The disappearing act required little magic. "You have to stay awake somehow," said Tracie Masek, 29, her flask of whiskey tucked safely away as the crowd of caped wand-wielders began to swell outside the Regal Union Square movie theater around 9 p.m. for the opening of the final addition to the Harry Potter film canon, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2." "I'm too old for this sitting-on-the-ground business."
The film had its premiere on Thursday night before anxious crowds around the country, and throughout the city fans turned out in droves. At the AMC Loews Lincoln Square cinemas, the lines encircled a city block hours before the movie started playing.
Among the moviegoers in Manhattan's theaters on Thursday night, first-generation readers, in particular -- those who were in their teens or younger when J. K. Rowling's prose first crossed the Atlantic -- had difficulty processing the news.
For fans like Ms. Masek, who plans to attend a "mourning brunch" with friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Friday, the film's release marks the end of a 13-year saga. (The first book was released in the United States in September 1998.)
"I was 11 when it came out, just like Harry," said Mily Mena, 23, who planned to attend a midnight screening in Yonkers. "And now it's over. It's the real world. I feel like I have to, like, a find a job."
She means it. Ms. Mena, who graduated this spring from Baruch College, said the self-imposed deadline to begin her employment search has been in place since she discovered the date of the premiere: July 15, 2011.
"They're moving on," she said. "I have to move on, too."
Perched at the front of the line at the AMC theater in Times Square since noon, Charlie Belin, 31, a McGehee, Ark., native who flew to New York on Thursday morning for the movie opening, attempted to suppress such introspection. The movie itself, she said, should be the focus of the evening.
"It will be perfect," she said, stone-faced, clutching her Harry Potter shirt. "It could be the best movie of our lifetime."
Since Potter remains, at heart, a children's franchise, some city theaters did host the occasional family attendees. Elaine Perez, 38, brought her two daughters to a special 6:30 p.m. screening at Kips Bay. By 9 p.m., lines there for later screenings stretched more than two blocks along Second Avenue. Waiting for admission with two friends, Chuck Rall, 42, said he left his three children at home in New Jersey, proudly assuming the title of elder statesmen of the Harry Potter stakeout line.
"We crash parties all the time," he said of his group. "This is nothing new."
The most visible revelers, though, came from the first class of young Potter readers -- who have begun to show, like the actors themselves, conspicuous signs of aging.
Adult beverages, concealed in paper bags, circulated along the slithering lines. Ticket holders puffed on cigarettes, brandished tattoos and, in some cases, carped that a dollar just doesn't fetch what it used to when they were young.
"These glasses were $8," Ms. Mena marveled Thursday afternoon, cradling a pair of commemorative spectacles from Harry Potter: The Exhibition in Times Square.
Sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk in Kips Bay, flipping through the seventh book, Tim Herzog, 29, bemoaned his aching body. He was not meant to wait like this without a chair, he said.
The scene did have one silver lining for Mr. Herzog.
"At least there's no kids," he said. "They're horrible in theaters."
Mark Getzfred contributed reporting.
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