Photo: Sara Konradi/The Washington Post/Getty Images
“Oh, that’s why all the streets are closed off?” two sailors in town for Fleet Week said to me. They were blissfully unaware that Seventh Avenue from 30th to 34th Streets had been shut down because of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Madison Square Garden wedding. Their obliviousness was more common than I’d expected. As I roamed the area in the 95-degree weather this past Friday, it was eerily calm, quieter than a regular Friday in midtown. There were no vendors hawking bootleg royal-wedding merch, no screaming lines of fans, not even that many impromptu sing-alongs (some were solicited by journalists looking for content). The orderly scene made it clear why the most famous couple in the country, with their unlimited funds, would get married in the unglamorous armpit of Manhattan.
Standing on the corner of 33rd and Sixth, I understood the table stakes of the wedding: Kelce and Swift wanted to invite 1,000 people. How would they all get inside? For the guests entering by car, there were single security guards stationed on both the East and West sides of the no-go zone, allowing cars in one by one. At one of these checkpoints, I watched as a parade of Cadillac Escalades paused to roll down the windows for passengers to show proof of invite to the security. I spotted Bowen Yang and Alison Roman (together), Lucy Dacus, Jerrod Carmichael, Jack Antonoff’s parents, Elizabeth Banks, and for some reason, George Stephanopoulos. I also spotted plenty of people over the age of 75 riding in black cars, confused about how to access the wedding website that had the beige QR code that would allow them entry. As people much more humble than the Kelce-Swift’s can understand, wedding guest lists can quickly get out of hand when you account for relatives who are bad with technology, so combining that with the need to have the Good Morning America anchors there, the massive space makes even more sense. While I cannot fathom why anyone would want 1,000 people to attend their wedding, I can understand that once the list ballooned over, say, 500, MSG was pretty self-explanatory.
There were some minor traffic jams, to be expected when you have a fair number of technology-challenged guests and a cluster of 20 to 30 onlookers crowding the curb and slowing down the procession of vehicles. But otherwise, the genuine efficiency of the operation was completely at odds with the nightmare scene at Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley’s 2023 Long Beach Island wedding, when thousands of fans swarmed the Jersey Shore to gawk at Taylor and other celebrity attendees and effectively shut down the island. Near Penn Station, people grumbled at having to walk around the block to cross the street, but that inconvenience was really no bigger than the general ones of getting around the city on a regular day, hopping from one construction zone to the next. As someone who nearly passed out multiple times throughout the day, I mostly felt tremendous sympathy for the cops and outdoor staff who had to endure the July 3 temperatures to guard the zone — their suffering was one of the only true downsides I saw for the venue choice. A sole protester marched around 33rd Street with a sign that read “Taylor Swift is a monster” listing her offenses, which included her excessive private-plane usage and her choice to date 17-year-old Taylor Lautner when she was 19. The protester mostly yelled expletives at guests rolling down their windows. But even if there had been dozens more like her, the show would have gone on.
Penn Station itself was relatively empty. The handful of closed exits was inconvenient, sure, but, again, not much more so than a regular day commuting through the aging transit hub. A closed entrance at 32nd and Seventh made it look like the Pret a Manger at the corner was also shuttered. It was actually still open, and Chris, one of the employees, told me he’s a big Kelce fan and didn’t see a problem with the wedding. But given that most people couldn’t tell the location was open behind the gates, he admitted business was “very quiet.” Stranded Amtrak passengers I spoke with attempted to blame their train delays on the wedding. “She’s ruining the Fourth of July,” one told me. But the blame for the delays really rested on a far bigger, and by now familiar, problem — climate change — unless you want to lump in Swift’s private-plane usage with that, too (the heat on the tracks was cited as the main cause of July 3 train delays, the same way blisteringly hot days shut down Amtrak lines every summer).
To get a brief respite from the heat, I went to the second floor of Roberta’s at One Penn Plaza to see what I could of the venue itself. Looking at the pink curtains draping the sixth floor of MSG, where cocktail hour allegedly took place, I saw the lipstick-on-a-pig nature of the wedding firsthand — the pipe and drape hardly looked gorgeous or intimate from the outside. It was obvious that it required a tremendous production to transform the arena into the couple’s alleged castle-in-a-forest setting. But thanks to the nature of the venue itself, no one was concerned about the aftermath. If Swift had chosen other rumored venues like the Met, the Cloisters, or Governor’s Island, there would have been plenty of chatter about the need to protect these historic sites from whatever horrors a massive wedding like this would entail. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s recent Palermo nuptials have already sparked controversy for turning a historic site into a theme park, and that party had only 300 guests. Imagine the potential destruction of a Taylor Swift wedding at some remote Italian island or medieval chapel. MSG? No one made a peep.
And again, there’s the location. Yes, it’s in a quasi-desolate, depressing stretch of midtown, but the Garden was so convenient to get to and, when I couldn’t take it anymore, run far, far away from. It was easy for the fans and for the bigger crowd — the reporters — who, despite the heat, were thankful to be able to go home after the all-day stakeout and enjoy the rest of their Fourth of July weekend. There was no need to find last-minute lodging on the tip of Rhode Island or curse the weak internet service in some distant tropical location. Irish reporter Henry McKean from NewsTalk said the day was the most fun he’d had “since the Conclave.” On my way home, I stopped by Cornelia Street in the West Village where Taylor once lived and wrote a song about her time there. I expected fans to have made a pilgrimage to this iconic Swift location, possibly mourning the end of her singledom and her string of questionable exes, but it was silent. Not a West Village girl to be found. They were all probably away at a destination wedding.
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