In 1965, comedian couple Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, along with their toddler daughter, Amy, moved into apartment 5B at 118 Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Later that year, Meara gave birth to their son, future actor and director Ben Stiller.
Together, the parents formed a comedy duo that appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show," sitcoms such as "Rhoda" and their own late-night sketch show. Meara, a stage and screen actress who appeared in "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and HBO's "Sex and the City," died in 2015 at the age of 85. Jerry Stiller, known for roles in "Seinfeld" and "King of Queens," died in 2020.
In the documentary “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” directed by the youngest Stiller and streaming on Apple TV starting Oct. 24, the siblings return to the apartment of their youth to clear out their parents’ belongings and prepare the unit for sale.
This is a task that often falls to many children when their parents pass away.
Stiller, the director, lets the sight of the apartment overwhelm the audience. Rooms are filled with boxes; tables are covered in photographs and cabinets hold mountains of notes and documents.
A cleaning crew could have the place empty in an hour, but that isn’t the point. What Amy Stiller, who is also an actress and stand-up comedian, and brother, Ben Stiller, set for themselves, and what families often do when letting go, is the job of handling each item, watching the copious hours of home footage that their father shot, and reading and examining everything they find for clues about what was happening with the adults when they were children.
While the kids unravel the mystery of their parents' psyches, in the background, the apartment is telling a different part of the story, about what brings artistic people together and why neighborhoods come to feel the way they do.
In subtle and overt ways, “Stiller & Meara” showcases how architecture and planning can foster creativity.
Big buildings attract big voices
It would be backward to say that an apartment in an Upper West Side co-op made the family artists, much less stars. Stiller and Meara appeared on national television while still living in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood north of the Upper West Side.
Combing through photos, the Stiller siblings reminisce about playing with artist Peter Max’s son, as Max had an apartment in the same building.
So, what pulled them and other artists to this neighborhood? Retired city planner Gilbert Tauber said the reasons start with the buildings themselves.
“The area west of Broadway, you have these beautiful old buildings … which had generous layouts and were very solidly built,” Tauber, 90, told Homes.com.
Tauber is a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group, which takes its name from the original Colonial name for the neighborhood.
The size was important, and the sturdy walls acted, to some extent, as soundproofing.
“You get a lot musicians, dancers, choreographers,” Tauber said. “All of these buildings, at least on paper, have rules about when you can practice.”
Tauber’s late wife, who had been a dancer, told him you could whistle on any corner, "and within a radius of 500 feet, you could put together a symphony orchestra,” he said.
Stiller and Meara’s apartment was nearly 2,000 square feet in their orange brick building, built in 1929. When they bought 5A and combined it with 5B into a single unit, it was 3,700 square feet.
The wide space in which the family plays and practices is a background character in the documentary. In the home movies, sketches are rehearsed at full volume, including the fights between the parents, which leads to one of the most pressing questions for the children: How much of the fighting was real?
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Amy Stiller says.
The neighborhood shows up in the comedy
“We live on Riverside Drive, Mike,” Meara tells Mike Douglas in one clip on the national daytime program “The Mike Douglas Show." In their act and in interviews, Stiller and Meara were quick to identify where they were from and where they lived, as if this information conveyed something key to knowing them.
In the 1960s and '70s, “the West Side got this bad reputation,” Tauber said. “There was a good deal of truth to it. There was a lot of crime, and there were fires and things like that.”
The crime was so notable that it was the neighborhood in which the 1974 revenge fantasy movie "Death Wish" was set, with scenes filmed at an apartment building on Riverside Drive and across the street at Riverside Park.
Urban renewal, gentrification and large-scale displacement marked the era, often targeting or at least affecting people of color and minority groups the most, according to Tauber.
You don’t see much of the city’s turmoil in the documentary. (You will get a brief glimpse of a 42nd Street that would be unrecognizable to modern tourists and denizens, as Jerry Stiller and his young son, Ben Stiller, film a sketch in front of a movie theater showing an X-rated “Alice in Wonderland.”)
Ben Stiller keeps the focus on the familial storm inside the apartment. The tumultuous time is reflected in the movie as we see broadening cultural attitudes in the public, as well as in jokes and life at home. Here was another way that the neighborhood inserted itself into the family’s art.
“As Lenny Bruce said: 'It doesn’t matter what religion you are. You live in New York. You’re a Jew,' ” actor Richard Kind, who is Jewish himself, said in an interview with Homes.com. The star of movies and TV shows such as “A Serious Man” and “Spin City” has an apartment on the Upper West Side. While he grew up primarily in Pennsylvania, Kind said his mother was raised in this neighborhood, only a few blocks from where Stiller and Meara would eventually move.
“There was sort of the cliché of the Jewish garment manufacturers [in the neighborhood],” Tauber said. “There was some truth to that, too, because if you looked at the subway stops … you could take the 1 train, and the Garment District was right there.”
According to a walking guide by The New York Times, the neighborhood also experienced a significant influx of Hispanic and gay residents during the 1950s and 1960s.
Anne Meara was of Irish descent and raised a Roman Catholic on Long Island. Jerry Stiller was Jewish and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
As a comedy duo, Stiller and Meara leaned into their ethnic cultures and those of the city that surrounded them. In one sketch, Meara portrays Mrs. Claus and at one point says something in Yiddish. Stiller, as Santa, asks what she said. “Oh, it’s an Eskimo word. I heard someone in the neighborhood use it,” she replies.
Kind said that watching them on TV as a child reminded him of relatives he had in and from the city. “You saw the facility with words, overlapping and interrupting,” he said. “That’s how people talked in New York.”
The diversity is one of the most vital parts of the character of the neighborhood, Kind said. “I was raised on … that we were a melting pot, and that is a wonderful thing.”
Affordability brought in artists
Stiller and Meara moved in when the apartment was still a rental for $220 a month, the equivalent of more than $2,200 today. When the building went co-op, they bought it for $11,000, according to the movie.
The West Side of Manhattan was known for having cheaper apartments, another reason artists came to inhabit it, according to Kind.
“The East Side used to be for Wall Street and money,” Kind said. “The West Side was much more Bohemian … Artists, as you know, don’t have a lot of money.”
It’s more expensive today. The median sales price on the Upper West Side is $1.36 million, and the average asking rent is $5,360 per month, according to Homes.com data.
Stiller and Meara’s apartment sold in 2021 for $5.95 million, according to information from real estate brokerage The Corcoran Group.
Still, it isn’t impossible to find a deal in the neighborhood, said Homes.com director of market analytics Jared Koeck. “While the Upper West Side has numerous luxury buildings, with the most opulent located on Central Park West, the area contains properties at a wide range of price points,” he said.
Living on the Upper West Side can make anyone feel like they’re not in New York City, said Lisa Chajet, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Warburg who lives in the neighborhood.
“For being in a really big city, there’s something that feels small about it,” Chajet told Homes.com. “You know your neighbors, you know the people in the stores. It’s just as much of a small town in a big city.”
Kind agreed. “I call the Upper West Side the suburbs, because you see a lot of kids, a lot of strollers, a lot of dogs,” he said.
Sure, it’s a small town that’s home to Columbia University and Lincoln Center, blocks away from Broadway and a bus or subway ride to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“The Upper West Side is a quintessential Manhattan neighborhood filled with cultural and educational institutions, a wide variety of dining and grocery options, as well as green space in the form of Central Park and Riverside Park,” Koeck wrote in an email. “The neighborhood has great connectivity to the rest of Manhattan through the A, C, B, and D trains along with the 1, 2, and 3 trains.”
The neighborhood has had a profound impact on the careers of the Stiller family. The American Museum of Natural History, located on the Upper West Side, is the setting for Ben Stiller’s blockbuster “Night at the Museum” series of movies. And in “Seinfeld,” arguably Jerry Stiller’s most iconic role, Seinfeld’s apartment is fictionally located mere blocks from where Stiller and Meara lived.
But these aren't the things the film shows as guiding the humor or the ambitions of its subject. It was the small, unnoticed, everyday places and interactions that allowed the creative energy to flourish.
In his opinion as a planner, “a creative life requires a creative community. And for that, you need the circumstances in which a creative community can develop,” Tauber said.
Or, as Meara told one interviewer, “A lot of the comedy begins at home.”