People who don’t live in New York frequently can’t comprehend our obsession with rooftops. Rooftops, in this city, are unanimously the most coveted of spaces. When seeking my first place in the city, my roommate and I immediately agreed on one thing: give us your walkups, your railroad apartments, your families of vermin, your iron-clad windows, your half-baths, your seriously-are-they-running-a-drug-operation-out-of-there-(and-if-so-can-we-get-a-discount) neighbors—we’ll take them for a good rooftop. I must pause briefly to define a “good” rooftop. Although I’ve been lucky enough to gaze down on New York from rooftops that are actually luxurious (a parent’s friend’s apartment, an event I only attended because it was at the SoHo House, a flash of pearly whites and perhaps upper thigh for a kind fellow who let us into the Gansevoort), here we categorized an acceptable rooftop fairly loosely. Pretty much, what we needed was a horizontal space atop our building that we could access—whether via posh elevator, or three flights of fire escape illegally climbed while clutching the guardrails for dear life (in the end, we managed to find an apartment with monthly rent payments that allowed us to sometimes be able to afford food(!), and a roof that we would spend hours on, drinking, dancing, reading, eating, laughing, and talking until night turned into morning–and the fact that my bedroom wall didn’t come all the way up to the ceiling seemed somehow, worth it).

These photos were taken on a roof near and dear to me, a roof my boyfriend and I looked over the city on after our first date, a roof where East meets West and the skyline seems endless. For New Yorkers, it’s those few hours—the ones where it’s really too late to bother going to bed, and whoever’s controlling the iPod must be living inside your brain, and it happens to be that 6 week period when the city adopts the climate and scent of a place where people would actually like to spend time outside—those are the hours, spent on dingy, gravel-and-melted-tar roofs, where the noise, the smell, the daily grind, the what-am-I-doing-with-my-lifes, the rent being too damn high—make perfect sense.

• Sunglasses: Illesteva (last seen here, buy em here)
• Top: Generation Love (buy similar here or here)
• Necklace: Vintage via East Village flea vendor (shop more chunky gold statement necklaces here, here and here)
• Tan Jacket: Actually a leather shirt (!!!), and one of my most versatile layering pieces, from Eleven Consignment Boutique (shop more leather shirts here and here)
• Coat: Max Mara (last seen here, buy this season’s version here)
• Skirt: American Apparel (buy it here)
• Tights: Spanx (always, buy em here)
• Shoes: Completely inappropriate in 4 inches of snow. Also, Dolce Vita (buy em here)