“Be Good to the Roxy!”: How Ryan Murphy’s ‘Love Story’ Gets ’90s New York Exactly Right

Before Bloomberg, before the High Line, before the $18 cocktail, there was a different New York City. One filled with phone booths and newsstands and Gray’s Papaya on practically every grimy street corner — a New York where getting your bicycle ripped off was almost as much a rite of passage as stomping on your first cockroach.

We’re referring to, of course, Manhattan circa the 1990s, arguably the height of human civilization — and an historic period that’s been meticulously resurrected in Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. Every detail of that iconic era — the flip phones, the glass-brick-filled lofts, the bustling magazine kiosks (remember those?) — seems to have been teleported from the not-so-distant past onto the screen, right down to the “Be Good to the Roxy and the Roxy Will Be Good To You” sign at the long-gone Roxy nightclub in Chelsea (which was recreated for the series in Brooklyn,…