The Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész moved into the new apartment building at 2 Fifth Avenue in 1952 and, over the next 25 years, amassed a brilliant portfolio of images of New York's historic Washington Square, mostly taken from his balcony overlooking the park. Since coming to New York from Paris in 1936, Kertész had intermittently photographed the Square, but it was his move to his 12th-floor apartment that provided him the platform from which he broadly explored the subject. Using a telephoto lens, Kertész photographed all elements of the park and the surrounding neighborhood. He executed variations of several closely related photographic themes and created abstract and ephemeral images of solitary figures walking in the park, of the tire tracks left by park vehicles in the snow, of the park illuminated by electric light, of the fountain in the center of the park, and of a folk-art rooster in front of an apartment window cloaked in the overcast atmosphere of a rainy day).

The writer Brendan Gill often visited Kertész and his wife Elizabeth at their apartment. Gill related the experience: "For almost a quarter of a century the Kertészes have occupied a charming twelfth-story apartment directly overlooking that eight-acre rectangle of trees, paved walks and dusty, scruffy grass. The little cantilevered balcony of the Kertész apartment hangs in space like the crow's nest of some impossibly high mastered barkentine; all year round, winds blow fiercely around it, in summer the sun bedazzles it, in winter the snow silently doubles and redoubles the thickness of its railings. One is close to the elements up there and feels the force and hazard of them; at the same time, one becomes a part of an immense cityscape of gleaming towers, tarred roofs, and zigzag, bonneted chimney pots.…Kertész on his balcony arms himself with his camera and bulky zoom lens to shoot the many lives of the Square" (Brendan Gill, "Appreciation," in André Kertész, Washington Square [New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975, n.p.).