In Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) a photographer looks out from an apartment on West 10th St onto the buildings of West 9th, where a dancer, a composer and a sculptor lead their creative lives. The street had been home to writers, painters, muralists, novelists, screenwriters and decorators for more than 100 years, including Edna St Vincent Millay, Dashiell Hammett and the journalist Ida Tarbell. Christopher Gray writes in the New York Times (15 July 2012), “West Ninth Street, from Fifth to the Avenue of the Americas, has a smorgasbord of picturesque houses, some over a century old, but then many village blocks have that. What other blocks don’t have is the street’s trio- nay, a full quartet – of truly Jack-in-the-Beanstalk-sized wisteria vines growing up the facades of three houses”, which he depicts folding in on itself “like a leathery Laocoon, growing, constantly growing, on this block with one foot in the 19th century and another in the 21st”.