Nora Ephron on "the sense of neighborhood"

Note: This post was edited on Jan. 20, 2007. Hotlinked image(s) were removed. Follow the link(s) to the image location(s). On June 5, The New Yorker featured a Nora Ephron short story titled "Moving On." Ephron describes her love affair with the Apthorp apartment building in New York City. A sense of neighborliness is one of the reasons she loved the Apthorp. She writes, Most people who don't live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense if magnified, because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another's names. At Halloween, those of us with small children turned the courtyard street lamps into a fantasy of pumpkin-headed ghosts; in December the landlords erected an electric menorah, which coexisted with a Christmas tree covered with twinkle lights. The Apthorp courtyard