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Looking out my window is like getting a front row seat at Lincoln Center. The dancers today are Gus Solomons and Dionne Figgins. Absolute powerhouses in the dance world (I Googled it). Dionne (I guess I’ve decided we’re on a first name basis?) teaches across the street, so I get to see her all the time—and even though we’ve never met, she feels familiar. I know her as a teacher, but now also as a sort of student, Gus’s student. The way she dances, there’s a vulnerability, an intimacy, that does make me feel like I know her, like I’ve picked up the ineffable threads of her story just by watching her move. (Hence the first name basis, perhaps.) It’s surreal to watch them in progress, crafting the constituent parts of something I’m used to only seeing whole and perfected. Watching something that is ultimately meant to be seen, but not yet. I wish I could inhabit their bodies for a minute and express myself so physically and completely. Hell, I’d settle for inhabiting their brains just so I could fully appreciate the beauty they’re creating. Maybe I will try to see this piece performed once they’re ready, or maybe I will let it live in my head as it is, something always in progress, performed for no one, that I was lucky enough to see.
Gus Solomons, Jr. was a hero to many, but especially to his neighbors across the street. The legendary experimental dancer had his Union Square studio right across from Gibney Dance Company and Ballet Tech, the city’s only public school focused on dance. Generation after generation of students and teachers alike would gaze out the school windows and watch him work his art. For this picture, the Ballet Tech's artistic director, Dionne Figgins, offered to go over and ask Gus for permission to shoot—he replied by offering to give her a dance lesson. It is a piece that will stay with me forever: just a few months later, Solomons passed away.
I find the diverse array of specialized schools in big cities fascinating. My office is across the street to Ballet Tech, which is a public school for—maybe you guessed it—dance. When I was fifteen, there was no way I knew what I wanted to do well enough that I would go to a school devoted to it. I could barely choose a college major and sort of managed to luck myself into my job at Netflix. I guess the dance world is something you have to get into early and dedicate a lot of time to if you’re going to make it work given how competitive it is. It’s clearly paying off—they’re really talented kids; I see them practicing sometimes. I find myself making up stories about them. The girl who is there only because her mother wanted to be a dancer and now is living vicariously through her. The boy who is torn between loving dance and loving writing—which form of self-expression will he choose beyond the halls of Ballet Tech? The kid who doesn’t have as much natural grace but is there practicing and practicing until she nails the steps—will she be able to make it as a dancer? Given how consumed I am by these made up vignettes, maybe this is something I should pitch. Or is it too similar to Fame? I would never make mine a musical, though.Coincidentally, right across from the school is a professional dancer's studio. She often practices with the windows open. Her music and footfalls are my soundtrack—sometimes they even seem to match up with the visual of the students.I bet it’s inspiring for the Ballet Tech kids to look across the street and see what their futures might hold, just as they inspire me.
She’s always had an eye for fancy things, collecting everything from antique pie safes, to globes, to model buildings and jewelry. She’s even got a full library card catalog. She finds most things can be collectable. But I wonder if at some point having so many collections and clutter makes any one of them impossible to appreciate. Most things are collectibles, once you find what they have in common. After the kids moved out, the stuff started mounting around the apartment; he felt squeezed out. I wonder if they fought about it — because one day, his stuff was just gone…he’d moved to the apartment next door. This new place was minimalist, as sparse as her place was cluttered. His and hers apartments, I suppose. Seeing them go back and forth, I think they’re happy again.
Below them lives a photographer. His apartment is sterile except for a few framed photographs on the wall. He’s lived alone for years, I’ve never seen a visitor. He used to spend his nights watching documentaries and eating take out from a TV tray — until the woman. One day he went out with his camera, and that night, he returned home with a date. From that day on, for nearly five years, they were inseparable. I never saw him without her. But three weeks ago, she disappeared, and now I worry his nights may return to how they used to be. He’s been sitting by the window, watching the lights change on the Empire State Building. There’s a heaviness to this routine.
He doesn’t even seem to be allowing himself the comfort of ordering takeout, he just eats Grape Nuts out of the same, sad plastic orange bowl. I think more than anything, he wants to have her back, even if it’s just to watch the lights together one more time.
The building I photographed from on Broadway sits at the northwestern tip of Union Square. It used to be the Arnold Constable & Company’s flagship, a department store that catered to New York’s wealthy elite from the early 1800’s all the way until 1975 — apparently the wives of Grover Cleveland, along with J.P Morgan and Thomas Edison were frequent shoppers. I can only imagine what they bought. 881 Broadway has this chalky gray-black roof on one facade that’s so unusual looking, almost like a drawing out of the Madeline books. (Others have referred to it as ‘Union Square’s Addams Family House.’) Now, it’s home to Crate & Barrel, so I guess retail begets retail, though definitely missing some of the original charm!
I’m photographing toward another large former retail store -— this one used to be the Gorham Manufacturing Company, which made sterling until 1905. Now, the ground floor houses one of my favorite shops, Fishs Eddy, which carries tons of unique dishware, often with historical New York pictures or patterns. I love that this indie store is still thriving and carrying forward little pieces of old New York.
I created this series of photos because I wanted to intentionally capture buildings that I see as I’m going about my routines — I pass these frequently on the way to the Union Square farmer’s market — and yet I’d never had the chance to go inside, nor meet anyone who lived there. And the building I shot is filled with fascinating characters. Dorothy is a collector whose apartment is filled with everything from exotic plants, to miniature figurines, to beautiful art. It’s mesmerizing, and also, cluttered — so much in fact that her husband bought the apartment next door to have a zen-like escape. Below them lives Builder Levy, a well-known photographer from the Civil Rights movement. In his clean, gallery-like apartment, his work is on display for anyone who comes to visit. And above on the very top floor is an apartment that reminds me of a treehouse, home to a couple whose children are now grown and out of the house. Still, traces of their childhood remain, as well as the family’s adorable dog.
Union Square was named for the literal union of two early Manhattan thoroughfares: Broadway and the former Bowery Road (now Fourth Avenue), and it’s still a place where people love to connect and gather. In the center of the square is a lush, green park with colossal trees towering over long rows of benches and cafe tables which are usually packed with people reading, people watching or catching up. Four times a week the city’s biggest greenmarket descends on the blacktop surrounding the green center. Farmers from hundreds of miles away set up tents which over the seasons are packed with a huge variety of fresh fruit and vegetables, containers of local honey, and soft pretzels. The market inspires many of the city’s finest chefs who plan their menus only after coming down to see what’s fresh that day. My kids went to elementary school at PS 41 nearby, and after I dropped them off I’d often head over myself, buy almost more than I could carry and then stumble home under the weight of my bounty. I once met the chef Michael Anthony, from Gramercy Tavern while shopping there, and he invited me and my then 7-year-old daughter to come back with him to his restaurant where he taught us how to make a soup by cooking cucumbers, then letting them cool and blending them with avocados. Amy Sedaris once admired my dog while we both purchased honey at a stand. I often run into my friend Missy, a street photographer, who always begins her day shooting in Union Square. In addition to the dance studios, Andy Warhol moved his Factory to Union Sq West in 1973. The storytelling organization The Moth held its first show in their founder’s loft in the late 1990’s. The archives of photographer Ruth Orkin, whose book “Pictures From My Window” inspired my work, are stored above the McDonalds, nearby, and my first agent, Saba, had his offices in the square. It’s been a place to gather in both happy times, and moments of trauma. Over the past two hundred years the square has been home base for festivals and protests, from the first Labor Day parade in 1880 and Earth Day in 1970. After 9/11 it became a gathering spot for mourners posting flyers with photographs of the missing. Underneath it all is a subway station where eight different lines come together, so it’s an easy place for people to meet up. A four story Barnes and Noble stands like a giant headboard on the northern end, with the footboard being a giant digital clock on the southern. This clock, a public art installation called Metronome, counts down the time in tenths of a second, and so the numbers fly by rapidly, counting down as the critical window closes for humanity to act to save itstelf from climate catastrophe.
