SEX & STABBING ON PERRY STREET

66, Perry Street

Lets deal first with the 'sex' bit of the title. Sex and the City was a highly successful cable television series with the original run of the show broadcast on HBO from 1998 until 2004, a total of six seasons. Set in NYC, the show focused on four women, three in their mid-thirties and one in her forties. The quirky drama/comedy had multiple continuing story lines and tackled socially relevant issues such as sexually transmitted diseases, safe sex, multiple partners and promiscuity. It specifically examined the lives of big-city women in the late 1990's and how changing roles and expectations for women affected the characters.

The show was primarily filmed at NYC's Silvercup Studios and on location in and around Manhattan with 66, Perry Street being used for the outdoor shots of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment.

Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Norman Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director, yet still found time to be married six times, father eight children , adopt one child, and maintain several mistresses. Like many novelists of his generation, Mailer struggled with alcohol and drug abuse throughout his adult life.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts and politics orientated weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village.

And the 'stabbing' promised at the outset? Whist living at 73, Perry Street in 1960 he stabbed his second wife Adele Morales with a penknife after a party, nearly killing her. He was involuntarily committed to Bellvue Hospital for 17 days; his wife would not press charges and he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault, and was given a suspended sentence. Adele recovered and not surprisingly divorced him.