American Psycho | 2 East 88th Street — The Address of a Man Nobody Misses

Paul Allen has the better apartment, the better business card, and the better table at Dorsia, and for those crimes he is killed with an axe on a sheet of newspaper. Afterwards Bateman lets himself into Allen's place and finds it immaculate, unlived-in, and — the joke that lands hardest — not missed by anyone. His fiancée assumes he is in London. His colleagues assume he is being difficult.

The exterior is 2 East 88th Street, at the corner of Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side. It is a pre-war apartment house of exactly the type the novel is fixated on: limestone base, a canopy to the kerb, a doorman, and a Fifth Avenue address that in 1987 was already beyond the reach of anyone who merely earned a salary. Central Park begins across the road. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim spirals up the avenue one block north at 89th, and the Metropolitan Museum sits six blocks south — this is the stretch known as Museum Mile, the most expensive residential frontage the city has.

It is a private building. You look at it from the pavement, and that is the correct distance anyway.

Stand on the corner of Fifth and 88th on a weekday afternoon and count how many people go in and out of the door in ten minutes. On a good day it is two. That emptiness is the point of Paul Allen's apartment, and the street still supplies it for free.