A girl on a balcony: when I look out the rear window of my East 60th Street apartment, I see her as if I were watching an outdoor movie on a misty night. The girl I see is not Juliet but Marilyn, and the movie is “The Seven Year Itch.” A town house whose backyard meets mine appears in that 1955 film, in which Marilyn Monroe played the “delicious” unnamed Girl subletting an apartment for the summer.

Her admirer is a book editor (Tom Ewell) whose wife of seven years has just left Manhattan with their son for a vacation in Maine. After roaming restlessly around his lonely apartment, he moves out to the terrace. Suddenly a tomato plant in an iron pot plummets from the balcony above, just missing him. The Girl leans over the railing in dismay. Hello! Later, over Champagne and potato chips, well, it’s easy to imagine the 1950s romantic but code-cleaned comedy plot.

The ghost of Marilyn Monroe dances provocatively all around my neighborhood. In the George Axelrod play on which the film is based, the apartment is near Gramercy Park; the movie script, by Axelrod and the director Billy Wilder, changes the location to a brownstone in the East 60s, where the rent is “a modest 160 a month.”

Only two scenes were actually filmed in New York, mostly as publicity stunts. The first location was a town house at 164 East 61st Street, and during filming Monroe could be seen, “clad in lingerie,” at a second-story window. “Barricades blocked off the street, between Third and Lexington Avenues, for four hours,” The New York Times reported.