24 Hours Inside the Cult of A24

Commerce Street in the West Village is one of only two L-shaped streets in Manhattan and by far the more picturesque. The adjoining brick houses that form its corner were built in 1844 as the home of an Irish dry goods merchant named Alexander Turney Stewart, who invented the concept of the department store. A savvy marketer, Stewart had the idea to place cases of his wares on the sidewalk outside his store to clutter the entrance and draw a crowd. In so doing, he helped establish one of the fixtures of buzz-building in New York: the sidewalk queue as both an indicator of and a driver of trendiness, from Supreme streetwear drops in the ’90s and the Cronut in the 2010s to whatever photogenic foodstuff blows up on TikTok these days to ensnare young New Yorkers into — as SNL put it in a recent sketch — a “big dumb line.”