register a woman rearranging a magazine rack.

Newsstands on this corner have changed hands and shapes over the years, and print magazines no longer stack six deep the way they did in 2003. The block itself has not lost its character — it is still loud, still young, still cheap in the right places.

Buy something small here and stand with it for a minute. The corner rewards loitering, which is exactly what the scene is about.