Sloan tended to observe city dwellers interacting in an intimate setting. A student of his wrote, he "concerned himself with what we call genre: street scenes, restaurant life, paintings of saloons, ferry boats, roof tops, back yards, and so on through a whole catalogue of commonplace subjects." Like Edward Hopper, Sloan often used the perspective of the window in his painting, in order to gain a tight focus, but also to observe his subject undetected. He wrote in his diary, in 1911; "I am in the habit of "watching every bit" of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it ... No insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen." Sloan's attention to isolated incidents within the urban environment recalls the narrative techniques used in the realist fiction and Hollywood films he enjoyed.