Lifestyle
How a forgotten California border town became a hip hideaway — with hot springs and music
The first two surprises, as you roll up Old Highway 80 into this dry and silent Sonoran Desert town, might be the steam and the music.
The steam rises from two pools at the recently reborn Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. The music seeps from a bathhouse ruin where the hotel stages weekend performances.
On this night it’s a torch song from long ago, sung by an acoustic duo for a small, rapt, eclectic audience — hipsters in their 30s, retirees in their 70s, desert rats and spa seekers, all sitting under the open sky as night falls on the roofless building, a few million surrounding boulders and a long, tall fence that runs into the hills.
These are features that California daydreams are made of, and this emergent scene is luring visitors to an outpost 70 miles southeast of downtown San Diego.
Bar patio area of the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Pia Riverola)
“It’s a refuge from the stressors of the city. Things seem to wash away here,” co-owner Melissa Strukel said recently.
Now, a few more surprises: The town of Jacumba Hot Springs has been down on its luck for decades. That long fence, 2,100 feet south of the hotel, is the Mexican border, where undocumented migrants pass regularly and a crisis flared last year. And the hotel’s owners are new to town and the business.
“Everything is the first time,” Strukel said.
It was four years ago, early in the COVID shutdown, that Strukel, a veteran San Diego designer and special-event rental entrepreneur, decided to take a drive.
She wound up in a town she’d never noticed before, standing outside a bedraggled old motel, smitten.
Siren Suite 11at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Mikael Kennedy)
So smitten, in fact, that she climbed over a wall to get a better look.
“I just knew right away that I belonged here,” Strukel said.
Soon she learned that the motel was for sale — with a catch. The owner wanted to sell it in a 150-acre package deal with most of the commercial property in town: a gas station (without gas), several homes and storefronts, a ruined bathhouse and a littered mess that was once a man-made lake.
Undeterred, Strukel enlisted her business partner Corbin Winters and they formed a plan.
They would recruit their friend Jeff Osborne, a former client and real estate business veteran. They would make the 24-room motel and restaurant into a resort with 18 rooms, two suites, restaurant, bar and global desert vibe, drawing on influences from Mexico to Marfa to Morocco.
They would replumb the hot springs to take advantage of the alkaline water’s “silky texture,” refill the lake, recruit a veteran general manager for the hotel and use the houses as vacation rentals, including two with their own soaking tubs.
Jacumba Lake is a recently revived reservoir fed by the same springs that feed the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. The hotel’s owners worked to refill the lake and plant the shoreline with palm trees.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
They would build a new sense of community in Jacumba Hot Springs, where the population is 540, the median age around 62, and the median income and property values are some of the lowest in the county. The nearest full-fledged grocery store is 45 minutes away; the nearest public school, several miles down the road; the nearest legal border crossing, an hour away in Tecate.
“At first I was like, ‘ah, no way,’” Osborne recalled.
But Osborne, 38, whose experience includes several years of house-flipping and short-term rental management, thought on it some more. He drove into town, spent a night in a tent by the lake and changed his mind.
By October 2020 a deal was done. Doing business as We Are Human Kind Inc., the trio paid more than $1.6 million — but less than $3.9 million, Osborne said, declining to be more specific.
Unlike many hotel owners, all three moved to town, taking on major roles in a community short on resources and long on characters.
“This community was the end of the line for a long time,” said Sam Schultz, 69, who lives east of town at the Desert View Tower with eight dogs and at least 12 cats.
Desert View Tower was built as a tourist attraction in the 1920s.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
On any day, migrants might be illegally crossing the border nearby, breaching a fence that starts, stops and varies in height, a product of shifting politics and stony slopes.
Yet most of the time, border-crossers are quickly met and taken away by the Border Patrol agents who steadily cruise the dirt roads and highway.
“I haven’t seen one person [crossing] for a couple of weeks now,” said Osborne, who lives in a stone house on a knoll known as Snob Hill. “I live less than a thousand feet from the border … and I don’t lock my doors.”
During my two days in town, I didn’t see anyone crossing, either. But I met plenty of the neighbors.
In the Exotic Desert Hideaway — a.k.a. the hotel bar — you might bump into Roman Wrosz, a 68-year-old inventor and longtime local who flies gliders at the otherwise lonely Jacumba airport.
Along the highway east of town, you will probably encounter Coyote, a 67-year-old junkyard proprietor with a booming baritone voice and a truck that says “UFO retrieval and repairs.”
Exotic Desert Hideaway bar at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Mikael Kennedy)
The Jacumba Hot Springs hotel includes a dark bar decorated with paintings of nudes.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
If you see a bearded man in a wheelchair working the register at Sunday breakfast in the town’s community center, that’s probably Eldon Caldwell, 75, who lives in one of the little houses the newcomers purchased.
“They inherited me as tenant,” Caldwell said. “They haven’t raised my rent. They put a shower in for me.”
While Caldwell works the register at those Sunday community center breakfasts, Winters volunteers every other week as a server — again, not standard hotelier behavior. Osborne has signed on as the center’s board president.
“It’s magnificent, what they’ve done,” said Kirk Gilliam, a 69-year-old artist/electrician who builds robot sculptures in a gallery two doors down from the Mountain Sage market on Old Highway 80.
If the new hotel team has its way, more neighbors will arrive soon to fill open hotel jobs and take over storefront vacancies.
“This is not a flip,” said Strukel.
Bathroom scene at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. (Mikael Kennedy; Pia Riverola)
It is, however, one of biggest changes in town since 1919. That’s when a San Diego magnate named John Spreckels opened his “impossible railroad,” running tracks through Jacumba on the boulder-filled hill-and-valley path from San Diego to Yuma.
Next came Highway 80 and speculator Bert Vaughn, who built a four-story hotel, bathhouse and a desert view tower to lure San Diego-Arizona drivers off the road. By the 1950s, a motel and man-made lake had been added.
At the town’s peak, Osborne said, “they say there were 5,000 people here on the weekends.”
But the rail line fell idle. Interstate 8 (two miles north of town) stole most of the passing traffic in the 1970s. The bathhouse and four-story hotel burned.
For a while it seemed the town’s saviors might be a pair of nudists: In the 1990s, David and Helen Landman bought an RV park outside town, converted it into a clothing-optional resort and moved in. Then in 2012, the Landmans bought and made improvements on most of downtown. But as the pandemic began, the couple’s patience ran out. They sold the hotel and most of downtown to Strukel, Winters and Osborne, then peddled the clothing-optional resort, DeAnza Springs, to other buyers in early 2021.
By early last year, the team was deep into redesign and reconstruction, and it was clear that making over the hotel and downtown Jacumba Hot Springs would cost more than buying them did.
The Solstice Pool at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.
(Kate Berry)
To bring back the lake, the three hired workers to spend months scraping with a tractor, consulted with the nonprofit group Indigenous Regeneration, then added about 70 California-native palm trees, which line a sandy shore.
Then the world intervened. In the space of a few spring days, hundreds of immigrants surged over and around the border fence.
Most had come from far beyond Mexico, speaking Chinese, Portuguese and other languages, apparently drawn by the expiration of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health measure that allowed authorities to turn away asylum-seekers more easily. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the migrants had been “callously placed [in the area] by for-profit smuggling organizations.”
Once across, the migrants gathered in three encampments and built campfires in the hills south of Old Highway 80, eager to be seen and considered for asylum, most of them without food, water or protection from the elements.
“It was two weeks of bad,” Strukel said.
While the Border Patrol decided how to respond, Jacumba locals spread the news. The hotel team set up a collection site and began to gather and distribute supplies with help from Border Kindness, a Mexicali-based nonprofit, and other groups.
“There were locals who brought out food and supplies, and there were others who hated them for that,” said Gilliam.
The co-owners of the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, seen in the old gas station that serves as their office, are (from left) Corbin Winters, Melissa Strukel and Jeff Osborne.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
The hoteliers “weren’t even open and they were using the kitchen as a place for people to bring supplies,” said Kelly Overton, executive director of Border Kindness. “There was no foreseeable benefit to them. They chose to do what they thought was the right thing. … Not everybody makes that decision when it comes to their business and their money.”
As the flow continued into 2024, the Border Patrol imposed more order and sent more buses. Then Mexico boosted its immigration law enforcement near the border and the Biden administration tightened asylum restrictions. Now, Border Patrol officials and locals agree that numbers are down again.
At the hotel, Strukel, Winters and Osborne began a gradual opening in late 2023, launching into daily operation in February, inviting newcomers to explore “an unexpected escape on the dusty edge of everything.”
Its workforce has grown to about 75 people, including general manager Natalie Richards from San Diego, chef Leo Ceja from Los Angeles and director of special programming and hospitality Juan Miron, originally from Tijuana.
I arrived on a Friday, ducking into a rustic-chic trailer that houses the front desk.
The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, built as a motel and dramatically reborn in 2024 as a boutique hotel, includes Moroccan design details, multiple pools, record players and curated paperbacks in guest rooms.
(Mikael Kennedy)
Beyond the Moroccan entry gate and wind chimes from Arcosanti in Arizona, every guest room features stylish tiling, a turntable and an adventurously curated selection of books and albums. (Mine included two Louis L’Amour paperbacks and albums by country crooner Charley Crockett and Ethiopian sax player Getatchew Mekuriar.)
Most guests so far have come from San Diego County, “a lot of creative professionals,” Osborne said, and “people that like things off the beaten path, that like going down dirt roads.” Rates typically start at $180 on weekdays, $360 on weekends. (The only other lodging option within five miles of town is the rustic DeAnza Springs Resort.)
That afternoon, guests lounged around the Solstice Pool and Ritual Pool (where sometimes movies are screened) or stepped inside to the warmer soaking tub in the Echo Room.
The Exotic Desert Hideaway Bar — as dim as the desert day is bright— features kitschy nudes on the walls, DJs on weekends, $5 beer during happy hour and a $78 cocktail situation known as “The Fortune Teller.” (It comes flaming in a cauldron, includes tequila and serves six.)
Down the block, Kirk Gilliam usually has his gallery open on weekends. Next to the gallery, David Lampley sells vintage clothes at the Impossible Railroad Trading Post and serves as director of auditory and visual experiences for the hotel. (If you’d like to make a mono recording on a 1938 record-cutting machine, he can help with that too.)
Out at the born-again lake, Coyote the junk dealer has contributed three kayaks and a canoe for anyone who feels like paddling. There’s no fishing, but wildlife sightings are common, including a very large cat — a black jaguar? — at water’s edge in early October.
Though the old bathhouse down the street remains in ruins, it’s busy almost every Saturday night. That’s when the hotel team dresses the roofless structure up with bistro lights and candles and invites an eclectic mix of musicians to play under the stars. Besides torch songs, sea shanties, Latino roots and rockabilly tunes have been heard.
The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel’s amenities include an old bathhouse, now without water or roof, where the hotel stages weekly candlelight concerts. The performers are Tiny and Mary, a sibling duo.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
“I’ve been coming out here since I was a teenager, and I never told anyone about it,” singer-songerwriter Mary Simich, 31, told me. “I was afraid people would ruin it.”
Now Simich, who lives in Orange County, is trying to buy a house in town.
The border remains a wild card (especially with new presidents in office or coming soon on both sides of the border). But this dusty little town is already in transition.
Strukel, Winters and Osborne say occupancy at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel is now running above 90%. Entrepreneur Max Daily, semi-famous in San Diego for running the pop-up Oslo Sardine Bar, has announced plans to open an eatery on Old Highway 80 with a stage for live music. Possible name: the Jacumba Yacht Club.
Meanwhile at DeAnza Springs — the former clothing-optional resort north of town — new owners Luke Wasyliu and Kevin Cho have made clothing mandatory, upgraded infrastructure and boosted a focus on wellness, glamping and weekend music festivals, including Youtopia, an October gathering aimed at devotees of Burning Man.
“It’s gentrification,” neighbor Sam Schultz said recently, sitting near the entrance of the Desert View Tower. “And a certain amount of gentrification is good for us around here.”
What to do, see and eat in and near Jacumba
Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, 44500 Old Highway 80, Jacumba Hot Springs; (760) 766-4333. Room rates start at $180 on weekdays, $360 on weekends.
DeAnza Springs Resort, 1951 Carrizo Gorge Road, Jacumba Hot Springs; (619) 766-4301. The campground has 311 RV sites and about two dozen rental travel trailers, tiny homes, tent sites and motel rooms, two pools and a restaurant. Neighbored on three sides by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, it also has many trails, including the scenic 1.1-mile Temple Peak Loop Trail. Hikers pay $5 each for trail access, a good bargain. Often hosts weekend music festivals.
Desert View Tower, In-Ko-Pah Road, Jacumba; (619) 971-2845. The view from this 70-foot tower is OK. The best part of the property is the neighboring trail among boulders, where someone long ago carved and painted all sort of faces and creatures. Adult admission $9.50.
Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, 750 Depot St., Campo. Open Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission $10 for adults. The museum is a place for hard-core train people, unless you’re going on a train ride (about 10.5 miles round-trip). Those are offered on Saturdays at 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., at varying prices. The museum also has a location in La Mesa.
Gaskill Brothers Stone Store Museum, Forest Gate Road and Historic Highway 94, Campo; (619) 980-2013. Includes a timeline on local history. The upstairs of the stone story museum is mostly about the Buffalo Soldiers. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
Camp Lockett Event & Equestrian Facility, 799 Forest Gate Rd., Campo; (619) 369-9399. Including a Buffalo Soldier Museum, horse facilities and camping area. The camp, built in 1941 and closed in 1946, was the last base of operations for Black “Buffalo Soldiers” before the U.S. Army integrated and disbanded cavalry units. The Buffalo Soldiers guarded the U.S.’ southern border and Italian prisoners of war. Museum opens Saturday 9 a.m.- 5p.m., closed in December.
You want to see some real fashion ingenuity? Watch the N.F.L. draft.
I’m not saying it’s all good, but where else are you going to see someone in a double-breasted suit made by a company better known for making yoga pants? Or an Abercrombie & Fitch suit jacket so short that it exposes the belt loops on the pants beneath?
On the whole, the style on display at the N.F.L. draft last night was very overeager senior formal: a lot of suits in colors beyond basic blue. The quarterback Ty Simpson wore a custom suit by the athleisure label Alo, which, I have to say, looked better than I would have envisioned had you said the words “Alo Yoga suit” to me.
I thought it might have been from Suitsupply, but the conspicuous “Alo” pin on his right lapel put that idea to rest. Simpson, smartly, unfastened that beacon before appearing onstage as the 13th pick to the Los Angeles Rams. He had, perhaps, satisfied his contractual obligations by that point.
Earlier in the evening, as the wide receiver Carnell Tate threw up his arms in exaltation after being picked fourth by the Tennessee Titans, his cropped Abercrombie & Fitch jacket revealed a swatch of rib cage. He looked like a mâitre d’ who had just hit the Mega Millions.
During the N.B.A.’s extended fashion awakening, its draft has become a sandbox for luxury brands to cozy up to would-be endorsers. The Frenchman Victor Wembanyama broke a kind of cashmere ceiling when he wore Louis Vuitton to go first overall in the 2023 N.B.A. draft.
The N.F.L. draft has none of that. The brands you see are often not brands at all, but custom tailors that reach the league’s neophytes through a whisper network among players. The draft is also a platform to raise the curtain on longer-term brand deals that better suit these rookies. We may, for instance, never see Simpson in a suit again. Nearly every photo from his time at Alabama shows him in a T-shirt or hoodie. It makes sense for him to sign with Alo.
Football is the most mainstream of American cultural entities. And it’s one that still hasn’t, in spite of the league’s best efforts, taken off overseas. Few players, save some quarterbacks and a tight end who happens to be engaged to a pop star, feel bigger than the game itself. If you’re a new-to-the-league linebacker, you’ll most likely never harness the star power to grab the attention of Armani, but you might have just the right pull for Abercrombie.
The N.F.L. draft is therefore one of the few red carpets where the brands worn by the athletes may also be worn by those watching at home. How many people watching the Oscars will ever own clothes from Louis Vuitton or Chanel? People may comment online about Lady Gaga wearing Matières Fécales to the Grammys, but how many of those fans and viewers could afford to buy clothes from it?
The Japanese designers changing fashion
Yesterday, I published a deep dive into how a newish crop of Japanese designers are soaking up all the attention in men’s fashion right now. This was a piece I was writing in my head long before I sat down and finally started typing. I remember sitting at a fashion show in Paris over a year ago — I believe it was Dior — and being asked by my seatmate if I’d made it over to a showroom in the Marais to check out A.Presse. That Tokyo-based brand is now part of a vanguard of Japanese labels that, on many days, seems to be all anyone in fashion wants to talk about. I spent months talking with designers, store owners and big-time shoppers to make sense of why these brands have kicked up so much buzz and, more than that, what makes their clothes so great. You can read the story here.
Other things worth knowing about:
Thirty years ago, comedian and actor Tig Notaro didn’t have a clear direction in life, so she followed some childhood friends who wanted to get into entertainment to Los Angeles. Secretly wanting to do stand-up, Notaro decided to try her luck at various outlets in town, which became the start of her successful career.
“I stayed on my friends’ couch near the Hollywood Improv on Melrose, and a couple months later, got my own studio apartment in the Miracle Mile area,” Notaro says. “I love all the options for everything in L.A. — the entertainment, the restaurants. I like to stay active. So many people love the hiking options in Los Angeles, and I’m one of them.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Notaro appears in Season 3 of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” and is a series regular on Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” as she was on “Star Trek: Discovery.” She’s also a touring stand-up comic and hosts “Handsome,” a comedy podcast, with Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin. The trio will be taping a live show May 4 at the Wiltern with the cast of Netflix’s “The Hunting Wives.” The live shows include interviews, but also “incorporate some ridiculous things,” she says. For example, upon hearing that some of the hosts always wanted to learn to tap dance, Notaro “hired a tap instructor to come to our live show in Austin and teach us how to tap dance in front of the audience.”
Notaro lives near Hollywood with her wife, actor Stephanie Allynne, their 9-year-old fraternal twin boys, Max and Finn, and three cats, Fluff, Linus and Skip. When she’s not touring, her ideal Sundays include sampling vegan restaurants, wandering through bookstores or museums, and doing something physically active with the family.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
6 a.m.: Up with the kids
Because we have active children, we still wake up at 6 a.m. or 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, but there’s not as much of a rush to get going. Stephanie and I will often have coffee and chat in the living room together. I love that part of the day. Stephanie may cook breakfast, but Max and Finn are pretty self-sufficient and can make certain little meals for themselves. Max is really starting to take an interest in cooking, so he’d make breakfast for himself. Our family is vegan, but he eats eggs, so he makes himself an egg sandwich with avocado a lot of times.
9 a.m.: Daily morning walk
After breakfast, we usually have a morning walk around our neighborhood. That’s a daily thing I like to do, regardless of what’s going on. Now that I’m not touring as much, tennis is back on the schedule. So I’d go to Plummer Park in West Hollywood and play for a while, then join the family for lunch.
11:30 a.m.: Hike with a side of chickpea sandwich
I love Trails, a cafe in Griffith Park, where you can eat outdoors. It serves simple food, and has good vegan options. I usually get their chickpea salad sandwich. The food there is great. Afterward, we’d visit Griffith Observatory, where there’s lots to see. There are lots of great trails in the park, so we’d go for an hour hike before leaving.
3 p.m.: Browse the shelves for rock biographies
Bookstores are fun, so we’d head downtown for the Last Bookstore, which is in a historic building with lots of vintage books. I really love all things plant-based, and I’m a very big music fanatic. So I love to look for vegan books, nutrition books, rock biographies and autobiographies. It’s just fun to browse around the stacks.
If we didn’t go to the bookstore, we’d probably go to LACMA. Our sons are huge fans of art and want to go for each new exhibit. They love Hockney, Basquiat and Picasso, to name a few.
4 p.m.: Cuddle with cuties at a cat cafe
We’d then make a quick stop at [Crumbs & Whiskers], a kitten and cat cafe on Melrose for coffee, snacks and to pet the cats. It’s best to make reservations in advance. There’s cats all around the place that need to be adopted. You can visit and pet them, or find a new roommate. I’d love to take some home, but we already have three.
5:30 p.m. Italian or sushi, but make it vegan
We’re an early dinner family. One restaurant we like is Pura Vita in West Hollywood. It’s the greatest vegan Italian food, and for non-vegans, nobody ever knows the difference. It’s the first 100% plant-based Italian restaurant in the United States. They make an incredible kale salad and I love the San Gennaro pizza. It’s got cashew mozzarella, tomato sauce, Italian sausage crumble and more.
Then there’s Planta in Marina del Rey. It’s right on the harbor and you can sit outside and look at the boats coming in and out. They have sushi, salads and other plant-based entrees. They’ve got a really great spicy tuna roll that’s made out of watermelon. They are magicians.
Or there’s Crossroads Kitchen in West Hollywood. They play the best classic rock, and the atmosphere is upscale, fine dining. The appetizers that we always get are called Moroccan Cigars, which are vegan meat substitutes fried in a rolled batter. I really like the grilled lion’s mane steak, their mushroom steak with truffle potatoes, or the scallopini Milanese, that has a chicken or tofu option. I get the chicken with arugula on top. I always love to have a decaf espresso with dessert, which is either a brownie sundae or banana pudding.
7:30 p.m.: Comfort watch or word games
After dinner, the kids often like to watch an episode of “Friends,” a show that all ages enjoy, sports or “The Simpsons.” Or we’d play a game where each of us will add a word to a sentence and create a weird or funny long sentence until one of our sons says period. Then they’ll try and remember the whole sentence and repeat it back.
9:30 p.m.: Bubble bath then bed
The boys usually go to bed at 8:30 p.m. and bedtime for us is 9:30 p.m. Stephanie and I would read or chat. I like to take a bubble bath, if people must know. The best Sundays for me mean finding a good balance of relaxing and being active. I feel very lucky that my family and I can do those things together.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
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