When Harry Met Sally – IAMNOTASTALKER

August 28, 2019August 27, 2019

The Sharper Image from “When Harry Met Sally”

Movies don’t typically surprise me, as far as locations go. But When Harry Met Sally has me absolutely shocked as of late! Ever since first seeing the romcom when it debuted back in 1989, I had been under the impression that it was lensed entirely in New York. The city is so woven into the fabric of the film – it is practically a character in the story! – that I couldn’t imagine even one frame of it being shot elsewhere. That all changed in 2016, though, when I contacted a crew member regarding a locale from a different production – the crab restaurant from A Few Good Men. As I chronicled in this post, said crew member not only informed me that the eatery I was looking for was in the San Pedro area, but that it had also appeared in When Harry Met Sally! Gobsmacked, I immediately started researching the matter further and discovered several more WHMS sites in Los Angeles, one of which being The Sharper Image where Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) karaoked with Harry Burns (Billy Crystal). Sadly, it’s no longer in business, but I figured it was still blog-worthy nonetheless.

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As has long been documented online, the exterior of The Sharper Image store at 4 West 57th Street in New York (which today houses an Ermenegildo Zegna boutique) was shown in an establishing shot at the top of the When Harry Met Sally karaoke scene. I had always assumed interior footage had been shot there, as well.

During my deep dive into the film’s L.A. locations, though, I was stopped in my tracks by a comment from a man named Colin Stone on the On the Set of New York’s When Harry Met Sally page who stated, “The interior scene of The Sharper Image was actually filmed at the Los Angeles (Wilshire and Grand) store.” A quick Google search for further information on the shop yielded absolutely nothing, which told me it was long since out of business. So I hopped over to Newspapers.com in the hopes of pinpointing its exact former address and found several ads (like the one below from 1986) noting its location as 601 Wilshire Boulevard, right on the corner of Wilshire and Grand, as Colin had said. (Also noted? The fact that it was a non-smoking store! Were people honestly allowed to smoke in retail shops back then??? I certainly don’t remember that as a kid!)

I ran out to stalk it shortly thereafter. At the time (July 2018), the site housed a print shop named LA Grafix.

Per Google Street View, it sits vacant today.

But back in the ‘80s, it was home to the mecca of all-things-yuppie, The Sharper Image. It was there that Harry and Sally headed to find a housewarming gift for their respective BFFs, Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie (Carrie Fisher). While shopping, the two test out a “singing machine” with a duet of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” and, in the process, run into Harry’s ex-wife, Helen Hillson (Harley Jane Kozak), and her new boyfriend, Ira Stone (Kevin Rooney), thereby setting Harry on a downward spiral. Quite a lot of the interior is shown in the scene (which you can watch here). Sadly though, other than the store seeming quite large (which goes against it being located in New York City), there really aren’t any identifying factors like doors or windows visible which would have helped me verify its use in the film. So I, of course, went straight to the source and tracked down Colin! As it turns out, he couldn’t have been nicer or more informative! Currently, he is a professional relaxation therapist and composer, but during The Sharper Image’s early days, he worked in the DTLA store creating health and fitness products, which is how he knew of its big-screen cameo.

I am absolutely kicking myself now for not having ventured inside LA Grafix during my stalk. I (wrongly) assumed that due to the passage of thirty years and the change in occupancy, the space would no longer look anything like it did onscreen. But as Colin wrote in his email, “I popped over to the location maybe 4 years ago and saw that it was a printing place (it was a Saturday and it was closed, but still in business then) and I was totally surprised and amazed to look in the windows and see they still had all the grey and burgundy fixtures, counters, displays, slatwall, everything, still intact from the TSI days!” Talk about a fail on my part!

I did manage to dig up some interior images of the place from a past real estate listing which corroborate Colin’s observations. As you can see, some of The Sharper Image’s grey slatwall, visible in When Harry Met Sally, was held over when the store closed.

There’s some more of it pictured below, though it is no longer grey.

The Sharper Image’s decorative triangular ceiling lining was retained by LA Grafix, as well.

You can also make some of it out here.

The Wilshire & Grand Sharper Image, which was the fifth of the company’s brick and mortar stores, opened its doors on November 12th, 1984. Founder Richard Thalheimer chose the location in a rather unconventional way. As he told the Los Angeles Times, “I just stand on street corners and count the number of people who walk by wearing suits and ties.” Though he looked at spots in Westwood, Beverly Hills and Century City, the corner of Wilshire and Grand fit the bill for his SoCal venture. As the article states, “There among the skyscrapers, he figured, were throngs of young professionals with a potential soft spot for gold-plated dumbbells, sculptured pillows designed to look like Porsche and BMW cars, guns that fire pulses of infrared light and even tummy exercisers, among other things.” Colin said the methodology was backed by the “San Franciscan logic that people shop where they work,” which turned out not to be the case in L.A. At least, not at the time. Today, DTLA is a bustling live/work community, but in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and even the early 2000s, the city virtually cleared out as soon as offices closed. And on weekends, it was practically a ghost town. Not exactly a fertile environment for retail. The downtown Sharper Image was apparently the lowest-performing in the entire chain. Per Colin’s recollection, the store closed in late 1992/early 1993, though the other outposts in Sherman Oaks and Beverly Hills remained open for a time. The company filed for bankruptcy in February 2008 and by the end of that same year, all of its retail stores had, sadly, closed, truly marking the end of an era.

Huge THANK YOU to Colin Stone for identifying this location and providing so much of the intel that appears in this post.

For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Sharper Image from When Harry Met Sally was formerly located at 601 Wilshire Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles. The space is currently vacant, but was home to the print shop LA Grafix when I stalked it last year.

July 21, 2017July 21, 2017

The Site of the “A Few Good Men” Crab Restaurant

To paraphrase Dorothy (Judy Garland) in The Wizard of Oz, our heart’s desires can often be found right in our own backyard. Even though I’ve seen the 1939 film about a gazillion times, I failed to heed Dorothy’s advice while searching for the crab restaurant Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore) took Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) to in fave movie A Few Good Men. The eatery had long been at the top of my Must-Find List, but because I always assumed it was located in the D.C. area where the 1992 courtroom drama was partially shot, I never put much energy into tracking it down. When I found out that the Grim Cheaper and I would be journeying to the East Coast last fall, though, I immediately sprang into action – and was shocked to discover that the locale was right in my own backyard the whole time. Or at least, it was. The restaurant has, sadly, since been razed, hence the odd photo above which shows roughly where it once stood.

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For those who don’t remember the scene (or perhaps have never seen the movie, which I can’t imagine is possible!), toward the middle of A Few Good Men, JoAnne shows up unexpectedly at Danny’s apartment and asks if she can take him out for dinner (it’s not a date, though!) at a good seafood place she knows. After razzing her quite a bit, Danny accepts the invite and the two head to a very East Coast-looking spot, where they proceed to eat crab off of a paper-covered table, with mallets as their only utensils.

The scene absolutely mesmerized me. Though I grew up in San Francisco, home to fish restaurants galore, until watching A Few Good Men, I had never seen crab eaten in such a way and wanted nothing more than to visit a place like that myself. So, on one of my first visits to D.C., back in 2001, I told my friends who lived in the area that I was not leaving town without going to a similar spot. (This was before I became a master stalker, so it never even occurred to me to try to track down the actual A Few Good Men restaurant during that trip.) My friends happily obliged and that meal is one of my fondest memories of the whole vacation. A page from my D.C. photo album is pictured below, showing us enjoying crab in all of our messy-handed glory.

For this trip, I decided I had to track down the real spot. Most sources I came across online claimed that the A Few Good Men scene was lensed at The Dancing Crab, a D.C. institution that had been around for more than 40 years, but was, sadly, shuttered in 2014. At the time of its closure, the restaurant was located at 4615 Wisconsin Avenue NW in the District’s Tenleytown neighborhood. The photos of the site posted on Yelp did not look anything like what appeared in AFGM, though. So I did some digging and learned that the eatery had moved locations in recent years. It was originally situated one storefront to the south at 4611 Wisconsin Avenue NW. Though I could not find any images of The Dancing Crab from its time at that spot, I could tell from looking at the outside of the building via Google Street View that it was not the right place. Two large windows are visible in the background of the AFGM scene, but the original Dancing Crab site (pictured below) has no such windows. So it was back to the drawing board. (Come to find out, The Dancing Crab does have an A Few Good Men connection, but more on that in a bit.)

I decided to start contacting crew members and got lucky when one responded right away. His reply to my query absolutely blew my mind. He informed me that the AFGM crab restaurant could not be found in Washington, D.C., but much closer to home, about 20 miles south of Los Angeles. As he explained, the eatery was a diner in the San Pedro area that had been redressed to look like a seafood restaurant for the shoot. Then he shocked me even further when he mentioned that the same site had also been used in When Harry Met Sally . . .! At the time, I was unaware that the 1989 romcom had done any filming in the L.A. area. My crew member friend did not remember the name or address of the diner, so I started looking into things and fairly quickly came across its whereabouts thanks to the book Shot On This Site, which stated that a scene from When Harry Met Sally . . . had been lensed at the Port Café in Wilmington. I was devastated to learn upon reading further that the eatery, once located at 955 South Neptune Avenue, just steps from the Port of Los Angeles, had since been demolished.

Scant information about the Port Café is available online, other than a few building permits and the short blurb below which was featured in the book Wilmington (Images of America). Originally built in 1941, the diner was mainly patronized by people who worked on the docks nearby. Aside from moving about 100 feet to the north in 1956 in order to accommodate the enlargement of a nearby terminal, little of the restaurant was changed over the years. Sadly, I could not locate any photos of the interior of the space to compare to screen shots from A Few Good Men.

So I popped in my When Harry Met Sally . . . DVD and was dismayed to see that the café, featured in the beginning of the movie in the scene in which Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) stop for a roadside meal during their drive from Chicago to Manhattan, did not look anything like the A Few Good Men crab restaurant. I started to think that maybe my crew member friend had gotten it wrong. Even though I knew that the space had been completely redressed for AFGM, I thought that some small detail at the very least would be recognizable from WHMS. I could not find a single matching element, though. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Enter my friend/fellow stalker Michael (you know him from his many fabulous guest posts). Michael’s eye is much keener than mine, so I asked him to take a look at the AFGM crab restaurant scene and compare it to the WHMS diner scene to see if I was missing anything. Sure enough, I was! As he noticed, a post and lintel (denoted with a purple circle below) and a beam (denoted with a green arrow) that match each other perfectly are visible in the respective scenes.

Upon taking another look at the two movies, I also spotted the post and lintel (albeit the opposite side of it) in an exterior shot in When Harry Met Sally . . .

And I noticed that the stainless steel/green/pink wall schematic (denoted with a purple bracket below) was the same in both flicks. (Love that the Port Café’s 955 address number is visible just to the right of Billy Crystal in the WHMS cap.)

The two movies (which were both coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, directed by Rob Reiner) really showcase different sections of the Port Café, which, along with the re-dressing of the space for A Few Good Men, makes it appear to be two totally distinct places. Helping with the visual manipulation is the fact that the restaurant seems to have had two counters (denoted with purple arrows below) and two kitchens (denoted with green arrows below) – one of each in the center of the space and one of each on the side.

Though the side counter is mainly featured in When Harry Met Sally . . . , Michael pointed out that we get brief views of the central counter, as well, when Harry and Sally enter and exit the restaurant.

The diagonal edge (denoted with purple arrows below) of the counter in A Few Good Men, the wood material, the metal piece running parallel to the floor (denoted with green arrows below) and the foot rest (denoted with yellow arrows below) all correlate to the center counter briefly seen in When Harry Met Sally . . . The green flooring visible in both movies is also a match.

Because I was having trouble envisioning how the Port Café was laid out (the two counters/kitchens really threw me), Michael was kind enough to draw up a diagram, which I transformed into the graphic below. The areas of the eatery utilized and visible in A Few Good Men are denoted in red (the initials TC and DM stand for Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, respectively), those utilized and visible in When Harry Met Sally . . . are blue (BC and MR stand for Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan), and those utilized and visible in both movies are teal.

When Harry Met Sally . . . provides us with some great views of the exterior of the Port Café.

I thought those views, along with the Historic Aerials image pictured below, would help me discern the Port Café’s exact former location when I went out to stalk it last week.

When I got to the area, though, I could not make heads or tails of anything and failed to take photos of the precise place. The picture below is the closest I got to the correct location. The Port Café was formerly located pretty much in the spot where the purple arrow is pointing.

Had I panned just a bit to the north, I would have captured its exact former site. Thank God for Street View!

The purple box outlines where the eatery was formerly situated.

In When Harry Met Sally . . ., Sally’s car travels north on Neptune Avenue before turning left (west) onto East Pier A Place and then into the Port Café parking lot. A very crude graphic showing her route is pictured below. The pink line depicts the path of Sally’s car.

Many of the tanks visible when she drives to the restaurant have been razed, as you can see from my photograph below (which, believe it or not, is pretty much a matching angle to the screen capture), though the tall white one on the left-most side still stands.

The tank situated on the side of the Port Café also still stands. It is pictured below, albeit from a different angle.

As I mentioned earlier, A Few Good Men does have a connection to the now defunct Dancing Crab restaurant. In his DVD commentary, Rob Reiner states that while filming in the D.C.-area, he took the cast and crew out for dinner at The Dancing Crab. The ambiance of paper-covered tables and mallet utensils made such an impression on him that he was inspired to place an AFGM scene in a similar setting. So when they got back to L.A., he did just that. And the rest, as they say, is history.

For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

Big THANK YOU to my friend Michael for helping me to identify this spot! Smile You can check out Michael’s many fabulous guest posts here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Port Café, aka the crab restaurant from A Few Good Men, was formerly located at 955 South Neptune Avenue in Wilmington. The spot where it once stood is denoted with a pink box below.

November 13, 2009December 6, 2013

The Central Park Boathouse Cafe

One of the locations that I was most excited about stalking while in New York last month was a little restaurant named the Central Park Boathouse Cafe, also known as the Loeb Boathouse. And although I’ve stalked this location once before – and even blogged about it – because the restaurant is not open for business during the winter months when we usually visit New York, I’d never been able to actually eat there. Until my most recent trip to the Big Apple, that is. This year, because my parents had only ever seen Manhattan during the cold winter months, we decided to change things up a bit and schedule our annual NYC vacation in early October. And I couldn’t have been more excited, as that meant that I’d FINALLY be able to grab a bite to eat at the famous Boathouse Cafe! 🙂

The first Central Park Boathouse was originally built in 1873 by park designer Calvert Vaux and cost $2,360 to construct. Vaux’s design consisted of a two-story Gothic inspired structure with open terraces lining the second level. For over eighty years, the Boathouse provided park-dwellers with a place to dock and store their vessels, grab a bite to eat, or just simply people-watch. But, in the 1950s it became clear that the eighty year old structure was in desperate need of a renovation. Thanks to a $305,000 donation from American Metal Company founder Carl M. Loeb and a $100,000 supplement from the Parks foundation, the original Boathouse was torn down and a new building was assembled in its place. The new structure, which was dubbed the Loeb Boathouse and was constructed in the neo-classical style by designer Stuart Constable, opened in March of 1954 and remains standing to this day. Although a bit more upscale than its predecessor, the Loeb Boathouse still provides visitors with a place to grab a bite to eat or an evening cocktail, rent a rowboat, or just simply take in the beautiful park scenery.

Because the Loeb Boathouse is so incredibly picturesque, it has, of course, been featured countless times over the years in various movie and television productions. With its lakeside setting, frequent rowboat passersby, and view of of the park and Manhattan skyscrapers in the distance, it’s really no wonder why producers have returned to film there time and time again.

Just inside the Boathouse’s main entrance is a large display of photographs from the many filmings that have taken place there over the years. So love it!

And, let me tell you, I just about died when I noticed an old picture of my girl Marilyn Monroe on the wall! As it turns out, though, according to the hostess that I talked to, the picture was not actually from a movie that was filmed on the premises, but was a candid that was taken while Marilyn rowed a boat one evening on the nearby Central Park Lake. You can just make out the outline of the Boathouse above her left shoulder in the photograph. So cute!

Ostensibly missing from the Boathouse’s picture wall, though, was a photograph of fave show Sex and the City, which filmed a VERY memorable scene from the Season 3 episode entitled “Cock A Doodle Do” at the restaurant. When I asked the hostess about it she said, “Sex and the City was filmed here? Really?” LOL LOL LOL In the episode, Carrie reluctantly agrees to a lunch date with Mr. Big at the waterside cafe, but, as often happens with those two characters, trouble, of course, ensues. Just before Carries enters the restaurant, she stops outside to make a quick call to Miranda on a nearby payphone. During the course of their conversation, Miranda makes Carrie promise that no matter what happens during the lunch she will NOT let Big kiss her. (On a side note – I tried to stalk Carrie’s payphone, but, unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found, which leads me to believe that it was either a prop that was brought in solely for the filming or it was a real payphone that was removed sometime after the filming took place. Such a bummer!)

Carrie then proceeds to enter the restaurant and spots Big waiting for her in the Bar & Grill area, which is pretty much the exact spot where my family and I sat while dining there. 🙂

Upon Carrie’s arrival, Big immediately goes to kiss her and, in backing away to avoid him, Carrie winds up falling into the water, pulling Big down with her. The two immediately collapse into fits of laughter until Carrie realizes that her Christian Dior purse has gone missing, at which point Big screams out “I’ll get it!” and then proceeds to heroically dive under the water to save the purse . . .

. . . with the whole rest of the restaurant looking on. LOL LOL LOL So love that episode! 🙂

So, of course, when I first visited the Cafe back in 2005, I just had to take a picture reenacting that scene. Too bad I couldn’t also reenact Carrie’s Richard Tyler dress from that scene, too! LOL 🙂

The Boathouse is also the spot where Sally lunched with her friends, one of whom was Carrie Fisher, at the beginning of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally.

In the more recent 27 Dresses, the Boathouse figures prominently as the place where Katherine Heigl’s character’s parents were married and where she also intends to someday hold her own wedding. As fate would have it, though, her younger sister gets engaged first and books the restaurant for her wedding instead. Towards the end of the movie, a scene takes place at the Boathouse in which Katherine attends a food tasting for the upcoming nuptials with her secret crush, who also just so happens to be her sister’s fiancé, Edward Burns.

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The Boathouse also appeared in the 2005 movie Little Manhattan and in an episode of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie. The upcoming Drew Barrymore/Justin Long movie entitled Going the Distance also apparently did some recent filming at the Boathouse and a fake Boathouse set was even built in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park this past summer for the Tina Fey/Steve Carell comedy Date Night.

Besides being a filming location, the boathouse has also long been a favorite dining spot for celebrities. In recent years, stars like Lindsay Lohan, Becky Newton, Orlando Bloom, and Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr have all been spotted eating at the Cafe. The Boathouse has also played host to numerous celebrity events, including the premiere after-parties for the movies Pride and Prejudice, Mamma Mia, and My Sister’s Keeper.

And while the Boathouse was at the very top of my list of locales to stalk during this year’s trip, as fate would have it, we actually got “stuck” there after being caught in a brief rainstorm while walking through Central Park. Because the Cafe was the nearest shelter we came to and because it was on my stalking list, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and ducked inside. 🙂 Thankfully the rainstorm didn’t last more than a few minutes and once it was over we immediately grabbed seats on the patio in the Boathouse’s Bar & Grill area (pictured above) and ordered up a few cocktails. And, I have to say, the place was A-MA-ZING! It is worth a visit just for the setting alone! I honestly can’t recommend stalking the Boathouse Cafe enough! It has to be one of my favorite places in all of New York. It is the absolute PERFECT place to spend a sunny – or even a not so sunny, as was the case for me – Manhattan afternoon.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Central Park Boathouse Cafe is located at East 72nd Street and Park Drive North in Central Park. The restaurant is seasonal and is only open from April through November. You can visit their website here.

December 22, 2008February 17, 2009

“I’ll Have What She’s Having!”

While in New York two weeks ago, I just had to drag my boyfriend to the deli where the famous “I’ll have what she’s having” scene took place in fave romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. I found this location a few years back in my favorite New York stalking book, New York: The Movie Lovers Guide , but had yet to stalk it. So I was super excited to make the trek during this trip. And while we didn’t get a chance to actually eat there on this vacation, I, of course, popped my head in and asked the cashier if it would be OK to snap a few pics of Harry and Sally’s table. He promptly pointed out where filming took place and told me “Sweetie, take all the pictures you want.” 🙂 I so love New Yorkers!

The deli, which is named Katz’s, is absolutely HUGE in person, much, much larger than it appeared onscreen. But other than the difference in size, the deli looks pretty much exactly as it did back in 1989 when the movie was filmed. And if there is any question as to where the famous WHMS scene took place, you need look no further than the large sign with the arrow hanging down from the ceiling of the restaurant which reads “Where Harry met Sally . . . hope you have what she had. Enjoy.” 🙂 Love it!!!! While I was stalking the famous deli, Harry and Sally’s table happened to be empty, so I was able to sit down and snap a quick pic. 🙂 A bit of WHMS trivia – it was director Rob Reiner’s mother, Estelle, who passed away this past October at the age of 94, who uttered the now famous line “I’ll have what she’s having”.

While Katz’s is best known for its appearance in WHMS, the deli has actually shown up in quite a few productions over the years. It was featured in the movie Donnie Brasco, in the scene where undercover agent Johnny Depp grabs a bite to eat with some of his FBI agent buddies. It was also featured in Across the Universe, Off Beat, and a Law and Order episode. Besides being a filming location, the deli is also a big time celebrity mecca and the walls are covered with thousands upon thousands of autographed head shots. Just a few of the stars who have visited the famous deli are John Voight, Mike Meyers, Elijah Wood, Ben Stiller and his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Liev Shriber, Keanu Reeves, and Henry Winkler aka “The Fonz”.

I highly recommend stalking Katz’s as it looks like a very cool place to grab a bite to eat. Who knows, you might even spot a celeb while dining. And the place was jam packed while I was there, so you know it’s gotta be good! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Katz’s Delicatessen is located at 205 East Houston Street in New York. If you’re in the neighborhood be sure to check out the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s Gift Shop located at 108 Orchard Street. It’s the BEST New York themed gift shop I’ve ever been to!!! My boyfriend could hardly drag me out of the place!! LOL