tenement

“We lived a teeny tenement apartment on 29th and 2nd Avenue above the Wonderland Blues Bar,” Brooks says.

Ginsberg lives on the Lower East Side in what Hujar calls “the most rundown tenement,” not far from a cluster of the burned-out buildings that marked New York’s gritty ’70s.

Her family relocated 11 times before she was four years old; they were evicted and had to live with relatives; they moved into a rat-infested tenement building in Philadelphia.

In the first four years of her life, her family relocated 11 times, moving in with relatives after evictions, or into rat-infested Philadelphia tenements.

Scenes switch effortlessly from Prague, with its shadowy bridge looming over the Moldau, to a Brooklyn tenement, a busy office, a tony art gallery, and the roof of the Empire State Building.