Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Madison Square Garden wedding was a huge inconvenience — at least, on paper. The affair, stretched over two days in the middle of Manhattan, involved street closures, subway-station-exit rerouting, an uptick in police presence, and a handful of bars and restaurants shutting down during the Fourth of July weekend, smack-dab in the middle of the World Cup and a heat wave, during whatever the hell’s going on with all those tall ships. To scroll the internet during the Swift-Kelce nuptials was to see a barrage of people lamenting the city’s electricity bill, misspent taxpayer dollars, and the alleged tackiness of a private, sure, but very much not secret affair. She’s there, beware, get used to it.
New York, however, is nothing if not resilient, and as disruptive as Swift and Kelce’s wedding could have been, in reality the neighborhood carried on with modest enthusiasm tempered with indifference. For the two days the duo took over MSG, I walked the area, dipping into delis and coffee shops, bars and restaurants, into Penn Station and Moynihan Hall, and all around the surrounding blocks in 100-degree heat. I spoke to fans and tourists, paparazzi and cops, Marriott bartenders and Crocs employees, and found that life mostly just trudged along like normal, if not sweatier. “She can fuck up a lot,” a woman told me, waiting for New Jersey Transit, “but I don’t think she can fuck up the trains.”
