In 1980, Halley returned to New York City and moved into a loft on East 7th Street in the East Village, Manhattan; there, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne was his upstairs neighbor. New York City had a lasting influence on Halley's distinct painting style. He became enamored with the city's intensity, scale, and three-dimensional urban grid—the "geometricization of space that pervaded the 20th century." Likewise interested in abstract painting, Halley "set out to connect the language of geometric abstraction to the actual space that he saw all around him, transforming the square—borrowed from Malevich, Albers, and others—into architectural icons he called 'prisons' and 'cells,' and connecting them by straight lines called 'conduits.'"