Inside the real Greenwich Village apartment that inspired Rear Window

Everybody knows Alfred Hitchcocks 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.

Sean Gullettes West 10th Street home looks onto the courtyard that inspired the film.Photo: Zandy Mangold

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.

Its not an easy building to get into theres no doorman, and the super didnt 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 movies 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 Hollywoods version, its recognizably the same point of view seen from the apartment of Stewarts wheelchair-bound photographer-turned-voyeur.

Granted, the backyard fence is taller than the one Kelly, Stewarts 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 Hitchcocks plot and camera moves.

Sixty years later, its easy to imagine where Raymond Burrs 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.

A building at 125 Christopher St. (inset) provided Rear Window director Alfred Hitchcock (on-set with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly) with an imaginary stage for murder. The Post photographed it from a nearby West 10th Street townhouse that shares the same point of view as Stewarts apartment.Photo: Courtesy of Everett Collection; Zandy Mangold

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Inside the real Greenwich Village apartment that inspired Rear Window