Reality-TV Deconstructor
Maybe someday, from a certain angle, if the light hits just right, Donald Trump’s ninety-thousand-square-foot ballroom will resemble the “much-needed and exquisite addition” promised by whitehouse.gov. Or perhaps it’ll just be the ultimate reality-television-show set for our reality-television-star President. For now, it’s a pile of rubble.
Jack Balderrama Morley, the exuberant thirty-eight-year-old managing editor of Dwell magazine, who just published the book “Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV,” can’t get worked up about the ballroom. “So much of the White House has always been a kind of symbolic construction,” he said the other day, while leading a private tour of some notable reality-TV locations around Manhattan. “All the tackiness—I find it endearing. The bald artifice, the kind of striver-ness of it—it’s like rooting for early Bethenny.”
The tour began outside the “Real Housewives of New York” cast member Bethenny Frankel’s old apartment complex, at 403 East Sixty-second Street, where she lived when she first appeared on “RHONY,” in 2008. (The multicity “Real Housewives” franchise turned twenty in March.) “This is the end of the Upper East Side,” Morley commented. With its proximity to the Queensboro Bridge and a Home Depot, Le Domaine, as the building is grandly named, feels a long way from France. A shirtless man drinking a beer at 10:45 A.M. waved from his balcony.
As Morley led the way to 162 East Sixty-third Street, the “RHONY” alum Sonja Morgan’s albatross of a town house (it took her a decade to sell it, in 2024, for half what she’d paid, in 1998), he talked about filming in New York apartments: “The spaces are so small, you can’t pull back, so you’re always up in their faces, and it feels really compressed, zany, and jittery.” Nevertheless, as Morley notes in his book, reality TV was “one of the first forms of media to create home-to-home visual connections.” Before TikTok, how else were you supposed to see how other people lived?
“It’s a little Miss Havisham-y—faded splendor,” Morley remarked, of the exterior of Morgan’s former home, wrapped in scaffolding. He walked, heel to toe, along the façade, counting. “This is, what, about fifteen feet wide? That’s super narrow. So it’s got to be handheld cameras following Sonja around as she’s picking a BlackBerry out of the toilet.” Ivana Trump also had a town house, on East Sixty-fourth Street, that sold for a fraction of its asking price, but at least it was a full twenty feet wide.
In a cab headed to SoHo, Morley defined “cruel architecture”: “That came from Lauren Berlant, the cultural theorist who wrote the book ‘Cruel Optimism,’ which describes things that people have faith will improve their lives but are actually counter to their own flourishing. So you could think of homeownership, or getting married.”
Meanwhile, he went on, “we’re all sitting in our little boxes that are falling apart and are getting kicked out by private-equity overlords that are buying our buildings and raising the rent!” The taxi inched down Park Avenue, near where another “RHONY” cast member, Kelly Bensimon, was once filmed jogging in front of a cab, with voice-over: “Like, the ultimate experience of being in New York is, like, running in traffic. It’s, like, you’re in the traffic trenches.” She is now a real-estate broker.
Morley recalled that, on the other coast, at the beginning of the Obama era, the Kardashians lived in a “Cape Cod-style house with an American flag out on the porch.” But, when Trump took over, “it became less about that sort of wholesomeness and more about the slickness, the empty, vast expanses of frictionless surfaces.” In short, a villain’s lair. He added, “It’s not helping anybody that the villains of the world are winning.”
At 22 Mercer, Morley gazed up at “Bethenny’s post-divorce apartment”—a major upgrade. The building featured some of the cast-iron filigree that SoHo is known for, and which, back in the nineteenth century, you could buy from a catalogue. “SoHo got romanticized as a place of hard work and true craft, but then you learn that a lot of the beautiful façades were mail order,” he said.
Down the block, near the Real Housewife Jenna Lyons’s loft, Morley whispered, “Oh, gosh, look at what’s happening.” A woman wearing stilettos and carrying a Gucci shopping bag was holding up traffic while unsteadily posing for photos, on cobblestones. “When the artists came to SoHo, they were just as much posers as influencers taking selfies in the street,” Morley theorized. “They were getting some of that secondhand glamour of hard work and sweat.”
Final stop: 565 Broadway, where MTV’s “Real World” was initially filmed, making it perhaps the original New York reality-TV home. When 565 opened, in 1860, a newspaper reported, “In proportion, in chasteness of design, in rich and elegant finish, and in perfect keeping, we know no building in the whole length of Broadway that can equal it.” “Supposedly the glass windows on the ground floor were the largest window panes in the country,” Morley said—the better to spy on its occupants. Now it’s a Madewell. ♦