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\u201cLike any great love, \u201c Taylor Swift<\/a> once sang about New York<\/a>, \u201cit keeps you guessing. \u2026 But you know you wouldn\u2019t change anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Well, at least she wouldn\u2019t. New Yorkers have long had what might be called an indifferent relationship with Swift, if not an overtly skeptical one.<\/p>\n When the pop star and Travis Kelce<\/a> get married<\/a> at the city\u2019s most famous building Friday night, it will cement, at least one gets the sense in her mind, the romance she has for the city. Saying \u201cI do\u201d right there on 34th Street in the heart of it all (if behind so many curtains<\/a> one can\u2019t really be sure) gives her the version of the fairy-tale ending she has long imagined. One also gets the sense that in her mind it also gives\u00a0us\u00a0the fairy tale\u00a0we\u00a0have long imagined \u2014 \u201cTaylor Swift! Married right here! At our most cherished landmark!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Swift has been knocking on Gotham\u2019s door evermore, seeking to join our pantheon of storied musicians associated with the city, our Lou Reeds and Lady Gagas and every third jazz great. But despite first buying a place here a dozen years ago and releasing that ode to the five boroughs, \u201cWelcome to New York,\u201d later that same year, matters have not gone as smoothly as she might have hoped.<\/p>\n At first New Yorkers (and I speak not for 10 million people but a vibe) were amused, even endeared, that she came here from Nashville. When Swift went on David Letterman \u2014 himself an easily naturalized New Yorker \u2014 in 2014 and\u00a0told us<\/a>\u00a0that she had recently gotten an \u201capartment in Tribeca after obsessing over\u201d moving here for a year, we smiled. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018You don\u2019t understand, you have to go there now! You have to go to New York! Just drop what you\u2019re doing! You have to go there, it\u2019s amazing, it\u2019s the greatest place ever,\u2019\u201d she told Letterman she\u2019d been telling everyone, relatably.\u00a0Who was this tall blond enigma, long established as a country star and newishly minted as a pop star, who also wanted to be a part of it? We were open. The city had a history of assimilating such yearners, most notably Madonna, Swift\u2019s forerunner and her own Middle American transplant success story. (That Madonna released a new record<\/a>, complete with Times Square pop-up, on the same day as Swift\u2019s wedding underscores the point.)<\/p>\n Of course, Madonna came as a teenager with nothing but a scrappy dream. Swift was already well established upon her arrival \u2014 that \u201capartment in Tribeca\u201d was two adjacent penthouses that cost $20 million. Her crowing about New York could veer from cute to clueless, and sometimes became a little like the infamous celebrity who gets pregnant, \u201cexpounding on things everyone already knows as if they were the first to discover them,\u201d as Daily Show co-creator (and New York stalwart) Lizz Winstead\u00a0notably said\u00a0<\/a>about one of our other landmarks, the\u00a0New York Times.\u00a0When Swift took to TikTok\u00a0to explain<\/a>\u00a0our actual most cherished building \u2014 \u201cYou can get almost anything in a bodega; bodegas are our friends\u201d \u2014 it became cringily clear that this relationship was not likely to go so smoothly.<\/p>\n In the years since, the concerns we had intensified. Swift made her fair share of appearances out in New York, but usually only at\u00a0trendy West Village restaurants<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Meatpacking clubs<\/a>, more Leo DiCaprio than Leo Durocher. Swift is someone we became a lot more likely to see at\u00a0The Corner Store<\/a>\u00a0(a two-week-wait Soho place that denies entry to anyone not in \u201cSmart Elegant attire\u201d) than a, you know, corner store.<\/p>\n Yes, there\u2019s an argument that this is what the city itself has become, a place for the wealthy and the $15 latte, a pit stop for the downtown influencers and the midtown tourists from whom money can be extracted before the trip back to Barcelona (a belief confirmed by one look at the World Cup bewildered currently wandering through). But despite the disappearing of a certain kind of New Yorker from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, they still exist everywhere else \u2014 and, at any rate, even the gentrified carry the bullshit detector.<\/p>\n In truth, plenty of New Yorkers are both privileged and come from elsewhere, but still fall into the rhythm and the patois that has long defined the city. The most recent example lies with none other than New York\u2019s leader, Zohran Mamdani, who arrived as an elementary-schooler and grew up wealthy on Riverside Drive but understands innately how to talk Knicks and the right bodega order.<\/p>\n The answers to the question of what makes a true New Yorker are many. (It certainly is NOT, as JLo\u2019s recent assessment\u00a0had it<\/a>, that you have to be born here.) But it does come with a kind of authenticity, an easy folding into the city\u2019s rhythms, especially after you\u2019ve stayed a few years.<\/p>\n And Swift has never done that, unlike so many of our beloved celebrities both born and naturalized, our Spike Lees and Julianne Moores and Timoth\u00e9e Chalamets, our Robert De Niros and Sarah Jessica Parkers and Jerry Seinfelds. Those people might be on the street or at the next table at the coffee shop or just do things that suggest someone who had taken to the very close-quarter casual vibe that presumably is why someone would want to live here in the first place. Swift never seemed a part of the fabric.<\/p>\n Sure, the paparazzi and stalkarazzi constrain her; we can\u2019t pretend that\u2019s not real. But Swift never gives someone who would do normal-person things even if she could. And besides, it\u2019s not like De Niro and Chalamet don\u2019t have photographers who want a pic.<\/p>\n The truth is, in the 12 years since Swift moved here, we mostly have forgotten about her\u00a0\u2014 not that she existed, but that she really wanted to be here or even was here, more than any mega-rich globe-skipping icon who is anywhere.\u00a0New York is, of course, different than L.A. because it\u2019s not so vast and not so car-bound; if you\u2019re here, we\u2019ll see you.\u00a0But we don\u2019t see Swift. What drugstore does she go to? Does she walk on the streeet? Does she even leave her house in the daytime? Has she endorsed or voted here?\u00a0<\/p>\n These are all things we can imagine about our most iconic celebrities because we\u2019ve seen them do it; heck, Paul Rudd stands on election lines and\u00a0hands out cookies<\/a>. All of that seems foreign for Taylor Swift, and her evident belief that she can join the pantheon without these basic rituals seems like one more example of her not getting it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Swift\u2019s appearance jumping up and down courtside at Game 4 felt so jarring. To her it was just what a New York celebrity does \u2014 goes to a Knicks game. But to us she wasn\u2019t a New York celebrity, which is why at sports bars showing the game people stopped cheering to offer loud boos went the cameras cut to her enthusiasms. It was almost poignant, her so badly wanting to be one of us and so many of us saying you\u2019re not, saying the love was unrequited. It was almost like \u2026 a Taylor Swift song.<\/p>\n And now, the wedding at MSG. As you may have gleaned from all the eyebrow-raising and decoy talk over the past month, New Yorkers remain unsold on the Garden. Despite its decades-long ubiquity in our lives and our iCals, the building has just as often stirred negative feelings. Sure, it has the Knicks, and Billy Joel, and the Big East, and the Islanders when they play the Rangers, but it also has been a\u00a0neighborhood bully<\/a>, the longtime subject of eyesore and\u00a0enshittifying<\/a>\u00a0renovations and a James Dolan who has used the place as his own very expensive\u00a0grievance-settling weapon<\/a>. That Swift didn\u2019t seem to understand this sentiment is further proof of the misalignment between the New York she badly hopes will embrace her and the many residents for whom the jury is still out.<\/p>\n Because the truth is we don\u2019t always throw rocks at things that shine. But we do like to see them at the bodega once in a while.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n