Lila Raicek's Guide to Uptown New York
The love story between the main character's in Lila Raicek's new novel plays out against New York City's Upper East Side. Here she gives Vogue her guide to the neighborhood.
Reported by Vogue.
Playwright, novelist, and television writer Lila Raicek has a complicated relationship with leaving New York — she's done it twice and keeps coming back. After studying writing at Barnard, she decamped to LA when her play Vertebrae was optioned, wrote for Younger and Gossip Girl, then spent time in London for a West End production of Master Builder starring Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki. Now she's back, and she brought a debut novel with her. The Plunge (Park Row) is, as she puts it, "the love letter to New York I've always wanted to write" — a tumultuous affair between two characters that unfolds across museums, park walks, and the sultry midnight streets of the Upper East Side. According to Vogue, the book was shaped by her post-Hollywood return and the uptown apartment of a mentor.
Her UES is not the caricature of old money and pearl clutching the neighborhood's reputation suggests. Raicek points to the lineage of female writers who lived and worked there — Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Shirley Hazzard, Wendy Wasserstein, Joan Didion — as the real cultural inheritance of those streets. For her, the neighborhood is a furtive hideaway, not a museum piece. The Carlyle is non-negotiable (she once got snuck into a Judy Collins concert at Café Carlyle while crying over a breakup), and Via Quadronno — which appears in the penultimate scene of The Plunge — is her year-round caffeine anchor: Italian cappuccinos in winter, gelato in summer.
Where She Actually Goes
For art, she's obsessed with the Neue Galerie — specifically the shop downstairs, where she found a special edition of Joseph Roth's The Coral Merchant that became, in her words, a "fictional spark for a murder weapon." She discovered painter Karyn Lyons at Turn Gallery, whose work "The Imposter" ended up on her book cover. The Lehman Wing at the Met is her secret quiet place: Bonnards, Balthuses, red velvet, stained-glass skylight. For beauty, Zitomer has served her for years — a 70-year-old pharmacy institution where, she says, an elderly saleslady once scolded her about her pores mid-cry. The newer Violet Grey, tucked into a garden, is her chicier counter-pick. Across town, the Park Avenue Armory — a literal 19th-century military fortress turned arts venue — is where she catches Lorca, Ibsen, and TEFAF every May.
Central Park is not background scenery in Raicek's world — it's a co-author. She walks it at all hours, in every season, tracking her own emotional weather by which route she takes: Shakespeare's Garden sundial, Bow Bridge's floral urns, Bethesda Fountain's bronze angel. She remembers drifting through Christo's The Gates in 2005 and understanding, definitively, that she could never leave. Her best friend and she do laps around the Jackie O Reservoir and call them "despair walks." Free SummerStage concerts and Films on the Green are her cheap date picks; dinner under Joan Mitchell's "King of Spades" at Marcel inside the brutalist Breuer building is her worth-it splurge.
New York, for Raicek, is "febrile, feral, and kinetic" — and the Upper East Side, unfairly maligned, is where that energy goes quiet enough to actually write something.
Read the original at Vogue.
