Where do you do your shopping? Well, I try not to leave my neighborhood. I mean, Stella McCartney is on 14th Street. Scoop is on Washington; that's a great place for casual clothes and stuff. There is kind of an interesting place called Dernier Cri, which [has clothing by] young, offbeat designers. There is a jewelry shop that I love called Ten Thousand Things. I have a lot of their jewelry. The designers are two guys. They are in Chelsea, near where my son took karate, so that's how I discovered the store. In SoHo, Marni is great for women's clothing. Marc Jacobs is there. The Prada store is fantastic. I'm a big furniture shopper, and there's a place called Lobel Modern on West 18th Street, just off Seventh Avenue. There is a store on Franklin Street that I also love, called Antik. They have beautiful Scandinavian furniture. One good shopping place in SoHo is Kirna Zabete. They have great taste and really interesting clothing. And the Strand Book Store is an amazing place. They have all these used books and also review copies for less than what you pay in a normal bookstore. It's a different experience than what we are used to with Barnes & Noble. You can actually find a first edition.

In 1998, you hosted Saturday Night Live, which is, of course, filmed at Rocke­feller Center. What are your favorite buildings in the city? What I love about New York the most are the residences, the town houses that were built all over the city in different styles: Greek Revival, Italianate, Victorian. You see all these ­different kinds of houses next to each other, on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side. I love all of them. And I love the Chrysler Building; I love the Empire State Building. I even love Wall Street, which I think is kind of glamorous-looking. I've always had this fantasy that someday I would have an office in a great big building. Trinity Church is a gorgeous building way downtown. It looks complicated, and it's dark. There is a graveyard right next to it.

If you read Michael Cunningham's book Specimen Days, the first section of it sort of deals with New York in the industrial age, when Walt Whitman was around. You really get the feeling of what the city was like as a working city and as a place. You know, Whitman evidently walked around my neighborhood when he worked on the docks on the West Side.