The enduring popularity of the nineties TV show “Friends” is a cultural riddle. Photograph from Warner Bros. / Everett

When I moved to a new apartment in the West Village, two summers ago, one of the first things that I noticed about my new micro-neighborhood was how the northwest corner of Bedford and Grove was never empty. People were there at all hours, taking pictures of one another or posing for selfies. It’s a nondescript corner, comprising the concrete back side of a public school. At some point, I realized why the pilgrims were there: for the best possible view of the southeast corner, the site of 90 Bedford Street, otherwise known as the “Friends” building.

The six-story residential building is made of tan bricks. According to records from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, it was built between 1898 and 1899, by the architecture firm Schneider & Herter, and is typical of late-nineteenth-century Eclecticism. Its distinguishing feature is the round-arched windows on the third and sixth floors, with a “handsome unifying foliate band course.” On the ground floor is the Mediterranean restaurant Little Owl, which has a cheery firehouse-red façade and blue awnings. The building made its television début on September 22, 1994, on the pilot episode of “Friends,” in a three-second shot establishing the location of Monica’s apartment, and remained a regular cast member until the finale, a decade later.

The building seems to have been anonymous until 1997, when a neighbor revealed its location to the Times. Tours, guidebooks, blogs, and now Instagram have brought more visitors each year. At some point, the “Friends” building appeared on Google Maps, likely luring some confused Quakers. Tourists linger in the crosswalk, doing jumping jacks for the camera or wielding selfie sticks. New York, of course, is littered with accidental pop-culture destinations: a few blocks north, on Perry Street, is Carrie Bradshaw’s brownstone, and up in Morningside Heights is Tom’s Restaurant, made famous on “Seinfeld.” Tourists seem not to care—or not to know—that “Friends,” like “Seinfeld,” was shot in a studio in Los Angeles, and that the Friends’ favorite coffeehouse, Central Perk, exists only as a stop on the Warner Bros. studio tour, in Burbank. They keep coming anyway, seeking a fictitious location in an idealized version of the West Village and often feeling disappointed to find a real place instead.

Although “Friends” was shot in a studio in Los Angeles, tourists flock to the West Village building that was featured in establishing shots for Monica’s apartment. Photograph by Stacy Walsh Rosenstock / Alamy

Passing by the building on the way to my laundromat, I sometimes think of myself as an extra in a “Friends” episode: Guy with Laundry Bag. In 2017, Matthew Perry wrote and starred in an Off Broadway play a block away. One night, at ten or so, I was walking home and stopped to talk to someone taking a picture on the corner. He was from Israel and was there, of course, because of “Friends.” I told him that Matthew Perry was down the street. “Who?” he said. “Chandler!” I said. “Chandler Bing! He’s going to be right over there in ten minutes.” The guy looked at me like I was completely nuts. I walked him to Christopher Street and left him in front of the stage door, where a crowd was forming. Lord knows what kind of New York magic trick he thought I had pulled.

The enduring popularity of “Friends” is a cultural riddle. The series still makes a billion dollars a year in syndication, earning the six lead actors twenty million dollars annually in residuals. In December, Netflix reportedly paid a hundred million dollars to keep the streaming rights for one more year, after thousands of fans signed a petition to keep it on the platform. The show is watched around the world, and, curiously, by people currently in their twenties or younger. Despite its nineties cool factor, which included a trendy haircut (“the Rachel”) and an earworm-y theme song, the show holds up remarkably well—better even than “Seinfeld,” which seemed at the time like the more durable work of sitcom art. “Friends” was pioneering in defining people’s twenties, often aimless and uncertain, as a distinct phase of adulthood, in which platonic friendships can provide a kind of structure lacking in romances or careers. In significant ways, though, the show is conspicuously dated: it’s set in a world with no iPhones or Facebook, shockingly little diversity (“I’d like y’all to get a black friend,” Oprah Winfrey told the cast in 1995), and a laugh track. To some, its gay jokes feel queasy at best, and its progeny—“New Girl,” “Broad City,” “The Big Bang Theory”—are more contemporary in their depictions of urban single life. So why are people still so into it?

At eleven-thirty one recent morning, I stationed myself on the “Friends” corner, determined to get an answer. About a dozen people were there, including Rebecca and Tom, a young married couple from Southampton, England. They had found the building in a Lonely Planet guidebook. Rebecca, who is thirty, had watched the show on box sets. “I like how relatable it is to growing up in your twenties and early thirties,” she said. “It’s iconic, really. I know people who hate it. I think it’s like Marmite. Back home, everybody loves it or they hate it.”

Tom, who is thirty-three, said that he watched “Friends” on Channel 4 when it originally aired. When I asked why it still appealed in 2019, he said, “It’s nostalgia, isn’t it? It was like what we had when we were growing up.” He added, “You used to do silly stuff back in the day, like when Joey gets his head stuck with the turkey. Nowadays, I don’t think you’d do it yourself. You’d watch someone else do it on a smartphone.”

“But I also think loneliness,” Rebecca added. “Loneliness is a massive problem in big cities. So, I mean, maybe you feel like they are your friends as well, which is really sad to say.”

When I was a teen-ager, in the nineties, I watched “Friends” religiously. I would usually go to my friend Charles’s place to watch the entire Must-See TV Thursday-night lineup on NBC, which included “Seinfeld,” “E.R.,” and “Friends” knockoffs such as “The Single Guy.” Charles had a massive crush on Courteney Cox (who recently exhilarated her Instagram followers by posting a video of herself outside 90 Bedford Street, yelling, “Goodnight, guys! I’m going home.”) I was obsessed with Phoebe, played ingeniously by Lisa Kudrow. The first Web site I ever visited was called Phoebe’s Songbook, a fan’s collection of her song lyrics, which I read about in Entertainment Weekly and visited in my high-school computer lab.

I suppose I saw myself as the kooky eccentric of my friend group, but my identification with Phoebe was self-negating: if I had been that eccentric, I would have been into something weirder than “Friends.” To a teen-ager, the show was aspirational: it’s what I imagined my twenties would be like, offbeat and eventful and hip. But the stronger pull was the sense of belonging; everyone’s personalities fit together, like a friendship jigsaw puzzle. By my actual twenties, I’d mostly forgotten about the show, even if I was living it in superficial ways. In the pilot episode, Monica says to Rachel, “Welcome to the real world. It sucks. You’re gonna love it.” She was right: being in your twenties in New York is excruciating, but often fun. I had bad dates and crazy roommates (sometimes I was the crazy roommate), plus constant, low-grade anxiety. I did not feel that it was my day, my week, my month, or even my year. It was not until my thirties that I could afford a rental in the West Village, mostly because I had a boyfriend and could split a tiny one-bedroom. (An apartment in the “Friends” building now goes for $3,495 a month.)