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So it turns out, the guy who lived across the back yard was Harvey Weinstein. Yeah, that Harvey Weinstein. It almost makes me want to shower, knowing I’ve had a front row seat to his existence. I can’t even remember if I’ve seen him before. I don’t think I registered who he was until his picture was plastered all over the news. The weirdest thing is, we’ve all just moved on. His neighbors who shared walls and probably even conversations with him have gone back to their normal routines. I’m of two minds, I guess. It’s rather horrifying that life proceeds after such terrible things. But it’s also beautiful that even after darkness and pain, we keep going. We read in bed and train our dogs and watch the sunset over the skyline. And maybe I’m nuts, but it kind of feels like that’s what the Freedom Tower, back there scraping the clouds, is attesting to—memorial to the past and sign of the future. Moving forward isn’t forgetting. What else is there to do, anyway?
Usually I plan far in advance for my pictures. But one evening, I was over at my friend’s apartment, and the light was just gorgeous. I had my camera with me. We knocked on the neighbor’s door across the street, and the housekeeper who answered first was very curt. That was surprising to me, especially in the West Village, where people have generally been pretty open to my project. Something was off. I shrugged and ended up photographing a few others in the building instead, after meeting the neighbors and getting consent. Not a week later, The New York Times broke the first accusations against Harvey Weinstein, launching the #MeToo movement—and I realized that the curt housekeeper had been working in Weinstein’s apartment.
She fixes his collar as they stand in the living room doorway, their eyes locked on one another. She says he looks nice, he murmurs that he’s worried it might rain. She shakes her head with a smile and fixes his hair. It’s been forty years now, and somehow he looks the same when he stands there, back straight and arms dangling helplessly at his side. She wishes him a happy anniversary. He blushes and looks away from her.
He doesn’t want to admit that the last ten years he was so afraid. Since the kids moved out, he was scared they’d slowly start to split and fall apart. It terrified him; he’d seen it happen to others. There were some hard days, there were some fights. But standing now, there was no fall. Here she is, her hand now cupping his cheek. It’s wet. He is crying, he realizes.
He asks her what they’ll do if it rains. She smiles and says a little bit of rain won’t ruin their day.
Because my kids went to PS 41, which is at 11th and 6th Avenue, to walk home, I'd have to walk past a lot of beautiful buildings. One of the buildings I always wanted to photograph is this building which I called “French Roofs.” And I loved this building because at certain angles, it looks like you're in Paris, not New York.
French Roofs is 43 Fifth Avenue. So I'd always wanted to photograph that building and the way I often do these shoots is I say to everybody I know: "Oh there's a building I really want to photograph, do you happen to know anybody who lives in it?"I was at a party with some of my neighbors and I said, “Does anybody happen to know anyone who lives in the building that looks like you're in Paris in the Village?” And my neighbor said, “I don't know anyone who lives in that building, but I do know somebody who lives in the building across the street.” My neighbor was an architect, David Hottenroth. And he was renovating an apartment across the street from 43 5th Avenue. So he let me photograph French Roofs from the apartment he was renovating. This
was in May, and I left a note for the neighbors, but as is common in New York, as you approach Memorial Day everybody leaves, so the neighbor told me that I could photograph, but I had to do it that week because she was about to leave for the entire summer.
David Hottenroth is the architect, he said I could shoot from the building he was renovating but it had to be before the end of the summer because then the new apartment would be done and then I couldn't do it, so I had to do it right away. So I leave a note for the neighbor across the street and I say, "I can see your building from across the street, here is a snapshot, this is what it looks like, I'm working on this art project, will you participate?" The woman who lives across the street immediately responds. I left the note for two people. I left one for the one in the picture and then the people on the top floor.
Rising 11 stories above Lower Fifth Avenue, the pre-war building designed by Henry Anderson in 1905, the apartments were originally marketed as Parisian apartments in New York City. In one window, we see the couple getting ready for an evening out as the wife adjusts the husband's tie. The woman in the photo has lived there for almost her entire life. She grew up there with her parents and older brother. They originally lived on the first floor and later moved to the ninth floor. They had the north half of the apartment and broke through the walls around 1964 after her little sister was born and when the two men who lived next door moved out. The building became a co-op around 1977. Her husband and she bought her parents apartment in 1995, and they bought a similar although fully renovated apartment on the second floor. They renovated their apartment before they moved in on December 13th, 1995, 6 weeks before their third child was born. They have several ancestral portraits hanging in the delivery room including Polly McCaffrey. Marlo Brando lived in the building at one point. And one of the maids' rooms, they used to comprise the top floor. The couple in the photo had been married 40 years. They have three children all living in the same zip code. That's French Roofs.
We live just down the street from the building where Rear Window was set, so I like to call my neighbor across the street “Grace Kelly.” She’s always looking out her window with binoculars — she spends a lot of time watching my building. She lives on a high floor in the corner, giving her an excellent vantage point for watching all of us. Apparently, her apartment has a clear view into Alec Baldwin’s on one side, but she’s rarely turned that way. Maybe the drama of us ordinary folks has more to offer than the life of a movie star — more cracked dishes, quiet arguments, and little moments of joy — but I’m sure others would disagree. The paparazzi eternally planted on my street corner sure do.
Grace Kelly watches one of her downstairs neighbors when he’s out on the street. I see him all the time too. I call him the “cat savior of Manhattan.” Together, we watch as he feeds the neighborhood strays. I always wonder if she knows how many he has in his home, I think it’s up to thirteen now.Though Grace Kelly is always watching my building and the street below, she has no oversight into her own neighbors’ homes. Me though? I know their lives intimately — I catch glimpses from my window every day. There’s the artist who works from her tiny studio apartment with her giant frames, and the couple who rarely leaves the building and yet, seems to enjoy long, scenic rides on their stationary bike. I feel safe with Grace constantly keeping watch. If there’s ever an emergency, I have no doubt she’ll be the first to call 911. Which reminds me that maybe, I should get some binoculars too, to keep better watch over her.
When I was in the building with the Japanese Painter, I realized I could get a pretty good angle of the Albert Hotel. I always wanted to photograph the Albert Hotel, partly because my maiden name is Albert. One of my best friends also had a studio apartment there when she was in her 20s. But I didn’t know anyone who lived there anymore. The shoots that always end up being the most successful are when one person is willing to go out of their way to meet all of their neighbors. As an outsider, I can’t just decide to take pictures of strangers. I have to get invited into people’s homes and become part of their community.
I googled everyone I could find who lived in the Albert Hotel, and I saw that one woman went to my college. I went to the alumni directory, and within 15 minutes of writing to her, she called me back, happy to help. She offered to introduce me to a neighbor who was a real estate agent in the building and knew everyone. It was this guy, named Dennis, who was the “friendly neighbor” that got everyone together to do the shoot right away.
The building is interesting. It used to be a hotel, but now the rooms have been combined and re-built in all sorts of different configurations as apartments. One family has the entire top floor. Below them, the next two floors are two-bedrooms and studios, a cool mix of people. There’s a Parsons student with binoculars, because she likes to look into the celebrity windows nearby. Below her is an artist. And next door to the artist is an editor at a big fashion magazine.
Four windows down, on the right side, where you see two people having drinks together with a blue wall, that's Dennis—the real estate agent who nicely introduced me to everybody. It really only takes one person who is able to reach out on my behalf. If somebody says, "I live next door to you and there's this photographer I'm working with across the street. Will you collaborate with us?" it’s much more likely that you’ll say yes. It becomes a collaboration, instead of voyeurism, and I think that is the key. Building community and creating connections is the most important thing.
Every time I’ve looked over at her this weekend, she’s been in bed. Lingering there for hours, losing all sense of herself, nothing can disrupt her. It’s a change of pace, for sure. Most weekends, I see her and her husband coming through the door with suitcases, back from being gone all week.
They usually come back wearing off season clothing, clearly returning from somewhere far away. It’s like exhaustion oozes out of them as they collapse on the sofa, moving only to order food and eat it straight out of the takeout containers. They don’t unpack, their bags are just pushed aside, ready to leave again on Monday. This weekend though, he’s away without her. And for the first time in months, she’s given herself the grace to just sit and be. The pressure of being on a schedule day in and day out has fallen away, and now, she only exists in the world of her novel.
Downstairs, the boy is also in a world of his own, this one filled with castles and towering turrets and adventure. I actually know him, at least a little. Our sons are a grade apart at PS3, and I often see the dad walking him to school. I’ve always wanted to say hi, but I chicken out, what am I going to say -“Hey, I’m Janet, I can see straight into your apartment, let’s be friends!” A dog sits by the boy’s side — Rover — the loyal knight in his make-believe world. The boy talks to the dog constantly, about their adventures in this magical land. They are knights on a quest, defending their Lego fortress against invaders and foe. As he plays, his parents, unaware of the epic tale unfolding in the next room, are engrossed in planning their winter holiday to India. As the woman reads and the boy builds, I see a certain sameness, as if the energy of their imaginations extends beyond the confines of their rooms.
From my window, they are two stories, perhaps soon to cross paths in the same city opera unfolding in my head.
Thirty years down the line, the Village will continue to change. As it gets more expensive, it will push out more ordinary artists, and attract more celebrities. NYU is also expanding its footprint. The woman reading in bed in this photograph has since moved away — the university bought the building next door, and the view out her window, once expansive, is now nothing but brick walls.
It also makes me miss my own teenagehood. It’s not like I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be that age. My kids would probably be mortified if they knew the stupid crap I used to pull behind my own parents’ back. I worry about them, from my fully-formed-brain adult perspective, but I also remember that I survived sneaking out, getting stoned out of my mind seeing the Smashing Pumpkins… I even hitchhiked a few times (I do PRAY my children don’t do that). I was, frankly, an idiot—but isn’t that what being a teenager is all about?
Those parents in the fancy building next door are in for it sooner than they think. Their little children, who take their plates to the sink when asked, have their hair combed, and say “please” and “thank you,” will be rebellious teenagers in the blink of an eye—seasoning their sentences with expletives, getting stick and poke tattoos with their friends, and blowing pot smoke out their dorm windows. I hope the adults over there (prim and proper though they may be) remember their own wild streaks well enough to have patience with them, and I wish the same for those kids, when they grow up and perhaps have children of their own.
While I was photographing French Roofs, I ran into a problem. A lot of buildings have rules that there's just no photography allowed. Ever. I don't know why. It's mostly a New York problem. But anyway, I'm sneaking in and out of the building, and I'm trying to be super friendly to everybody. I'm coming out of the building, and this one woman comes up to me and she's like, “Huh, what are you doing? Lots of photo equipment.” I get really nervous because I know I'm not allowed to be there but I decide to be honest and tell her what I'm doing, and I say, “Oh, I photograph from one neighboring window to another, and she's like, "Oh, I follow you on Instagram!” And she invites me to photograph from her apartment, because she looks into an NYU dorm.
In reality, half the building is a dorm and half the building is not a dorm. That's what's interesting about Susie's view to me. On one side, there’s this incredibly elegant family, in this gorgeously renovated kitchen, with a wine fridge and beautiful antique furniture, and then next door, there are kids. I posed all the dorm kids. The boy who organized all the kids in the dorm was one of my daughter's preschool classmates who had moved to Hong Kong when he was three and had come back to go to NYU. That’s what’s amazing about all of this. I've done this project all over the world, but when I do this in New York, it is my personal relationships that are making it possible. Susie followed me on Instagram because she was friends with the architect who I was friends with. It wasn't completely random. And I got these NYU students because I knew an NYU student through my daughter. That kind of web is what's really interesting to me – how one thing leads to another. That's particularly interesting in this group of photos. One picture leads to the next picture, which leads to the next picture. We can even go back to Caarin, my friend from Montclair who kind of initiated this corner — she was a friend of my husband's from elementary school.
And it is that kind of web that makes it all possible. People often ask me, how can I do this? I'm willing to talk to anybody and everybody and keep creating these connections.
Time seems to move differently in every apartment across the street. The woman on the top floor seems to be able to go back to the past anytime she has her friends over, which they are tonight. Drinking wine, eating cheese, sharing stories — the same ones they’ve recounted since college, or maybe new ones. They’ve been having these get-togethers ever since I moved in, two decades at least. Catching up, opening a portal to the past. For a few hours, no one is a day over twenty-one. When they say their goodbyes, the reality of time sets in, but they don’t mourn its passage. It serves as a testament to how far they’ve come from the young women who snuck cheap pinot into their dorm room, fantasizing about what their futures might hold. I wonder if this is what they imagined. Just below is the painter, who doesn’t seem affected by the movement of minutes at all.
Sometimes, if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll look at his clock to check the time. I can see it from my couch — 8:29. I usually just look at my phone. I didn't even think people used clocks any more, but the painter has one, despite paying it no mind. It sits behind him and ticks away the minutes, the hours, that he remains steadfastly hunched over his brushes and ink. He’s been there all day, as he is every day, never checking the time—just looking at the page, blank this morning, transformed by now into a new world of his own creation. Perhaps he marks time by the changing light, the shifting shadows across his desk. Does he trace them in his ink? It’s dusk now; almost all the lights are on in the Albert Hotel next door. The clock changes to 8:30. Thepainter doesn’t notice. One more story down, and I feel like I’m looking into my own alternate timeline. I mean—to have an all white kitchen as clean and tidy as the folks on the 6th floor? A pipe dream for those of us with children. I find myself thinking a lot about them—they’re almost austere, unknowable. Their home is clean, modern, just a few books and apples as decor. But there’s also an easy intentionality to their apartment, how they dress, their whole life, frankly. Would I also have clean counters and time to read if I didn’t have kids? Do they gaze in my window and imagine their life with children? The crayon drawings on the fridge, sticky handprints on the counter, fruit shoved in lunch boxes rather than a glass bowl. Would they want to rewrite their past if they could? I know I wouldn’t trade my present—though I do pine a bit for their sweet adult freedom.
When you're on the street, sometimes New York just looks cluttered and messy, but when you get to stand in someone's apartment and look out their window and see what they see, that's where New York gets really beautiful — where everything slows down, and you can actually pay attention to the details.
Photographing “Valentines,” I realized the view back across the other way was perfect: the view of the building where I had set up my camera. I asked my friend Caarin to organize another dinner party there, because the party is what led to the original picture of Valentines. They’re on the top floor in the picture. But I wanted to get others in the building too. And before I even posed the neighbor downstairs, before I even got there, I saw that he was in his apartment painting. He practices this Japanese style of ink painting called Sumi – it's a super meditative process. My pictures take about two hours by the time I set up, put the camera on a tripod, put sandbags down, figure out the exposure, figure out what time the inside light and the outside light are going to match best, set up the lights across the street and then wait for the right moment. And the whole time, he was painting. I've never seen anybody have so much focus and stay in the same place for so long.
Turns out, he’s lived in the apartment building for 30 years now. Thirty or forty years ago, The Village was cool. There were a lot of artists—these weren’t big fancy apartments. Now all the apartments have been combined and it's a really elegant, sought-after building, one of the nicest in New York. The painter was just lucky to have been one of the early buyers. I love that there's a sense of chaos on his desk, even though the process is really meditative -- there's all this stuff out, and there's so much to look at. There's his clock, and the lotion, and a robe on the bed and a book and tissues and paint and water.
And then you look right downstairs at the neighbors in their kitchen and it's perfectly clean — almost sterile. There is a woman and her husband. You can see the cookbook on the table. And of course, she's looking out her window.
It always strikes me how the man in the yellow shirt goes to the extra effort to put on nice exercise clothing. Maybe it's for his wife, though she probably only caught a glimpse of it, too focused on her sewing in the other room to care about her sweating husband. Clearly they have done this before, separated from each other in order to focus on their own tasks. But just existing together in the same space brings them a certain comfort.
To the far left, a couple is dancing. It’s a new rhythm for them — or maybe, an old rhythm rediscovered. With two teenagers just a year apart, they’re about to be empty nesters. The last time they shared a sweet slow dance was at her brother’s wedding, 22 years ago. At that point they had only been married for a few years but they were unbothered by their lack of experience on the dance floor. Their confidence and affection led their klutzy steps, as her family watched from the sidelines. He tripped over her Loeffler Randalls and she squealed in pain, but they refused to cut the dance short. In the decades since that night, they’ve enjoyed each other through their shared milestones: watching their girl’s first ballet recitals, weekend family trips to Bucks County, the oldest girl’s high school graduation. Soon, there will be a new sense of space with less distractions. Will they just step on each other’s toes again? The possibility pushes them to practice, for her nephew’s bar mitzvah in two weeks, and for the dances yet to come.
Back upstairs, the teenagers are beyond excited for the party they’re setting up for. The spirit of Valentine’s Day surrounds them— they are hopeful, and eager. The anticipation before the party — of what the night might bring — can sometimes be the best part; for them, the future has so many possibilities. As I watch the mom reading to her little girl on the couch, I feel totally in the here and now— and also in the past. I remember reading to my kids and feeling we were completely sealed off from the rest of the world. As I watch them, I don’t hear my phone ring or the fire engine passing by and the laundry is the furthest thing from my mind. Even though I’m across the street I don’t dare stir for fear of interrupting the moment. I wonder what they’re reading. Maybe, Lyle the Crocodile.
This is one of my favorite buildings in New York: 26 East 10th Street, on the corner of University Place. It’s a super cute corner — and my kids went toP.S. 41 in the neighborhood, so I’d been wanting to photograph this building for years. I knew people who lived there: Melissa and Steve, who are dancing in the photo. Their daughters, the girls with the red hair, red dress, and balloons, went to preschool with my daughter. But I could never manage to meet anyone who lived on a high floor with a good view from the facing building. Finally, in 2023, my friend Caarin was invited to a dinner party across the street. She texted me from the dinner party and she said,“Gail, my view looks like it could be one of your pictures. You need to photograph it." She was looking at another apartment in the building that Melissa had bought for her mother, who never moved in. I called Melissa.
"You're not going to believe this,” I said. “I finally found someone across the way!" Her response took me by surprise. "You'd better do the shoot this week,” she replied, “because we're about to sell the apartment." Usually, my process to set these pictures up from beginning to end takes weeks.Sometimes it takes months. That's because the idea is to get everybody to be home at the same time. There’s coordination involved. But I decided that since Melissa owned two apartments in the same building, I could do it quickly. We decided to try for the very next day: Valentine's Day. The girls decided to throw a Valentine's party in the empty apartment. Melissa and Steve decided to have a romantic dinner at home. And they asked all their neighbors to be in the picture. With no pre-planning, we spread the word: “We're shooting tomorrow at 5:30 p.m, can you all be home?” Everybody agreed. The people on the bottom floor were the only ones who didn't want to pose, but they still agreed to the picture. I put lights in all of the apartments, I set up my camera in the facing building, and then I called everybody and I directed them from across the street.
One of the things I really like about photographing in New York is that the streets are parallel. That means when you look out towards another building, you're often looking directly into the windows. In some cities, things are at funny angles, and you have to kind of stretch your head to look, but in New York it feels like the windows are made to be looked into. And in this one especially, every single window is almost like a TV screen— as if I'm supposed to watch the lives of the people inside. It feels like they're inviting me in.
Greenwich Village is one of those iconic New York City neighborhoods that has changed a lot over the past half century or so. It has long been an incubator for artists, poets, and musicians — Bob Dylan, Willa Cather, and Maurice Sendak are among the many creatives who have once frequented its streets. More recently, many of the apartments have been combined, and the buildings have become some of the most elegant and desirable in all of Manhattan, more accessible for celebrities such as Alec Baldwin, Anna Wintour, and Anderson Cooper. In addition to being a star-studded neighborhood, “The Village” is also home to New York University, making for some astonishing contrasts of A-listers and undergrads in its buildings and windows.
Just north of Washington Square Park, there’s a corner that has always called out to me: East 10th Street and University Place. My kids went to P.S. 41 in the neighborhood, so on our walk home, I’d always pass it by, wanting to photograph the beautiful buildings around it. The amazing part about doing this project in New York is that I have personal relationships that possible to get very special, privileged access to these historic apartments. There’s the turn-of-the-century Hotel Albert, made famous in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, where a college classmate introduced me to a real estate agent and his friendly neighbors willing to be photographed. There’s the building I’ve nicknamed French Roofs—because it was originally marketed as Parisian-style living in New York City—which I could only photograph because my neighbor was an architect who happened to be renovating an apartment directly across the street.
Sometimes, the connections are purely coincidental – like when my husband’s elementary-school classmate went to a dinner party directly across the street from Valentines, where other friends lived, and found the kind of view that felt like the windows were made to be looked into. From there, one view led to another, and soon this exclusive corner of the Village had this sense of interconnectedness. It felt like people were inviting me in.
That’s the thing about New York: when you're on the street, sometimes it just looks cluttered and messy, but when you get to stand in someone's apartment and look out their window and see what they see, that's where the city gets really beautiful — where everything slows down, and you can actually pay attention to the details. Like an artist carefully meditating over a Japanese Ink Painting for nearly two hours, or the contrasting windows of an elegant family and a college dorm building (NYU Dorm).
Thirty years down the line, the Village will continue to change. As it gets more expensive, it will push out more ordinary artists, and attract more celebrities. NYU is also expanding its footprint. In To Dylan, the woman reading in bed (Dylan herself) has since moved away — the university bought the building next door, and the view out her window, once expansive, is now nothing but brick walls.
