How Julie Powell Changed The Food World From A Long Island City Loft

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — Before she was blogging her culinary pursuit of Julia Child and being portrayed by Amy Adams on the big screen, Julie Powell was a low-level bureaucrat living in Long Island City.

Powell, who died on Oct. 26 from cardiac arrest at age 49, embarked on the project that catapulted her to food-world fame in 2002, when she was living in a small apartment near Court Square.

Public records pinpoint it as the three-story brick building on Jackson Avenue and 46th Road, right up against MoMA PS1, where Powell and her husband Eric occupied a third-floor apartment. (The ground floor is now home, appropriately, to a clothing store called "Extra Butter.")

That home, which Powell herself described as a "hideous apartment" with a "crappy outer borough kitchen," was where she launched the Julie/Julia Project, in which she spent a year trying to cook every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" — blogging her varying results, along with digressions about her marriage, the city, and the pitiful state of their home.

"The new apartment, a charming fixer-upper above a Greek diner in a promising patch of industrial wasteland, convenient to the Rikers Island bus, was an adjustment for all of us," Powell wrote in one of the blog's early posts, shortly after moving to the neighborhood.

"We slept uneasily, smelling of cat s--t as we did, listening to the lullaby of freight trucks on Jackson Avenue, and the occasional yowls of the traumatized cat crouching inside the bedsprings."

The Salon.com blog ended up amassing 400,000 page views by the end of that year, and shot to further fame when the New York Times profiled Powell near the end of her yearlong journey. A Nora Ephron-directed film adaptation, released in 2009, stars Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child. (It was filmed in part at Long Island City's own Silvercup studios, along with exterior shots taken around the neighborhood, according to IMDB.)

Along the way, the Long Island City apartment took on a kind of mythic status: at least one fellow blogger ventured to the neighborhood to explore "Julie Powell's Long Island City." Powell told QNS in 2012 that she was a regular at the Murray Park dog run, and even helped shape the menu at the bygone Vernon Boulevard restaurant Lounge 47, after befriending chef Min Chen.

After Powell and her husband moved away, it was listed as a short-term rental online in 2018. Photos depict the home as far less dingy than she had described, with exposed brick walls and a spacious kitchen.

Though some of her later writing proved controversial, her Julie/Julia blog "inspired other amateur food writers to begin cooking their way through cookbooks" and spurred professional writers to break out of their stiff shells, according to the Times's obituary published on Tuesday.

Powell and her husband moved upstate permanently in 2018, and she died at her home in the Catskills, the Times reported.