Having to live in someone else’s shadow is one of the risks of being a New Yorker. Yet for untold thousands, this vexing state of affairs is literally true. In a city forever sprouting new buildings, the quest to reach higher often comes at the cost of stealing somebody else’s light.

And so, despite the approach of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the harbinger of more sunlit hours — as well as naturally occurring vitamin D — home and street life for many New Yorkers remains, or is about to become, dark.

On Ludlow Street in Lower Manhattan, Alice O’Malley, a photographer, now gazes dolefully across the street at the relentless rise of her neighbor due west — a 20-story hotel that has wiped out the last of her apartment’s gentle pink light.

On the Upper West Side, Ilonna Pederson greets a darkened apartment for the second winter after nearly 50 years there; her southern windows were bricked over a year ago to make way for a high-rise inches away.