To Cleveland, With Love

On the road and in the skies before dawn, with Manhattan's most ambitious reverse commuter.

Photo by Jessica Bal

On a recent Saturday night out at The Rusty Knot, a nautical-themed bar facing the West Side Highway, Jonathan Weiss looks like a typical 26-year-old New Yorker. Chatting with friends in the packed bar, he sips a Tecate underneath a ceiling decorated with a fisherman’s net, seashells and oars.

Jonathan lives across town in an immaculate East Village studio, the ideal bachelor pad in a lively neighborhood flush with twenty-somethings.  He is slim but toned (he recently completed a Tough Mudder obstacle-course race) with a strong jaw line and close-cropped brown hair.  A few months ago Jonathan started dating Meagan Murphy, a striking blue-eyed brunette from Connecticut whom he got to know at another bar, following a Zogsports kickball league game. “We played beer pong and I crushed you,” Jonathan jokes of their first activity together.