Matteo Pericoli, who has drawn Manhattan 360 degrees from a Circle-Line-eye-view (Manhattan Unfurled, 2001) and from a land base inside Central Park (Manhattan Within, 2003), was struck by a thunderbolt when he decamped from the apartment he had lived in for a number of years.

"Once all the boxes were almost ready," he says, "I looked out my window and realized that I couldn't leave without taking that unique view with me. As if I could peel off a film from the window and detach the view with it, I made a large drawing of the view to take to our new place."

Left: David Byrne's view. Right: Wynton Marsalis's view. Copyright and courtesy the artist.

Thinking about it, Pericoli realized that the arrangement of buildings and trees framed by his window was his own personal perspective of New York. "I started to wonder about other people's views. I became obsessed, and started to ask some people if I could take photos of their views to then draw them."

The result is The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York (Simon & Schuster 2009), a charming book with the window views and commentary of 63 New Yorkers who Pericoli visited, plus a view from the former studio of Saul Steinberg that appears on the cover.

Tom Wolfe said of his view, "A real estate agent had shown my wife and me thirty-four apartments before we finally took the one you're looking out of right now. When we had reached twenty-nine she said to me, 'Do you realize that every time I show you an apartment, you never look at it? You rush straight to a window to asses the view.' To this day, I haven't really seen the apartment, only what's outside of it."

"When I returned to New York in 1993," writes Stefan Sagmeister, "I wanted to get a place capable of reminding all of us in the studio that we live in New York City on a daily basis. New York is the classic symbol for the modern city, with the Empire State Building, the ultimate icon, summing up all skyscrapers. The view keeps us connected to the outside world with the changing weather and light situations creating a lively and always different working environment."

Annie Leibovitz writes, "When I first began living in my house in Greenwich Village, I thought I had no view on the ground floor. And then I noticed that at a certain time of day, a shadow slowly forms on the brick wall at the far side of the little yard in back. The imprint of a large sycamore tree growing in our yard takes shape on the wall. It's a borrowed view. A New York thing."

As architecture critic for The New Yorker Paul Goldberger writes in his introduction, "Pericoli reveals the personal connection each of us has to the cityscape, and the way in which things that are simply there, things that we did not create but that we look at all the time, can have a profound effect on our being."

Other notables whose views Pericoli captures include Mario Batali, E.L. Doctorow, Richard Meier, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., Nora Ephron, and Stephen Colbert, among others.

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