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Street Beast: The Real Estate Ninja

by 07/15/2018
Neighborhood: Lower East Side

I’d already seen the apartment several times– once with Joey and the other time with the two Jeffrey’s. The two Jeffreys were thinking about moving out of their apartment in the East Village and wanted “something more fun and interesting,” which is another way of saying “we’re going to fuck your schedule in the ass […]

Ironing

by 03/28/2015
Neighborhood: Tribeca

It was one of those days where the sky was an azure sheet pulled taut against Heaven and the water was as flat and reflective as a mirror. This was the view of the Hudson from my then-boyfriend’s Battery Park apartment. We had both just graduated from college. I, with my bachelor’s, he with his […]

I Remember I Forget, And Why

by 02/18/2015
Neighborhood: West Village

I’ve lived in the neighborhood practically forever, but to my girlfriend it’s all new. She’s always making some new discovery. Once she came home with a small box of Japanese chocolate wrapped inside a perfect silver bag and with a sleek packet of dry ice. I asked her where it came from and she told […]

Exhaustion, Faith, or Madness

by 12/12/2014
Neighborhood: Jackson Heights, Queens, Uncategorized

A group of Asian teenage boys with shaved heads slows down in front of me. It is around 7 pm, not yet dusk, not really day, and we’re passing by a series of low brick row houses with bar-covered windows on 73rd Street in Jackson Heights. The boys look kind of tough, but they are polite as […]

A Picnic in Eden

by 09/01/2014
Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Williamsburg

“No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” — Elizabeth Bowen There’s a man across the street. He’s seventy-five, maybe eighty years old. He comes out of a red door in the apartment building kitty-corner […]

Scented

by 08/26/2014
Neighborhood: Financial District, Manhattan

I’m not the girl who woke up from another one-night-stand. But I could be, in the view from the Sephora window. It’s raining: The dull Saturday too-early morning pitter-patters against the makeup counters; my nerves, pounding on the exposed brick. I feel like a quasi-well-dressed spy. Partly because “quasi” is the word that won me […]

I Just Want to Stay In and Get High and Watch Netflix

by 07/20/2014
Neighborhood: Bushwick

I was not where I wanted to be. This was because I was out. I was out at a bar called the Narrows in Bushwick–or East Williamsburg if you’re a real estate broker. The bar is called the Narrows because the building is very narrow. But really every building in New York City is narrow. […]

Uninvited Guest

by 05/28/2014
Neighborhood: Bronx

We were living in a tenement apartment building in the Bronx, and it was full of all things common to such. I was doing the breakfast dishes one Saturday morning when I felt something feathery run over my bare foot. Of course, I already knew what it was, but I screamed anyway. Ahhh!!!!!!!!!!!! My four-year-old […]

The Laughter of the Maestro

by 03/09/2014
Neighborhood: Fort Greene

Last week I was walking home through a snowstorm. Turning the corner toward Fulton I called Cecil Taylor, who lived in the last unrenovated brownstone on that street. We knew each other from back in the 70s. The jazz pianist’s manager James Spicer had been a mutual friend, until the silver-haired impresario ripped off my […]

Real Estate Rhetoric: A User’s Guide

by 03/02/2014
Neighborhood: All Over, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Chinatown, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Williamsburg

 Affordable housing. For most New Yorkers the term is an oxymoron. Niklas and I moved to the West Village when we got married a few years ago, a romantic notion if not an especially realistic one. In the beginning we joked that we could live on love. But a sandwich is also nice sometimes. As […]

My Washington Square West Apartment for $900 a Month

by 01/17/2014
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

L. Monroe Looking to rent to current student. 900/month utilities included, 12 month lease, 1500 sq. ft. The apartment is on Washington Square West, above John Sexton, sheltering Jude Law, haunted by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. A piece of hair is glued by sweat down the side of my face, the end of the […]

Viva La Vita

by 01/16/2014
Neighborhood: West Village

For a frustrating period of several months, my roommate decided on a daily basis if she was vegan or not. Her daily choice depended on a combination of the selection of food in our ragtag dorm room refrigerator, and the strength of whatever moral tug she felt on any given day. And so, it was […]