Artist Ria Sim is enchanting readers with her debut book, Dear New York, I Love You, a collection of annotated drawings of city scenes. It is organized by season and unfolds mostly in Manhattan, with the West Village at the epicenter.
As the title indicates, the book is a love letter to the city. “There’s this inexplicable connection, even if you’ve never set foot in the city,” Sim writes. “It’s a blend of the familiar and the unknown, all wrapped up in a single moment. From the countless stories told through movies, books, photographs, paintings, and commercials, there’s a sense of longing and connection and possibility.”
The book derives from Sim’s Instagram art, which includes an illustration of the West Village intersection of 11th and Bleecker Streets. This is precisely where the modern cupcake phenomenon was born. The intersection houses the original Magnolia Bakery, where a Sex and the City scene was filmed. The turn-of-the-millennium TV appearance catapult Magnolia to fame and cast cupcakes as symbols of urban glamour.
Sim captioned the artwork, “If you follow your heart just right, it will get you to New York City.”
Many Sex and the City viewers so fantasized. Those who moved to or visited New York often fed their desires at Magnolia, where the barrier to entry was lower than buying designer shoes or renting a West Village brownstone.
A Magnolia cupcake afforded a taste of the show’s aspirational lifestyle. It inspired Sex and the City fans to follow their hearts to 11th and Bleecker. In fact, the magnetism continues today. The bakery remains a mecca for out-of-towners and is a stop on the Sex and the City bus tour by On Location Tours, operating since 2002.
The city is widely considered the fifth character in Sex and the City. Its capacity to awe and surprise is the subject of a section in Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell, the official companion book. There Sarah Jessica Parker said, “In New York City, you walk out the door and you do not know what is going to happen. There’s such potential for poetry.”
Sim wanders with unrestrained glee. Inhibition surrenders to multisensory overjoy and raw emotion finds giddy expression. “I see New York with my heart,” she writes. “In my heart, I see its magic, its beauty.”
Sim is a site-specific interpreter of streetscapes, neighborhoods, people, shops, restaurants, weather, and wildlife. Her artwork weaves a cartographic narrative of geographic desire. She is deliriously seduced by the conceit of place.
Without intending to, Sim stands as an eloquent practitioner of psychogeography.
The discipline is a combination of psychology and geography. “Trying to define this obtuse field is an adventure itself, although a relatively straightforward definition includes ‘the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals,’” wrote the Village Voice.
In the early aughts, psychogeography conferences took place in the city. As co-organizers Christina Ray and Dave Mandl told Gothamist, “psychogeography is about exploring or experiencing the physical landscape in new ways: trying to find what’s marvelous, life-affirming, or at least exciting about seemingly mundane places—or transforming them to make them more marvelous, life-affirming, or exciting.
“There’s also a strong utopian element in psychogeography—there’s the impulse to create spaces that are more congenial, more exhilarating, more conducive to romance, etc., rather than seeing them as just conduits for the movement of commuters or consumer goods. There’s often an interest in chance and randomness, and the desire to study or subvert the paths and patterns we create as we walk through cities.”
In Utne Reader, Ray characterized psychogeography as “how we’re affected by being in certain places — architecture, weather, who you’re with — it’s just a general sense of excitement about a place.”
With this in mind, we return to Sim’s artwork of 11th and Bleecker Streets, cupcake ground zero.
Sim has illustrated the psychogeography of modern cupcake history. The fusion of place and sentiment is resonant. The one sentence about the one intersection does more than meets the eye. By pure happenstance, it defines the psychogeography of cupcakes.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 