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New York Post

Gen Z tourists obsess over NYC stoop from ‘Millennial cringe' HBO show ‘Girls': ‘It's our Sex and the City'

The kids are stooping to new levels. Gen Z's latest Big Apple photo op obsession is a Brooklyn stoop made famous on a 'Millennial cringe' HBO show – drawing fans from around the world despite the series having gone off the air nearly a decade ago. Advertisement 5 Evan Lazarus and Amelia Ritthaler, both 27, of the 'Girls Rewatch Podcast,' on the famed Greenpoint stoop from HBO's 'Girls.' Paul Martinka Forget Carrie Bradshaw's infamous 'Sex and the City' townhouse, younger viewers have latched on to 'Girls' — the Golden Globe-winning comedy-drama starring Lena Dunham — injecting new life to a quiet Greenpoint block where the show was filmed starting in the early 2010s. 'Gen Z really takes to 'Girls' because it's so authentic – there are so many [relatable] stories told – where Gen Z doesn't really know what it wants to do in its career in the same way,' Evan Lazarus, 27, one of the hosts of the Girls Rewatch Podcast, told The Post. Advertisement Amelia Ritthaler, 27, and Lazarus' former roommate, said the show, which follows a group of four friends in their 20s trying to make it in the city, found a new audience during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many young people were forced to hole up at home. 'During Covid, we were supposed to be 22 [years old] in the city, and we weren't allowed to be,' said Ritthaler, who hosts the retrospective podcast with Lazarus, both Williamsburg residents. The fresh audience felt, 'Like, 'I guess we'll watch these girls do it,'' Ritthaler said. 'No one's really on any timeline [in the show], and I feel like that's really refreshing for Gen Z to watch,' she added. 'I just feel like it's our 'Sex and the City.'' Advertisement 5 The India Street apartment was the onsite filming location for Hannah Horvath's apartment on the show, which aired from 2012 to 2017. Paul Martinka The show's online resurgence has also fed into the stream of photo-frenzied tourists flocking the India Street where the facade for the apartment inhabited by Dunham's striving writer character Hannah Horvath was filmed. 'Whenever I'm in the Radio Bakery line, there's always people there too,' said visiting Bushwick resident Meghan, pointing to the India Street apartment across the street. Liz McNamara, who has lived in the building since 1960 and stayed in a garden unit during six years of the series filming inside apartment 2L, told The Post she has welcomed fans, often hailing from as far as Europe, 'all the time' for more than a decade. Advertisement 'We just have people from all different places of the world taking pictures,' said 72-year-old McNamara. 'Especially during the week, a lot of them are really tourists coming from other places … there's always picture-taking here, I've even taken a few pictures for them.' 5 Longtime India Street resident Liz McNamara shows off a 'Girls' hoodie gifted to her by one of the show's producers. Nicole Rosenthal / NYPost McNamara will sometimes even invite eager fans inside to get a glimpse of Horvath's on-screen apartment, even though the interior has been fully renovated since the series started filming in 2011. One of those visitors invited inside was 20-year-old Mia Struck, who went to the stoop in February. 'We were just in the neighborhood and happened to stumble upon it,' said Struck, who started watching the show, which went off the air in 2017, as a teen during the pandemic. 'I re-watch it all the time, so it was cool to experience [it] in person. Liz was so welcoming.' 5 Liz McNamara's colorful streetside 'menagerie' was captured in the series, she told The Post. Nicole Rosenthal / NYPost The quaint stoop is 'nothing' like its Sex and the City counterpart – which has resulted in its owner pleading with the city to install a steel and cast-iron gate to keep swarms of tourists away, said McNamara. The longtime local noted she doesn't mind the extra attention, saying her experience with fans has been pleasant over the years. Advertisement And a big part of the relationship is courtesy. 'They don't linger,' McNamara said. The resident noted she was the one to let location scouts inside the building in 2011, and was even gifted an honorary 'crew' hoodie from a producer years after the show began airing on HBO. 'I was here for the whole thing,' she recalled. 'I made a lot of friends.' Advertisement 5 Evan Lazarus and Amelia Ritthaler on the steps of the iconic brownstone apartment building. Paul Martinka While 'people love to visit sites from any TV show,' Lazarus said, the India Street stoop is especially fun for Gen Z audiences because it's hidden in plain sight – and is often empty enough to give fans a 'main character' moment. The self-obsessed characters from 'Girls' have struck a chord with social media-overwhelmed Gen Z, Lazarus said, 'because we've all been trying to grow our personal brand since we were like two.' 'The idea of being self-absorbed has been more normalized in the last decade,' said the podcaster. Advertisement Co-host Ritthaler called out Dunham-as-Horvat's infamous line 'I'm the voice of my generation.' 'I feel like she's actually the voice of Gen Z,' Ritthaler said, 'because millennials hated her [for that] … but then Gen Z is watching her and they're like, 'yeah, like 'we are.''