You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Apartment Life.”
I had my first paying job, making deliveries for the local butcher when I was twelve and in the eighth grade. I was not yet eligible for working papers, but the butcher on Washington Avenue, two blocks away, didn’t require them. I knew how to ride a bike and was from the neighborhood—my mother bought her meat from him, preferring [...]
As I am walking out of yoga class, an acquaintance asks, “How’s Rio ?” She is referring to the two pound poodle puppy I had mentioned I would be getting. At this point, I’ve had Rio a few days. “He’s great,” I say, “But it’s way more overwhelming than I thought it would be.” Her face instantly screws up in [...]
The front of the White House wasn’t that bad. The reviews online had been awful but perhaps they’d been hasty. The doors were bright blue and no place with bright blue doors could be that bad. I heaved my suitcase over the step. At the train station, a frat boy had tried to help me with it. “Jesus Christ, how [...]
My first apartment in New York was on the second floor of a seven-story walk-up on MacDougal Street, between West Third and Bleecker. It was a three-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom with a view of a chain-linked pen where the building kept the trash, always bags and bags of it. I was twenty-five and feeling very lucky. I could hardly believe I was [...]
The sidewalk in front of my apartment building was wrapped in crime tape. An ambulance waited idly on East 10th Street. Policemen strode in and out of the lobby. It was a mild winter Saturday afternoon, and I’d come downstairs for my mail. My doorman looked ashen. “A woman jumped,” he said. “18G.” He was the second person to see [...]
My partner and I found an apartment with one bedroom—one more bedroom than either of us had in our old places. The new residence did not, however, have a bathtub. The bathroom—an extension of a hallway that also served as the kitchen—was too small for a tub. The space left for a tub measured about three feet by three feet. [...]
As a teenager, I lived with my dysfunctional family in a modest but comfortable apartment in Beechurst, Queens. One Saturday morning, too fried to suffer any longer the slings and arrows of my sorry-assed teenage life, I decided to run away from home. I told my mother I was going into Manhattan to spend the day at the New York [...]
She looked like a collection of spheres stuck together to represent the female body. Round little torso, round little head, protruding chipmunk cheeks like those on the marionettes on that TV show “Spitting Image.” Dark little eyes that glared from some bottomless well of anger and pain. Her mail came addressed to two completely different names. Behind her back, everybody [...]
I moved into Gramercy Park through sheer dumb luck. I didn’t discover Eden with my own bumpkin nose; I had help in the form a lanky, soft-spoken boy who was returning home after living as a piste-addicted ex-pat. I met him after some of my own colossally unproductive post-college years in Colorado. We had in common a faux-elitist notion that [...]
When I woke up that morning, I thought we were in my East Village apartment sleeping in my bed. I thought we had fallen in love. It was the sound of his voice that convinced me, soothing and sexy, masculine and raw. His words were unintelligible as they crept through the dark. I liked the sound of my name on [...]
At 4 a.m. on a Saturday night in May, I was suddenly trapped in my own bedroom with no likely route to freedom. I had just turned out the light and pulled the covers when a strong draft slammed the bedroom door shut. This had happened before, but the door had never locked. The problem with my bedroom door (as [...]
The second time I met Michele she wore a similar get-up as the first. She showed up at my office to pick up her set of apartment keys wearing a pink and blue Indian floral tank dress layered over green army pants with the fly held together by safety pins and bright orange clogs. Her henna-ed brick red hair with [...]
It was July 1977. I had gotten my master’s degree in journalism the year before, but I still hadn’t gotten a full-time job. Not that jobs in journalism were easy to find. At the present time, I was writing weekly news articles for the Eastside Courier, a neighborhood newspaper on the Upper East Side, and monthly feature stories for Westchester [...]
Photo by Cannon Kinnard The faded green sign at 1700 Bedford Avenue that reads “NO BALL PLAYING” has had tenants of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field Apartments laughing at the irony, as they walk across the street to Jackie Robinson Park to play ball. This is the former site of Ebbets Field baseball park; home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1957, when [...]
My landlord George fled communist Armenia at a young age. Whenever I have occasion to talk with him in the hall he is infallibly cheerful and quick to offer words of encouragement. “How a you doing?” he asks me, “is beautiful day but must still be working, what can do.” He shrugs at the day’s obligations. “Yes, yes,” I agree, [...]
Living in Manhattan and dwelling in an apartment depletes a person of standard, taken- for-granted privacies and idiosyncrasies that I believe every person and family exhibits. Here, on this grittiest of islands, we are intimate and strangers. Think of all of the people you comfortably smile at and gossip with, not knowing (or caring) about the intimate details of their [...]
The Ansonia Hotel was not your usual hotel. But we were not your usual family. By the time I was born in 1945, the Ansonia had suffered years of neglect. The live seals that once frolicked in the lobby fountain were long gone. So was the fountain when I lived there as a child with my mother and father. Many [...]
The visible landscape of Brooklyn Heights is much the same as it was in my childhood, which is a large part of why I moved back to the neighborhood after almost twenty years. Every so often, someone stops me on Clark Street to ask directions to the subway station. It always takes me a second or two to understand that, [...]
The candle does not just smell of street-corner pine forests and homemade apple pies; it also smells of tinsel, traffic, and the extra table leaves in place to make room for four, five or--if they really squeeze--six more cousins. Honestly, if you’ve never owned a Slatkin Holiday candle, you’ve never really been home for Christmas. This time last year, I [...]
Our doorman, John, wants an exercise bike for the lobby. I can imagine him on the bike, next to the sign that reads, “All Guests Must Be Announced.” Instead of greeting me, he would be riding the bike. Instead of buzzing the intercoms, the wheels would be churning and the perspiration on his brow would shine. Gray sweats would replace [...]
My neighbor is an artist and I’ve been walking my dog Vera past her door daily looking for evidence of how she lives. I’m new here now but no longer young. When I was, I lived in the same neighborhood but it was different, so even though my first address in this city was only a few blocks from my [...]
Nicola is a lively twenty-year-old girl of Thai and Italian descent, born and raised on the Upper East Side. She has been my roommate on East 4th Street for four months, since I answered her apartment ad on Craigslist, and she works as a cocktail waitress at Thor—a fashionable nightclub in the Lower East Side—until 4:00 a.m. most nights. The [...]
“Just like a boxer in a title fight you’ve got to walk in that ring all alone You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes but they’re the only things that you can truly call your own” --Billy Joel I was looking at some apartments with my realtor, Harriet Loshin, just west of Union square, near west 12th street. We [...]
I never shared my life with any pets – unless you count a legion of uninvited cockroaches. Until I got married, that is, and my wife brought a black cat home from the gym. “This cat has been rescued, my instructor was offering him up,” she said. “Cat’s poop inside,” I said. “You’ll love him.” “What’ll we call him?” “Felix,” [...]
[When the site first published Ennis Smith's "The Super With The Toy Face," its impact was felt immediately--not just on the site, but on the literary history of the United States. Smith has sent us a revised version of the piece, which we are happy to publish below. We're going to keep the original up, though, in order to see [...]
Last year, after the indictment of Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Maureen Dowd wrote a column praising the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. “It was bracing to see the son of a New York doorman open the door on the mendacious Washington lair of the Lord of the Underground.” At first, I was gratified to see Ms. Dowd recognize [...]
Of the millions of New York City’s undomesticated rodents, only one has caused me grief. I was raised in suburban Los Angeles, and so pre-war apartment living with pre-war apartment problems are new to me—and mice, specifically, have never threatened to pester me in my home. As summer turned to fall, however, my roommates and I began to notice tiny [...]
They have never heard of the Sturgeon King, even though they might easily visit this small slice of piscean royalty for a lunch—excuse me, an appetizer—of an individual can of salmon or individual can of solid white tuna. It’s quaint, it’s charmingly atavistic, who the hell orders an individual can of salmon but a cat? Yet the menu items persist [...]
Monday Night Football and the Greenwich Village Packer haunt, the Kettle of Fish, is heaving. There are orgasmic spurts of happiness as the Packers recover four interceptions in the first half. Seattle’s fair weather fans are distraught as the Pack dominates in the heavy snowfall. Brett wants this one. You can see the fire burning in his eyes. And he [...]
One of the oddities of growing up in a big city like New York is that the discussion and anticipation of crime enters into everyday childhood rather unremarkably. In many ways it is the first real adult problem children are asked to deal with and conversation about murders in general were, by necessity, exceptionally frequent in my childhood, New York [...]
[A few months after this piece was originally published, Ennis Smith sent us a revision which we have also published here. Look at the two versions side by side and see if you learn anything about how revision figures in the writing process. --Ed.] They called him the neighborhood watchdog. He was the super of the building on the corner [...]
I have just taken over the passenger car from Roberto. There are three tenants in the elevator and they are discussing their vacation plans. 3A and her family will be hitting the slopes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; 5C is going to work on his tan and try his luck at the blackjack tables in Aruba; and 12B and his girlfriend [...]
Rada told me to be at the broker's office at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday. I showed up eating the last of my sublet's granola bars. Abandoned desks sat side by side without cubicle separators; it was like the newsroom of the Daily Planet. The receptionist seated me, then quickly disappeared into the bathroom. She did not return. Rada materialized at [...]
We found it. After two years of wasted Sundays touring sad places in forgotten boroughs, my wife and I had finally found a place we liked, a place that was affordable. Well, maybe we didn’t like like it. It was a six-flight walk up that the real estate broker called a “handyman’s special.” My wife called it a “common man’s [...]
A guy on my street, let's call him Eddie, is probably thirty-eight, only two or three inches shorter than Wilt Chamberlain, with a sort of pirate's crook nose and a Russian infantryman's sinewy musculoskeletal system. He doesn't seem to mind the smell of trash. I know this because he's my trash man. He used to live somewhere far beneath my [...]
“Leap and a net will appear.” Right. You know what appeared the last time I leapt? MasterCard debt and an empty bottle of vodka. Don’t get me wrong – vodka can really cushion a blow, but a net it is not. I moved to New York City on a whim. Well, most people call it moving—I call it running away. [...]
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
