Reality 1 / Manhattan roofscape at dawn

Reality 1 / Manhattan roofscape at dawn. For a flicker of those classic New York City water-tanks with conical tops, silhouetted on rooftops across the cityscape, as captured on soft-toned black-and-white silent film, this is me flitting around a Downtown roofscape at dawn.

This fragment of footage was a sweet little whim suggested by my friend Edward Vilga because he had an unused bit of old Super-8 celluloid that he felt it would be a shame to leave unexposed. So up the stairwell we headed, onto his Soho rooftop six storeys above the south-east corner of Prince Street and 6th Avenue, at a painfully early hour of the morning, some year in the early ’90s.

Google Maps’ 3D satellite view shows that those big silver pipes where I perched have all vanished now. But the gap in the roof’s eastern parapet is unchanged, through which I stepped onto the roof from a vertigo-inducing external fire-escape on that one occasion only. (36”)
(See video here.)

 

(This video is also on Vimeo and YouTube.)