Everybody knows Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window’’ is set in Greenwich Village. But few realize the massive Hollywood set on which the 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’s recognizably the same point of view seen from the apartment of Stewart’s wheelchair-bound photographer-turned-voyeur.
Granted, the backyard fence is taller than the one Kelly, Stewart’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 would have been — and where Miss Lonelyhearts (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 Joseph MacMillan Johnson “did nothing but plan the design of what was to become the largest indoor set ever built at Paramount. Hitchcock himself superintended the huge and complex construction that took six weeks to set up.’’
Jacobs continues: “The entire set was fit with a sophisticated drainage system for the rain scene and with an ingenious wiring mechanism for the highly complex lighting of day and night scenes in both the exterior of the courtyard and the interior of the apartments.’’
Of the 31 apartments, 12 were fully furnished on a massive set that was 38 feet wide, 185 feet long and 40 feet high — with the soundstage floor removed so that the courtyard level could be built into the basement.
Rear Window Timelapse from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.
Not a frame of “Rear Window’’ — which never shows even a glimpse of the fronts of any of the buildings, save a restaurant on “West Ninth’’ — was actually shot in Greenwich Village.
But the portion of the courtyard behind West 10th Street finally got its close-up — in 1993’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery,’’ Woody Allen’s “Rear Window’’ homage.
According to Gullette (whose feature directing debut “Traitors’’ played this year’s Tribeca Film Festival), the backyard he shares with neighbors also played Al Pacino’s garden in 1973’s “Serpico.’’
Although a building on Minetta Street was used for the exterior of Serpico’s home, he’s also shown working at the NYPD’s 6th Precinct, which is directly across the street from the townhouse.
In “Rear Window,’’ Stewart’s character calls that same (but never seen) 6th Precinct when Burr’s murderer discovers that Kelly has sneaked into his apartment.
Sixty years later, we know why the cops arrived just in the nick of time.