Caroline Calloway has pulled a lot of stunts. But she insists she had absolutely nothing to do with a fake historical marker that showed up last week outside the West Village building where she lived until 2022 (the same year that her landlord sued her for $40,000 in back rent). The brassy oval plaque, placed just to the right of the front door, reads:
Caroline Calloway (1991 - ) the American memoirist lived in this West Village apartment building throughout her twenties, during which many of the events she would later write about occurred.
A spell of eleven years.
She paid rent for ten of them.
The text is word-for-word, missing-comma-for-missing-comma what Calloway wrote in her memoir, Scammer, when she described the plaque she hoped would someday hang outside this very building. The timing is also suspect; the plaque appeared last week, just as Calloway arrived back in town after a self-imposed exile to Florida, making appearances at the Waverly Inn and a gala for The Drift.
Calloway says she found out about the plaque on Tuesday after an anonymous tipster sent a photo of it to a “member of my team,” whom she declines to name. She went to see the plaque for herself, took photos, and on Friday shared them to Instagram. By 5 p.m., the plaque was gone, according to a user on Reddit and several followers Calloway says reached out to her, who were sad to report it missing since they’d tried to go steal it for themselves. She has no idea who was behind it, she says. (If she was behind it, she says she would have designed it differently. Scammer describes the plaque as turquoise — one of her two “signature brand colors.” Plus, she is partial to a different design of historical marker — “Frankly, the ones in London are the prettiest.”)
The plaque doesn’t seem to have been taken down by the landlord, Beach Lane Management. Someone who picked up the phone in the office was surprised by the inquiry and said that “management doesn’t know about it” before transferring me to a supervisor, who has not yet returned my message. A lawyer who represented the building’s suit against Calloway didn’t respond to a request for information. (Calloway says she has settled the suit thanks to the success of her memoir, which allowed her to make the lump-sum payment and pay her landlord’s legal fees.)
To Calloway, the plaque’s disappearance is a happy ending. “I was happy to see so many people wanted it,” she says. “It’s a very nice statement piece for any home’s interior or exterior.”