Impose photo contributor f.trainer gets himself onto rooftops in Chinatown NYC for the micro and the macro of this lower east corner of Manhattan: the tags ten stories up and the noise brewing down below in the street.

From his mouth:

It’s a really strange place up on those rooftops as there is a ton of evidence of people being up there- from the graff to the clothes slowly air-drying on lines, but we never actually saw anyone. It was especially weird because all of the families would keep their doors open so that friends and family could just come and go from their apartments as they wished, walking by and looking in, smelling the smells of home-cooked food. You can look down off the edges of these buildings- once you get up on one you can generally move around across the entire block, and see the back alleys that aren’t open to the street. It wasn’t hard to forget that you were in New York, that is until you look up and saw the Empire State Building looming uptown.