## New York and the Working Childhood
After the convention signing, Leighton moved with her mother to New York City. She was ten years old. The geography of this move — from a small beach community on the Gulf of Mexico to Manhattan — was enormous. The practical circumstances of the arrival were modest: mother and daughter living in inexpensive rentals, the West Village and then Inwood, the northern tip of Manhattan, where the neighborhood is more working-class and the rent has historically been lower.
She enrolled in the Professional Children’s School, a secondary school in Manhattan specifically designed for students whose professional commitments create scheduling demands that conventional schools can’t accommodate. The Professional Children’s School has educated a remarkable number of people who became major figures in entertainment — it operates on the understanding that the students who attend it have careers that are real and ongoing and that their education needs to fit around those careers rather than the other way around. Attending it is, in itself, a marker of a specific kind of childhood: one organized around professional work rather than around the conventional developmental arc of school and activities and summers.
She booked commercials for Bloomingdale’s, Stern’s, and Limited Too. She did a Ralph Lauren campaign, shot by Bruce Weber. She worked with photographer Sofia Coppola — though this was before Coppola had become the director she would later become, when she was still working primarily as a photographer — in a modeling context. She modeled for Limited Too alongside Amanda Seyfried, a biographical adjacency that is interesting in retrospect given that both women would eventually become film actresses of significance.