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Nick Engstrom on his West 4th Street deck.
(Photo: Michael Edwards) |
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(Photo: Michael Edwards) |
E.
What Engstrom Sees: “Let’s face it, looking at them reminds me that I live in an impoverished, crumbling townhouse.” Upstairs, a middle-aged man types at a computer for eleven hours a day. “I watch him write instead of writing my book,” says Engstrom. In the solarium, a woman knits “very large things. Always knitting. They’re always home. I have a relationship with their cat. He’s very inquisitive. He comes outside and stares up at me.”
Who Really Lives There: Laure-Anne Bosselaar, 63, and Kurt Brown, 63, poets. “ ‘The woman knits and the man writes?’ That is not what happens in this house!” says Bosselaar. Her writing room is in the front, where she writes from 4 to 10:30 a.m. daily. “And I only knit around Christmas. It’s a vest for my husband.” There are two cats, Soot and Snooze. “The two cats are so alike that he might think it’s only one.”
What They See of Engstrom: “That building changes all the time. I see window treatments, then darkness, then boxes, then window treatments again. We wave to the guy on the deck [Engstrom]. But the whole thing about such close proximity is that you don’t look.”
F.
What Engstrom Sees: Middle-aged man and wife who cook a lot. “Nothing unusual.”
Who Really Lives There: Michael Ratner, 63, a human-rights lawyer, and Karen Ranucci, 51, general manager of “Democracy Now!,” a news-radio show. Ranucci hatches live turkeys, chickens, and ducks in the backyard. Ratner, a two-decade resident, is the ad hoc block historian. “Armand Hammer owned the three townhouses next to us—they were a compound. Minetta Stream runs under all the backyards, about six feet down.”
What They See of Engstrom: “I’ve always wondered about that window. Because it’s always open, in the dead of winter and summer,” says Ranucci. “And the television is always on. Always. What are they doing?”
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(Photo: Michael Edwards) |
G.
What Engstrom Sees: “An apartment of women in their twenties who occasionally go on the roof and get drunk. I’ve never seen a man there. Could they be lesbians?”
Who Really Lives There: Ratner and Ranucci’s 16-year-old daughter, who sometimes simply sits on the roof with her friends.
H.
What Engstrom Sees: “They just got new window shades.”
Who Really Lives There: Linda Honan, 26, advertising manager. “I moved from Australia five months ago. When I first moved in, I had no blinds, and I had to sprint naked past my French doors from the bathroom to my bedroom in the dark. They took months.”
What She Sees of Engstrom: “My window shades. It’s horribly dull.”
I.
What Engstrom Sees: “I can see into the window, but I never see anything going on. Nothing.”
Who Really Lives There: Jack Farinhas, 34, radiologist and rock guitarist. “I’m never home, and when I am, I practice.”
What He Sees of Engstrom: “I see only the people directly across from me, and they’re pretty old. But one night, I was in bed and I saw this gaggle of people scaling my fire escape. Scared the crap out of me. I found out later it was the neighbor’s kids.”
J.
What Engstrom Sees: A large white building. “I think it’s commercial.”
Who Really Lives There: Neighborhood gossips say it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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