David Schwab and his wife, Judy, were seeing “Jerusalem” at the Music Box Theatre on the evening that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, and his wife, Anne Sinclair, moved in next door to them, at 153 Franklin Street. “I started getting these texts during the show,” Schwab said, “‘I see you got a new neighbor.’ I didn’t know what that meant.” They arrived home on Franklin Street, where they live in a second floor loft with their daughter, Anna, who is sixteen, to find the street full of reporters and cameras.
The Schwab loft adjoins the Strauss-Kahn townhouse on the side where David, who is a filmmaker, and Judy, a singer and performer, have their bedroom. (“Of all the places in New York City, I have this guy five feet from my bed,” Schwab said.) Their deck, in back, looks over into the neighboring patio, the few hundred square feet of outdoor space now allowed to Strauss-Kahn, who has been charged with attempted rape and assault, under the terms of his bail. (He has pleaded not guilty). The patio is surrounded by five-foot-high opaque walls made, according the property’s prospectus—it had been on the market for just under fourteen million dollars—of “Japanese paper glass.”
On the night after Strauss-Kahn arrived, the couple saw Sinclair through the glass, smoking a cigarette on the patio. By standing on their bedroom windowsill, they could look over the glass and see her head. Judy and her friend Libby Spears, a filmmaker who was staying with them, decided to sit on the fire escape; they could hear murmured voices, but not actual words. Finally, Anna said that it wasn’t right for them to be spying, and the adults came inside.
Someone at a French magazine got in touch with Schwab and offered to pay him ten thousand dollars for a photo. Schwab did some research and decided that a good quality picture of Strauss-Kahn at home could be worth fifty thousand at the low end and up to a hundred thousand. “Him and her together—that’s the money shot,” he said. Last Sunday, the D.S.K. household made the money shot harder to get by installing six canvas sidewalk umbrellas around the patio, blocking most of the view. “But if you get on a ladder in the bedroom you can still see over the umbrellas,” Schwab said.
One day this week, Schwab was standing in the foyer of his building, talking to his wife, who was on her way to lunch with a neighbor. He had the door propped open, and a young reporter from the press stakeout on Franklin Street tried to dart in, saying, “Is there a front desk here?”
“Does it look like there’s a front desk here?” Schwab answered. “Step outside please because I don’t know who you are.” The man walked away hurriedly, just as the postman came in.
“Man, they get a lot of mail,” the postman said, when asked about 153 Franklin. “Before they moved in, just a few things went there. Now, it’s a lot. I mean a lot.”
Schwab took the elevator up to his place and went out onto his deck. He looked over the Japanese paper glass walls and the café umbrellas, four of them taupe colored and two of them tomato. Beyond the glass walls stretched the flat roof of a one-story garage that led to Leonard Street. If there was a guard on that side, Schwab couldn’t see him. “It would be easy for him to escape,” he said. “He could be at Teterboro in thirty minutes, and he’s gone. That’s the picture I want—the escape. Maybe I should set up a Web cam that runs all the time and scans for movement.”
The best view into the Strauss-Kahn backyard was from the other side of the townhouse, but Schwab hadn’t seen anyone taking pictures from there. “I think they must be richer than us,” he said.
Photograph by Anna Schwab.
