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One afternoon this spring, I went to the West Village to meet a West Village Girl.

When I arrived at the whitewashed wine bar she chose, just two blocks from the brownstone stoop Carrie Bradshaw made famous, Miranda McKeon was journaling in her notebook and sipping a cup of green tea. She wore crimson leggings, a stack of candy-colored beaded necklaces, and a black sweatshirt that read SELF-EMPLOYED because she is a full-time influencer — or “creator,” as it is more polite to say in this part of town.

Online, the blonde, rosy-cheeked 23-year-old from New Jersey has over a million followers across TikTok and Instagram. She posts a lot, most often about her charmed life in the West Village: sweating it out at Pilates, treating herself to weeknight Froyo, drinking espresso martinis with her girlfriends. Over a photo of herself walking down the street, she wrote this past fall, “Life is too short. Wear the sparkly skirt!!!! Post the content!!!!! Text the boy!!!!! Leave your number on the table!!!!! Ask that girl to get coffee!!!! Wear cowboy boots year round if you love them!!!! Try! Fail! Love! Lose! Try again! Be embarrassing! Take a risk! Feel it alllllll while you’re here!!!!!”

It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl See All 

McKeon knew she wanted to rent in the West Village long before she moved to New York. In college at the University of Southern California, she started hearing from high-school friends, girls who had migrated here before her, that it was the place to live — a cobblestoned paradise where a young woman like herself could live an entire life within a block. During her final semester, last year, McKeon started obsessively combing StreetEasy for the perfect postgrad apartment and, to prepare for the move, watched Sex and the City for the first time. (She identifies as a Carrie with some of Miranda’s “girlboss energy”; she majored in entrepreneurship.) Now eight months in, she likes that the neighborhood reminds her of being back on campus insofar as she is constantly running into people she knows, though instead of classmates, they are girls she follows or who follow her. “I feel like a freshman in New York,” she said.

In person, McKeon seems, just as she does online, to be a remarkably well-adjusted and unjaded New Yorker. On weekends, she likes going out for what she calls a “three-drinker” (a nice dinner with her girlfriends with a self-imposed three-cocktail minimum). She knows the names of the important restaurants (the Corner Store, American Bar, Dante), a couple of age-appropriate bars (Bandits, Bayard’s, the Spaniard), and even some of her neighbors. “I went out to dinner with two girls last night, both of whom live on my street,” she told me. “We met through social media. It’s nice.”

Maybe her only complaint so far is her apartment. Online, it appears bright and roomy, decorated with string lights. Off-camera, she told me, there have been the occasional cockroaches, leaks, and — just this morning — a strange brown substance that dripped out of the brick wall onto her roommate’s comforter. She’s planning to resign the lease next year anyway. “Everything’s creaky. And … I love it!” McKeon said, slapping the table between us with both hands. “I could stay here forever.”

“There’s a cult mentality” to the neighborhood, McKeon continued. It’s true that many of the young women passing by the bar looked like her clones. They move through the neighborhood in packs, wearing the local uniform: a white tank, light-wash jeans, and Sambas, an iced matcha latte in hand, and hair slicked back into a tight ponytail. It was chilly, so several of them, McKeon cheekily pointed out through the window, were also wearing Aritzia Super Puffs, as she was, in the color matte pearl. “I feel like everyone else here in some way,” McKeon told me. “That’s the point of it, I guess.”

The neighborhood has, in recent years, transformed into a fabulous theme park for young women of some privilege to live out their Sex and the City fantasies, posting and spending their mid-20s away. They all seem to keep impressive workout routines (“Hot this and hot that,” McKeon said), have no shortage of girlfriends, and juggle busy heterosexual dating schedules. (The boys they consort with tend to be of the fratty variety.) They work in finance, marketing, publicity, tech — often with active social-media accounts on the side. They have seemingly endless disposable income. They are, by all conventional standards, beautiful. Occasionally, they are brunettes. Whatever their political beliefs, their lives seem fairly apolitical; as one 27-year-old lawyer on a walk with her best friend, both wearing identical puffer jackets, succinctly put their collective interests to me one day in April, “Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.” (They may be more political than they appear: “You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights,” said one person who lives in the neighborhood.)

This isn’t the first time a generation of socially ambitious young women has descended on the West Village and, as one fashion executive explained to me with just a hint of an eye roll, “made the neighborhood their whole personality,” fundamentally changing it along the way. If Sex and the City washed out the last of the neighborhood’s bohemians two decades ago and turned the West Village into a celebrity playground where real adults with real incomes live, the pandemic turned it into something else entirely: a bustling sorority house. “Everyone has the same mind-set. We’re here, we’re young, we’re single. Let’s go out and have fun and be ourselves. Work hard. Play hard,” said a new arrival from Texas with blonde highlights while polishing off a bottle of rosé with her girlfriends one afternoon. They’re basic, they told me proudly. “Basic isn’t a bad thing,” a crew of Cosmo drinkers at Anton’s, just down the street, elaborated. “There’s a reason everyone wants to be like that.” (There’s a sense lately that the entire city, or at least much of downtown Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn, is going the way of the West Village. “They’re everywhere,” almost everyone I talked to for this story told me.)

A so-called real New Yorker might survey a neighborhood overtaken by this homogenized mass and scoff at what was once a haven for artists and gays, admiringly described to me by multiple people as like Charleston, Georgetown, or “Southie” in Boston. But to the actual people living in those places, these young women, who broadcast their lives like reality television to their millions of followers, may just be the ultimate New Yorkers. They seem to be enjoying their city more than the rest of us do. “Finding a new restaurant to have an Aperol spritz and hang out? That’s a new level of enlightenment,” said Kit Keenan, an influencer and former Bachelor contestant who helped put this new version of the neighborhood on the map. I couldn’t help but wonder, Are the West Village Girls doing something right?

In the summer of 2021, Serena Kerrigan, then a 27-year-old former Refinery29 producer, moved to the neighborhood from the Lower East Side. Once there, Kerrigan started influencing, styling herself on TikTok as a Samantha Jones type and giving her hundreds of thousands of followers — whom she called her “gorgeous, gorgeous girls” — dating advice. (She popularized the Gen-Z catchphrase “Do it for the plot.”) The neighborhood, one of the wealthiest in the city, felt empty, some of its residents presumably having fled for the Hamptons or Connecticut (save for the diehards holed up in rent-stabilized apartments). Just by being there and posting about it, Kerrigan rebranded the West Village as a haven for single women, dubbing the West Side Highway “Club West Side Highway” and using the newly opened restaurant American Bar as a sort of local country club. Later that year, the restaurant put her name on the menu; you could order the chopped salad “SFK style,” meaning with a negroni. On a recent night when I visited, a group of girls had taken over an entire section, all of them wearing black fascinators as if attending a funeral. The hostess explained that it was a young woman named Mallory’s “RIP to my 20s” birthday dinner.

Kerrigan wasn’t the only up-and-coming influencer posting furiously through the pandemic and giving the neighborhood a younger, blonder complexion. Keenan lived there with her mother, the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley. While Kerrigan posted about hookups, Keenan posted cooking content, but the background was the same: the West Village, made legible for women fresh out of a Big Ten school. She posed with a Blank Street matcha on a stoop; in front of the pastry case at Bar Pisellino; with her iPhone outside the wine bar St. Jardim. Everything in both Keenan’s and Kerrigan’s accounts was calibrated to be just the right level of accessible yet enviable: fast fashion and white sneakers, Solidcore workouts and Aperol spritzes, all set against a picture-perfect backdrop of New York City, recognizable from everyone’s favorite middlebrow television shows. Among its other most attractive attributes: The Friends apartment is there, and so is Cornelia Street, which Taylor Swift featured on Lover in 2019.

The young women who follow Kerrigan and Keenan — fellow New Yorkers and transplants alike — soon flooded the neighborhood. So many that it became a memeable stereotype: “the West Village Girl.” In a post last September, a TikToker named Kayla Trivieri summed up the type under the caption “POV: you’re on a date with a girl from the west village.” The monologue went like this: “So what are you into?” “Pilates, Cartier bracelets, Blank Street, Hugo spritzes, Reformation, and my dachshund …” “What kind of music do you like?” “Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, and Morgan Wallen once in a while.” When I asked Trivieri about the send-up recently, the native Canadian told me she became familiar with the type before she even moved to the States. “She was the cultural Zeitgeist on TikTok,” Trivieri said. “It became this almost idealized persona. I felt like people in Toronto were even dressing like that in head-to-toe Pilates gear.” (The influencer Tinx sells a $75 crewneck that reads RICH MOM WEST VILLAGE.) To put New York youth culture into high-school terms, Kerrigan said the West Village Girls are “the Plastics, the Mean Girls without the meanness.”

Now, years after she started posting from the neighborhood, Keenan said, she often has to wait on line to get coffee at her favorite shop, Fellini. “I’m thinking about how that’s kind of my fault,” she added. “I’ve recommended it a million times. But it’s a beautiful sharing of information, so I can’t be annoyed.” (The lines, she said, are a good place to meet friends.) Kerrigan said the West Village is now filled with “young powerhouse women with vision boards,” ambitious zoomers who idolize Alex Cooper and Carrie Bradshaw in equal measure. The appeal is “the main-character energy you get when you’re in the West Village,” which feels, she said, like a “movie set.” The irony, of course, is that when everyone’s a main character, is anyone?

In the late ’90s and early aughts, when the luxury industry was thriving and Sex and the City was in its first run, the West Village was an if-you-know-you-know kind of place for the fashion set — publicists, editors, and stylists who had just arrived from the provinces and were similarly hoping to have a good time, get to work, and find their Mr. Big in the process.

Back then, there were more mom-and-pop shops, affordable rentals, and a thriving gay scene. “It felt super-electric, kind of like a college town,” said Bonnie Morrison, a former publicist and magazine editor (living in the West Village, she added, was a positive attribute in her first interview at Condé Nast). Within convenient walking distance was the Meatpacking District, then the center of Manhattan nightlife. “It was all about coming home at five in the morning, coming home in Manolos on the cobblestoned streets,” said the British socialite Lucy Sykes, who was then working at Marie Claire. “There was blood everywhere” — there were still slaughterhouses in Meatpacking. “It was amazing.”

To hear anyone of that generation tell it, the area was all about the party. “You really did not know what could happen. The DJ changes the music and then all of a sudden ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ is playing because Axl Rose just walked in,” said Morrison. After the club, you could hit the all-night diner Florent with the off-duty drag queens. “I’d come home and somebody would be passed out in my bed with Sky Ferreira,” said Savannah Engel, a fashion publicist who moved to the neighborhood in 2009. “I’d wake up on a Tuesday and there’d be ten people passed out in my apartment. We’d all be in black” because that’s what they were required to wear to work. “It was fabulous.” Her rent cost around $900 a month. Annelise Peterson, a former Calvin Klein publicist, called the Greenwich Avenue Equinox the Chic-quinox: “Everybody was there at six in the morning so they could be skinny in their sample sizes for Patrick McMullan,” the party photographer.

Over the years, the fashion followed the fashionistas, and so did the Sex and the City–loving tourists. By 2006, Bleecker Street had transformed into a proper shopping destination. Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Intermix, and Brunello Cucinelli opened stores — BLEECKER’S BECKONING, the New York Post squawked — and Maison Margiela and Juicy Couture soon followed. Jacobs ended up opening six locations. It became a high-end outdoor mall for window-shopping if not actual shopping. “The colorful bohemia has crossed the tracks,” read a 2007 New York Times report, “leaving a respectable neighborhood of high rents, big mortgages and little children. The children replaced the gays — the men have left for Chelsea, the women for Park Slope.”

Then came the ultrarich, gobbling up the newly sanitized neighborhood’s real estate. Rupert Murdoch bought his 25-foot-wide townhouse for $25 million in 2015; the next year, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick purchased two adjacent townhouses for $34.5 million, later combining them into a megamansion. Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn became a “celebrity playground” of “idling SUVs,” as one person put it. The Post termed a corner of the neighborhood near West 11th Street “the real Billionaires’ Row,” citing Mets owner Steve Cohen, Chipotle founder Steve Ells, and former Facebook president Sean Parker as residents. But the retail scene couldn’t handle the rising rents. By 2017, most of the storefronts on Bleecker Street were vacant. “The landlords started jacking up the prices,” said Rowley, who purchased her building in 2004. “That’s when everybody left.”

The pandemic offered an opportunity for a cultural reset, especially for retailers. A start-up called Leap, which helps online-only brands find and operate their first brick-and-mortar, began scooping up tranches of empty addresses on Bleecker. The company currently leases 11 stores in a four-block stretch. It then staffs and operates the spaces for its brands, including Frankies Bikinis and Set Active. “Any time we go into launching a cluster of stores, we think about whether or not it’s an area we can grow,” said Amish Tolia, Leap’s co-founder. “It’s sort of like dominoes,” Tolia said. “Energy begets energy.” (The company now operates more than 100 stores total, mostly in trendy but touristy shopping areas like Abbot Kinney in Los Angeles and Armitage in Chicago.) Leap had evidence that its bet on the neighborhood would pay off: Several of its brands were already shipping often to apartments in the neighborhood. It was a strategy Brookfield Properties had already been pursuing pre-pandemic, buying up seven storefronts. (It sold them last year for $20.25 million.) “We merchandised to support the market,” said a Brookfield representative. “I don’t think it’s accidental that our businesses were very female oriented. We took advantage of noticing who was patronizing this community.” As for the apartments the businesses were shipping to, the average one-bedroom in the neighborhood is now $5,995 a month, though apartments often cost much more. A dingy one-bedroom can easily go for $7,500 (expensive but doable on a finance salary or with help from parents). Most of the young women who approach Compass agent Heather Domi opt to live nearby instead, in Chelsea or Hudson Square, she said: “If the girls aren’t living in the West Village, they’re consuming the West Village.” (Still, data shows that more 25-to-34-year-olds moved to the West Village between 2019 and 2023 than any other age group.)

Now the area has been remade in their image. Every other storefront seems to be a coffee shop, a gelato shop, or a med spa. Everything that isn’t a bar is called one: There’s BeamBar (for teeth whitening), a “charm bar” (for build-your-own bracelets), and Hair Repair Bar (for blowouts). There’s a Stoney Clover Lane, which hawks monogrammed makeup bags; a TikTok-friendly candy shop; and the ultragirlie, ultrasuccessful clothing brand LoveShackFancy. In November, Frankies Bikinis, selling a Bella Hadid–collaboration two-piece, opened just in time for resort season. Magnolia Bakery’s signature banana pudding briefly came matcha-flavored. The storefronts are filled with fake pink flowers, presumably to take pictures in front of. Signs placed on the sidewalks outside seem made to beckon the girlies inside. PRETTY RUDE IT’S NOT 80 DEGREES OUTSIDE, read one in front of a boutique in April. Outside Joe & the Juice: THIS WEEK BEEN SO ROUGH MY COFFEE NEEDS COFFEE.

“We’re trying to figure out how to manage the amount of traffic we’re getting in stores, especially on weekends,” said Lili Chemla, the founder of Leset, another Leap store. “The racks will be empty because everyone’s trying almost everything on in the dressing rooms. It’s crazy. It looks like a Black Friday thing.” In April, I visited a new “jewelry bar” on Bleecker called Ana Luisa Jewelry, an influencer brand that specializes in affordable rings and earrings. It opened in the corner store that used to be Marc by Marc Jacobs and, more recently, Sarah Jessica Parker’s shoe store before the brand shut down last year. Ana Luisa won the location in an aggressive bidding war. The store opened at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday, the co-founder told me, and sold $1,000 worth of inventory in the first 30 minutes. “We know our customer. They come here and then to Magnolia Bakery,” he said. “After COVID, this is the neighborhood that’s rebounded the fastest.” This month, another jewelry store will open 230 feet away.

The original West Village Girls — those who have remained in the neighborhood and didn’t jet off to Greenwich or to a classic six uptown — aren’t entirely pleased with their new neighbors.

One Tuesday in April, I met Kim Vernon, a former Calvin Klein executive who bought a loft in the neighborhood in 1997. “I don’t want to be an old-lady bitch, but this is the pinnacle of what happened to this fucking neighborhood,” she said when we sat down at Bar Pisellino, which even at 2 p.m. was packed with young women ordering spritzes and pastries. “I see less gay men and, more than anything, groups of four or five girls,” she added. “They’re always talking at a high, high pitch. It is so intolerable. It’s so unpleasant.” Not to mention it’s impossible to get a table at I Sodi or Via Carota these days, two once-neighborly Italian restaurants that were tumbled through the TikTok recommendation machine and came out nearly unrecognizable with lines of day-trippers waiting down the block at all hours of the day. “I used to go to I Sodi when they had an answering machine. Someone would call you back. It wasn’t super-popular,” said Vernon. The last time she tried to have dinner with a friend, she was quoted a three-hour wait.

Another common complaint is the neighborhood’s current pedestrian experience. In the afternoons, on her way to Sant Ambroeus, Vernon occasionally passes Carrie’s stoop to give the influencers a talking-to: “I say to them, ‘Excuse me, is that your property? That’s actually trespassing.’ ” Earlier this year, the resident was granted permission to install a gate to deter them from making what has become a sort of pilgrimage. (TikTok is filled with recommendations for other neighborhood backdrops to take photos in front of if you get shooed away from this one.)

A curly-haired 20-something sat down across the bar from us, opened a book, and ordered a bowl of olives and a negroni. Vernon nearly whooped with pleasure. “This is a rarity now! A nice, well-dressed woman having a snack on her own.”

Another chief complaint among the originals is that these new West Village Girls don’t seem to be having enough fun (or, at least, their idea of fun). For one, “back then, it wasn’t about getting the right workout look,” said Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, the founder of Lingua Franca. Less green juice, less hot yoga, more walks of shame. “It wasn’t so health conscious,” said Rowley, noting that her morning walks on the West Side Highway weren’t always as crowded as the New York City Marathon. “It was the party-girl West Village. People didn’t walk around in their leggings and sneakers.”

At her store, Rowley said, it used to be “a lot of moms buying stuff. Now everybody’s 25 buying our stuff, which I love. If I’m in there, they’re like, ‘Ahhh, oh my God, I love you.’ I’m like, Really? I’m so surprised.”

The old bars and restaurants are also adjusting to the new whims and tastes. “I have regulars who come in all the time and say, ‘What happened?’ It’s just an army of Levi’s and white tank tops,” a bartender at Bayard’s, a newly popping but long-standing Irish pub on Hudson Street, told me. (Behind the bar, she showed me a box of lost phones and another box of abandoned clothes, which she lugs to Housing Works once a month.) In the fall of 2023, the restaurant and bar Cowgirl decided to convert one of its margarita machines into one for frozen espresso martinis, “the new cocaine,” the owner joked to me. “You can see the new group coming in. I don’t know where they’re getting their money from, but they have money,” she said. “Especially on the weekends, everyone’s 27. That magic number. We never had demand like this.” The Spaniard, a cocktail bar by day and a shockingly rowdy hookup spot by night, had to hire an entire security team after what one manager described as a “mass exodus” of the older, tamer clientele. (Its top-three sellers now are spicy margaritas, espresso martinis, and Aperol spritzes, which are pre-batched into kegs.) At L’Artusi, a high-end Italian restaurant, the owner, Kevin Garry, told me he’s selling less expensive wine post-pandemic. “Previously, the crowd was kind of that classic West Village type. Late 30s, early 40s, Masters of the Universe with good jobs and no kids,” he said. “A $150 bottle of wine doesn’t compare to a vodka-soda.” As a waitress at La Bonbonniere, an old-school diner that has been around since the 1930s, said bluntly, “The old people? They die. Now it’s young people with the social media. After corona, pew! The internet!”

Needless to say, no one would go on the record getting too snarky about any of this; it all makes for good business. And some former West Village Girls admitted eventually that in their descendants they could see their younger selves. “I think they’re probably doing what I did when I was 20. This is where they want to go around and get drinks and run into people and look cool,” said Hruska MacPherson. “It’s like Disneyland for them. Let’s let them be young and have fun, even if we cringe at it. Let’s let them have their Aperol spritzes. We were also discovering ourselves.” Annelise Peterson echoed this thought: “We were discovering ourselves. I stayed down there until my ex-husband told me it was time to move to the Upper East Side. Things change; things never stay the same. What the West Village will be in 20 years might be something very different. The influencer is fickle.”

It’s easy to get reflective after a few brunchtime cocktails. “Was I one of these little fuckers?” Savannah Engel wondered aloud to me one Sunday after Bloody Marys at Cafe Cluny. The question seemed to stump her. Two girls hauled yoga mats past us, and she said, “I like to kick them out of the way.”

It was a beautiful spring weekend, and as the neighborhood is most days of the week, but especially on Saturdays and Sundays and especially when good weather calls for day-drinking the scaries away, the West Village was glutted with girlies. If I hadn’t spent so much time there recently, I might have been shocked to pass three stoops in a row all occupied by young women staging photo shoots.

I walked over to the West Side Highway, the quad. On one of the piers, I met a collection of thin blonde women in pink, red, and black puffer jackets and Sambas. They were lying on the turf, staring straight up at the sky, their sunglasses, for once, off. They told me they work in finance and marketing and had just moved to the neighborhood after graduating from Washington and Lee University. “The girls that we knew from college who moved to New York before us told us to go to the West Village, and we just kind of trusted them,” said one. Their boyfriends followed. “Our guy friends live nearby too. They all work in finance. They do what we do; we live parallel lives. They’re boys; we’re girls. We see them all the time. They do their dinner; we do ours.”

Still, despite the good time they’ve been having, they told me they can’t quite imagine staying in New York forever. This was like their study abroad. “I don’t think I’ll raise kids here or anything like that,” said the pink puffer. “I’ll probably leave within five years.”

Just then, a group of two dozen women in matching leggings came jogging by, chitter-chattering over their huffing and puffing. At the front of the pack was Miranda McKeon, wearing those same crimson leggings, leading her run club. I decided to join them.

“How did people find this?” she yelled to the ladies behind her.

“TikTok! TikTok! TikTok!” they shouted back.

“What’s the age range here?”

“23! 23! 23!”

Their three-miler finished, and with no three-drinkers on the books, they were all headed to a coffee shop. “Miranda’s a beep-bop girl too,” a brunette who works in marketing and just moved here from Georgetown told me. A what? “Like, we like to beep-bop around.” I asked the group, What are young people in New York looking for? “Connection! Experiences! The third place!” In a city that can be, especially upon arrival, terrifyingly isolating, it’s clear these young women have found something that eludes most of us. “I’ve been really trying to do more in-person things,” said McKeon. “Honestly, it makes me feel more connected, purposeful. Online stuff can feel frivolous. Materialistic. It’s nice seeing real people.” Upon our arrival, several older millennials who appeared to be co-working at the shop grimaced, quietly packed up their laptops, and left.

As the day went on, the girlies multiplied. At the Spaniard, the day was just getting going. A trio of ladies sat at the bar, alternately catching up over white-wine spritzers and taking brief breaks to absent-mindedly look at their phones. After they snapped a selfie, I observed one of them, in the course of a minute, check a group chat, swipe through a dozen Instagram Stories, clock in to her Hinge account (no new messages), then throw a few heart reacts into yet another group chat. When I introduced myself, she told me she settled here two years ago after a breakup; it’s a good place to be single. “Everyone’s so attractive. It’s electric on the weekends,” she said. Plus: “We’re all the same! We’re all doing the same thing! It’s not a bad thing. It’s community!”

“Aren’t we living it?” they told me. “Are we doing it right or what?”

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