Inside the real Greenwich Village location that inspired the setting for Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window,’ which turns 60 this week
EVERYBODY knows Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window’’ is set in Greenwich Village. But few realize the massive Hollywood set on which that thriller takes place is based on an actual New York City location.
The address given in the film — which opened 60 years ago this week — is 125 W. Ninth St., a red brick apartment building where the wife murderer played by Raymond Burr lives in a rear apartment with a fire escape that Grace Kelly climbs to look for evidence.
As was customary in crime films back then, the address is fictitious. But film historian Donald Spoto, a longtime resident of the West Village, traced that address a few years ago to 125 Christopher St. — as Ninth Street is called west of Sixth Avenue.
It’s not an easy building to get into — there’s no doorman, and the super didn’t answer the doorbell. But around the corner on West 10th Street, The Post was welcomed into a Federal-era townhouse on the other side of the courtyard for a rarely seen rear view of 125 Christopher and the neighboring buildings that inspired the movie’s set.
“Yes, this is where Jimmy Stewart lives in ‘Rear Window,’ ” says the tenant, actor-director Sean Gullette. “Architecture is one of the building blocks of making films, and Hitchcock was brilliantly inspired by this view.’’
Even with a vista partly obscured by trees absent from Hollywood’s version, it’sit’ recognizably the same point o f view seen from the e apartment of Stewart’s wheelchairbound photographer-turned- voyeur.
Granted, the backyard fence is taller r than the one Kelly, Stewar rt’s fashionable girlfriend, scales in high heels — Gullette thinks the fence may have been rebuilt fairly recently. But even in 1954, the set designers rearranged things to accommodate the intricacies of Hitchcock’s plot and camera moves. Sixty years later, it’s easy to imagine where Raymond Burr’s apartment wwould have been — and where Miss Loonely-hearts (Judith Evelyn) lived just below, and the fire escape where another couple slept in an era when few working-class people had air conditioners.
Easy, too, to see which of the low-rise buildings on the right inspired the penthouse studio occupied by the composer played by Ross Bagdasarian (better known as David Seville, creator of the singing Chipmunks).
Cornell Woolrich’s short story upon which “Rear Window’’ is based doesn’t even specify a city, much less a neighborhood. That was apparently Hitchcock’s idea.
According to a 1954 Paramount Pictures press book, the director personally scouted Greenwich Village locations and “dispatched four photographers to that colorful section of New York with instructions to shoot the Village from all angles, in all weather and under all lighting conditions, from dawn to midnight.’’
According to Steven Jacobs’ “The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock,’’ for months the director and set designers Hal Pereira and