(Photo: Lisa Kereszi)

Paul Rudnick
Playwright, Screenwriter, Greenwich Village
Though his apartment looks out over the new Hudson River park, Paul Rudnick lodged his office in an interior, view-free nook. “I like that it has no windows, so I’m not distracted,” he says. “But it’s filled with crap, so I am.” Almost everything in the Greenwich Village apartment is, in Rudnick’s words, “Gothic Revival from various godforsaken countries.” Even most exceptions are old-school: Front and center on the desk sits an IBM Selectric, which he still uses to write. There’s a heavy wooden chair, “in which I write heavy, wooden prose,” and two Gothic cabinets “used for completely inappropriate things, like to hold a fax machine, just to outrage the furniture.” Behind the typewriter stands one lone token of the 21st century, an iMac, “where it shivers in terror.”