The Glamour and Romance of John F. Kennedy Jr. Returns to Tribeca Streets

In a scene being shot for the upcoming series "American Love Story," Paul Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr., exits the North Moore Street building (with changed address) where Kennedy and his wife Carolyn Bessette had lived. In the foreground are paparazzi waiting for the chase. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

A handsome, sharply dressed man, shouldering a backpack and looking eerily like the late John F. Kennedy Jr., exits a grey apartment building on North Moore Street, dog in tow. He strolls towards Walker’s as a paparazzi-wary blonde woman peeks her head out the front door, then strides in the opposite direction towards Hudson Street.

It’s a scene that may well have played out many times in real life between Kennedy and girlfriend-turned-wife Carolyn Bessette at the very building where the real couple lived until their deaths in a plane crash in 1999. 

Actors Paul Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon are portraying Kennedy and Bessette in the Ryan Murphy-produced “American Love Story,” chronicling the couple’s turbulent romance. The action, shot on Friday, was one of several scenes played out in the neighborhood recently and mirrors the real couple’s lives within their media frenzied relationship. 

“They couldn’t leave the building without being accosted,” recalled a resident of the building, who asked not to be identified. Before they married, he said, “we’d be able to sit on the deck together and it was like a normal life. But after they got married, it got very chaotic.”

Another scene, filmed Friday on Franklin Street (but in real life took place in Washington Square Park), recreated one of the couple’s infamous quarrels caught on camera by paparazzi. In the scene, a forlorn-looking JFK Jr. sits on the curb, head in hands, while Bessette stands over him screaming, “He’s our dog” before storming off.

(Meanwhile, two “movie dogs” paced up and down the street with their handlers. Neither of them was a Canaan Dog, the real couple’s pet.)

One of many who stood watching the production was Laura Lefkowitz, whose parents renovated a loft years ago near where Kennedy lived. Her mother, she said, often saw Kennedy on the street. Lefkowitz called him “an amazing person.”

“I’m sorry not to see what he could have been if he had lived,” she said.