(Paul Martinka)
(
)
A New York Times interior-design writer who once encouraged readers to spy on their neighbors wants her own to quit snooping — after they began gossiping about her all-glass balcony shower in Brooklyn.
Julie Scelfo, 39, commissioned designers to build the shower at the rear of her $2.1 million town house at Tompkins Place and Kane Street in Cobble Hill, where neighbors snapped pics of the shower and sent them to blogs, speculating that its owners are sex-obsessed exhibitionists.
Scelfo — who simply hadn’t yet installed privacy strips on the under-construction shower — wrote an article in 2009 headlined “Window Watchers in a City of Strangers,” which noted that nosy neighbors can create a “sense of community.”
She might now want to issue a correction.
Scelfo and lawyer-husband James Cavoli, 46, have since slapped a note on the shower window — visible from nearby back yards — asking neighbors to back off.
The couple wrote that they plan to install “privacy coverings” and are “heart sick” over the negative attention.
“We look forward to a day when we know our neighbors well enough to discuss any concerns over coffee, and not in newspapers and on gossip sites on the Internet,” the note reads.
But neighbors are still gossiping.
“I remember [Scelfo] saying, ‘Is everyone talking about us? Are they all talking about us?’ And I think they like it,” a neighbor told The Post.
“I just think they like the attention. They’re getting exactly what they want,” she said, adding that the shower looks tacky.
“It’s just a shame . . . it’s a glass room that sticks out from the rest of the house. A glass box,” the neighbor said.
Other neighbors just laughed off the whole thing.
“It’s a lot of rich people with petty things,” said Harry Koepp, 19, a Parsons student who lives nearby on Kane Stree. “It’s like a weird, insular, somewhat homogenous area.”
The shower is visible from the rear of the building. No neighbors saw anybody actually using it.
Eighteen months ago the home renovation irked neighbors, who complained that backyard and rooftop additions would be too tall for the brownstone-lined block.
Scelfo did not return calls for comment.