But on this night, windows were flung open.
Many of them have appeared on the cover, including another painting that features his night windows.
Here is how this year's Eustace Tilley drawing was made: "I did a whole series of these New York City night windows," Colombo continues.
Gaston Lachaise's big bronze nude waves you into the next gallery, but you may only have eyes for the Museum of Modern Art's "Night Windows," where once again you overlook the action.
And a century or more after they were etched, Sloan's unblinking accounts of intimate moments — "Night Windows," "Turning Out the Light" and "Love on the Roof" — look sweet rather than shocking.
From "Night Windows" (which sounds like a loving rewrite of R.E.M.'s "Nightswimming") to "Civil Twilight" (which pays heroic tribute to a sad-sack bus driver), these songs are full of characters and tunes that stick.
His calm, intense look, his deliberate walk and his soft Austrian accent were somehow both scary and reassuring, just right for footage of night windows banging and curtains inexplicably blowing.Mr Holzer was keen to tell Americans that ghosts were nothing to be frightened of.
The book is punctuated by lyrics on women that almost invariably end with parting, as in "Night Windows", which concludes with the "you" of the poem rising "with a sigh" and walking away "trailing the dress of your shadow behind you".
But often not: I also stayed in town with local friends as, all day and night, windows shook from nearby blasts and bullets spattered against house walls.
Hopper's "Night Windows," with its plump rumps, raging fires and gently breezing curtains feels similarly indistinct, sandwiched between other paintings on a crowded wall.
