Ask Elijah Wood why he recently moved to the Flatiron district instead of Mulholland Drive, and he sounds less like the star of a gazillion-grossing trilogy and more like, well, a 22-year-old who just got his first real digs. “To have my first apartment, and for it to be in the city, is a dream come true,” he says. He riffs on the restaurants (“Babbo was a food adventure”), the bar culture (“I finally move from California, and now there’s a smoking ban here”), the music scene (“The Strokes get a lot of shit, but they write great songs”), and only then the film scene, briefly, before raving about “Toy Tokyo—this great toy store on 7th and Second Avenue!” Yes, he admits, it’s been known to stock a Frodo figure, “but the stuff I love is from Japan. And they had this twelve-inch figure of Jack Nicholson from The Shining, and the blade he was holding had a real wood handle!” So much enthusiasm, but we thought hobbits felt more at home in the bucolic Shire than Mordor-like Manhattan. “Yeah, I guess it is sort of anti the message of the films,” jokes Wood, “but at some point, I am thinking about moving somewhere with trees, maybe Park Slope—or Williamsburg.”

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• Archive: “New York Minute”
• Articles by Logan Hill
• Table of Contents: Dec 22, 2003 issue of New York | Subscribe!