New York State of Mind

Photo by Kipp Wettstein with Emily Wettstein

In addition to missing friends and family, I cannot help but daydream about the view out of our NYC apartment’s window. For those of you that visited the apartment we spent our last year in NYC in, you know what I am talking about. Because we lived on Tenth Avenue and most of the buildings between Eighth and Tenth are low rise tenement buildings, we basically looked at New York’s skyline in elevation. It was spectacular.  Even though we were only twelve floors above the street, it felt like we were floating above the city. I took hundreds of photos of the view. It never really got old.

I had a very hard time emotionally separating myself from the window. Before leaving I would spend hours staring out the window, with Jay Z and Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind blasting in the background. I knew that some way, somehow I had to capture this snapshot and take it with me to the other side of the planet. So last summer, only days before our furniture was to be picked up to head Down Under, one of my extremely talented former students (who has a background in photography) and her cousin, who is a professional photographer, came over to capture the moment.

Almost six months later the view has returned, only this time virtually, a printed canvas 50 inches wide by 40 inches tall on our wall just opposite our Sydney view. The crazy thing about it is that the image resolution is so high that you can actually see things that you could not see with the naked eye.

We can come home from a hard day’s work, sit on the same couch we sat on in NYC and look out the same window to the glittering city. It keeps NYC on our minds…