Heavy rain pours down on a red SUV parked on an empty New York City street. Not a single human in sight. A towering streetlight illuminates the downpour and reflects off the car’s roof, while Taylor Swift’s “loml” plays in the background, setting a melancholy mood.
On the surface, nothing in this scene should be particularly remarkable. It’s just a 10-second clip on TikTok. And yet the video has somehow resonated with millions of people, racking up 9.5 million views and 1.8 million likes.
It’s just one of countless cinematic moments captured by Greg Marzinsky, a mostly anonymous creator whose simple Manhattan cityscapes have become a surprising phenomenon on TikTok.
His posts largely follow the same formula: A short static shot of a New York City street — usually at night, often in the rain — with no specific action or narrative, always accompanied by Swift’s music. Though Marzinsky concedes that he doesn’t fully understand why his content has become so popular, he thinks its simplicity is a major part of its appeal.
“I feel like there’s a degree of people seeing themselves, like their own point of view,” the 30-year-old freelance marketer tells Yahoo. “It’s accessible, but it is also [has] an aspirational, or emotional connection to it.”
Marzinsky says his videos have “an interpretive elasticity” to them, and that ambiguity, he argues, allows people to connect with his content in the context of their own lives.
“A hundred different people could have a hundred different stories,” he says. “It could be a relationship, or a memory, or a possibility, or even just wanting to be in New York City and experiencing the scene.”
The content has become so well-known in certain corners of social media that his first name has become a verb. His fans will sometimes post about how they “just got gregged” — a loosely defined term that appears to describe the experience of having a strong emotional reaction to a seemingly ordinary moment.
There’s a regular stream of posts from fans musing about spending time with Marzinsky in the city, or seeing things through his eyes. As one creator put it: “Everyone needs to have a Greg moment.” His content has even become something of a template for creators in other cities to follow, like Paul from Washington, D.C.
Marzinsky now has more than 640,000 followers on TikTok, plus nearly 50,000 more on Instagram. Despite his content’s ballooning popularity, he insists he’s not in it for personal fame or fortune. The only time you’ll see his face is the simple black and white headshot attached to his profile. He also says he hasn’t made any money from his content to date, in part because being a “faceless” creator makes it harder to get lucrative brand deals.
Marzinsky moved to New York City seven years ago and has been posting streetscapes from around his West Village home since 2022. But his content has evolved considerably since then. At first, they had a faster pace, using a series of cuts timed to the music instead of a single lingering shot. For years, it was your typical TikTok account with most posts getting a few hundred views.
“Originally, when I started, they were kind of all over the place,” he says. “I like to look back, and I’m like, ‘Oh my god, like, this is strange.'”
Things started to take off in early 2025, when a post he shared of a snowy evening in the West Village received more than 41,000 likes. After that, Marzinsky’s posts began receiving hundreds of thousands of views and, before long, were regularly cracking into the millions.
He attributes much of that breakthrough to the way his process and thinking developed over time. The cuts between shots are now mostly gone. Each post is just a single, simple scene that Marzinsky encountered in his everyday life in the city and decided to share.
“I don’t go looking for content,” he says. “It’s mostly my natural movements.”
Why Taylor Swift? He just loves her (as is the case with most Swifties, there’s no one reason). When asked if he was ever tempted to use another artist’s music for his videos, he says, “I mean, I really only kind of listen to Taylor.”
As his account’s popularity skyrocketed, so did interest in the man behind the videos — attention Marzinsky initially found unsettling.
“It started becoming uncomfortable a little bit, because people would make these assumptions or say things,” he says. At times, the comments on his posts were filled with speculation that his account was run by AI or that it was a secret marketing campaign orchestrated by Swift’s PR team. Marzinsky says he has become more comfortable with the unexpected notoriety, especially after seeing how many of his followers have come to his defense — including one who shared a viral clip proving that he’s a real person.
Marzinsky notes that he hasn’t allowed his new popularity to change how he finds and shares content, which he thinks of as a visual diary, capturing evocative moments that catch his eye.
“It kind of is like a day in my life,” he says.
Marzinsky admits that it often takes effort to turn off the content-minded part of his brain and simply enjoy the city he spends so much of his time documenting.
“It has become very difficult to go for a walk,” he says.
