13 Going on 30 | New York Public Library — The Steps That Saved the Magazine

Jenna's rescue plan for Poise is the idea of a thirteen-year-old, which is why it works: stop photographing models and photograph the people who actually read the magazine. Friends. Neighbours. Faces with histories. The film stages that shoot on the Fifth Avenue steps of the New York Public Library's main branch, and no other set of stairs in Manhattan would have carried it as well.

Carrère & Hastings finished the building in 1911, white Vermont marble facing Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, with Patience and Fortitude — the two lions — holding the ends of the terrace. What makes the location right is not the grandeur. It is that these steps are the most democratic seating in the city. Nobody checks your ticket. Students eat lunch beside tourists beside people who have simply run out of energy, and they have done so for over a century.

That is precisely the argument Jenna is making inside the plot: the interesting picture is the one with strangers in it.

Sit near the top on the 41st Street side for twenty minutes and count how many people photograph each other there. Her idea was never original. It was just true, and this building has been proving it since before the film existed.