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The world lost a good friend on Saturday with the death of actor Matthew Perry, who was found unresponsive in his hot tub at age 54.
Perry was best known for playing the lovably sarcastic Chandler Bing on the NBC sitcom Friends and is widely remembered as an advocate for sobriety and recovery after his decades-long battle with addiction.
Tributes for the actor have flooded the internet since the news broke on Saturday night, with social media users sharing videos with Perry’s best moments on Friends – such as the classic lines “I’m not great at the advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” or “You have to stop the Q-tip when there’s RESISTANCE” (allegedly an ad-lib by Perry).
Fans in California have gathered around the actor’s Pacific Palisades home this week to leave flowers, while mourners in New York City have turned the “Friends” building – which served as the exterior to the Greenwich Village apartment building occupied by characters Chandler, Joey, Monica and Rachel – into a makeshift memorial.
In Texas we have no such gathering spot. The closest any of the characters got to Dallas was the time Chandler’s job relocated him to Tulsa. The Friends pop-up experience in Plano that allowed fans to visit replicas of Central Perk and a few other of the show’s famous sets operated only from November 2021 to January 2022.
But superfans can visit a neighborhood in Taylor, near Austin and about two and a half hours away from Dallas (by car, obviously), where the streets are named after Friends. Oh. My. Gawwd.
The neighborhood’s streets have names such as Pivot Drive, which intersects with Yemen Road (please let there be a “15 Yemen Road”). There’s an intersection of “Onna” Street and “Break” Avenue, and roads honoring characters Janice, Marcel and Gunther.
The latter was played by James Michael Tyler, who died in 2021 at age 59 from prostate cancer.
The Friends neighborhood streets were named by its builder, WBW Development, though it has neither visibly purple walls nor a coffee place with a couch suspiciously only available to one tiny demographic.
But nothing can stop future residents from honoring the spirit of the series, and Perry’s memory, by channeling the eccentricity of the crabby Mr. Heckles or by becoming the neighborhood’s own Ugly Naked Guy.
