You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Apartment Life.”
I slept on my fire escape one night last week but it wasn't due to martial strife or a daredevil spirit. Rather, the sight of yours truly three flights up sporting boxer shorts and a death grip on the bars came courtesy of Con Edison (with a nod to Mayor Bloomberg). The lights first dimmed on Monday, July 17—smack dab [...]
I am sitting at my desk in my coop one day on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, paying my monthly expenses: coop mortgage; coop maintenance; coop insurance; four other kinds of insurance--health, for four people (I’ve got a stay-at-home wife and two kids); life, in case I die on them; disability, in case I collapse; and car, in case [...]
I noticed him during the first week of living in my new apartment. I was staring down from my fourth floor two bedroom. He sat in a window on the south side of the block, to the west of Kelly's Flat Fix facing 3rd Avenue, his elbow hanging out the window as if he were driving along in a car [...]
My dad was helping me, his oldest daughter, carry a stuffed duffel bag up a dirty Chinatown staircase, in a dirty Chinatown building, with no-longer-usable brooms on the landings and cigarette butts on the sills. We could hear babies crying though the walls, drowning out television sets. He asked if I was sure I would be O.K. here. I said [...]
MOROCCAN LETTERS Phase 1: The Seduction Jane Bowles liked to call her husband, Paul, a spider. The spider is a dry creature, and she was referring to the spider’s thirst to lure its prey into his net and drain their fluids. She herself suffered that fate. Bowles met Alfred Chester at a dinner party in New York in the winter [...]
About a month ago, a terrible new smell turned up on North Moore Street in Tribeca. It did not coexist peacefully with the other smells on the street: the coffee and cooking smells from Bubby's, a local hangout; the sweet, strong smell of olive oil stored in Hillside Imperial Foods; pepper and nutmeg smells from Atlanta, a spice warehouse; the [...]
Sitting in my first floor apartment window, people watching, it hits me (hard) that three out of the last five people who had just passed by were white. "When did this happen?" my daughter who had been out of the country for over a year asked in astonishment. It was her second day back in the states and in Brooklyn. [...]
The first nice weekend of the season, temperatures in the 70s, a light breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. A year ago today, I would have had a pang of jealousy thinking of the suburbanites who were combing their garages and heading to Home Depot to find tiki torches, bug zappers, weed whackers, and new patio furniture for [...]
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away--that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter in a paper bag from [...]
For three years my girlfriend, Erin, lived in Dakar, Senegal, and though I never even made the trip there, I developed an attachment to Africa. There was something in knowing, truly knowing of her life there that became a part of my own life--acquiring not a working knowledge of Wolof (the language native to Dakar) but an understanding simply of [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper In the sixties and seventies watching the balloons being blown up wasn't such a big NY "happening" and the only people their were residents of the neighborhood, building and neighborhood employees and business owners, the volunteers who inflated and walked the balloons, and the police. The street was closed at around dusk the night before the [...]
The monthly meeting of the co-op’s Board of Directors is tonight at 7:30, so I clean the basement a little earlier than usual. I am just finishing mopping the floor when Mrs. 11B, the President of the Board, steps out of the elevator onto the wet floor. She apologizes for ruining my hard work and slowly tiptoes across the floor [...]
I moved into 292 Elizabeth Street in the fall of 1976. On a Sunday night. I was skipping out on three months rent at 242 E. 10th Street on the corner of 1st Avenue and figured it would be easiest to do when there was less traffic and not many people around. Unfortunately, the Maltese landlady lived on the 2nd [...]
Jimmy, the boss, and I are in the basement still mourning the passing of 16A, when the passenger car opens and a white envelope dances out of the elevator. The white rectangle shimmies and gyrates obscenely, beckoning us. We are powerless to resist. As we near the object of our desire, the envelope, and the hand to which it is [...]
"Philadelphia is nobody's sixth borough," proclaimed the heading of a column in one of Philly's daily newspapers. "Especially not New York's," the column went on to say. The writer was responding to a New York Times article chronicling the migration of New Yorkers to Philadelphia. It noted that Philadelphians themselves occasionally referred to their city as New York's sixth borough. [...]
I looked out the window and saw a woman come walking up the street eating a cupcake. She was blonde, in sneakers, alone. The cupcake’s icing was white. The woman’s timing was perfect— I had begun reading on the computer at dusk; by the time it ran out of power, and the screen went suddenly black, the sky had become [...]
1. It was a cold, early evening in autumn, and the street was crowded with people. I walked down the street looking down. I was focused on the tiny people in my mind. A friend had been making pottery and attaching these tiny little people to it. She hovered over a large magnifying glass and held each tiny person between [...]
In New York City, you never know who might inadvertently teach you an impromptu life lesson. Maybe the local bagel maker gives you insight into your love life, or a phrase uttered by a cab driver changes your outlook, at least for the duration of the taxi ride. One recent Saturday, I encountered one of these situations in the most [...]
The Indian food was 39 minutes late and our guests were hungry. My wife called the restaurant and after a lengthy interrogation determined that the food was actually in the process of being delivered to an apartment in our bulding, on our floor. The only problem was, it wasn’t our apartment. We were apartment E, and somehow, at that very [...]
The F train hurtles through the tunnel and suddenly we’re above ground. Lower Manhattan twinkles in the distance. I gaze at the view and for a second my anxiety has disappeared. As the skyline recedes, my stomach muscles return to the knotted state they’ve been in since this afternoon, when I made the appointment to look at the sublet. Even [...]
For 10 years I lived in New York City in the House of Carpati. Moving to New York after college was an ideal next step for a person who wanted to be a magazine editor, so that’s what I did. After spending the summer post-grad as a nanny in Scarsdale, and then six weeks house sitting for friends of the [...]
I used to see her in the elevator. She was finely dressed, her white hair piled high, her dark red lipstick ennobling her mouth. In those early years she'd be with her husband, a kind-looking gentleman in a wheelchair—the result, I later learned, of the beating his knees took as an Olympic runner. He’d won a gold and two silver [...]
Apartment hunting in New York City is like dating: in the search for the One, you’ll inevitably run into countless disasters along the way. While my romantic relationship has been the model of stability for once, buying my first Manhattan apartment was like looking for love all over again. The idea of settling down gave me the chills, but after [...]
An urgent tapping sent me scurrying to the front window of my brownstone garden-floor apartment located in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I peeped through slats of the wooden shutters and saw two T-shirt clad white men with badges hanging around their necks. “Yes?” I inquired. “Police,” they called out authoritatively. “Someone upstairs must have called for you” I yelled through the slats. “We [...]
Living on the first floor of a tenement can have its advantages—no multiple flights to walk up at the end of a tiring day, or to stumble up after a long night. During the summer, the first floor always remains the coolest, so I don’t feel like I will die a broiling, stuffy death unless I install and run an [...]
The introduction to this column, and its first episode, can be read here. ** I am here less than an hour before I slice my finger with a box cutter while breaking down some boxes 8B left in the hallway—her weekly fix from the Home Shopping Network. I should probably put a bandage on it, but the boss is bellowing [...]
“It’s nice today,” says 15B as he enters the elevator, taking off his gloves and Dartmouth Alumni Association baseball hat. “Maybe a little chilly.” “Yeah, it’s nice,” I agree. I close the elevator door behind him. “Forty now, but they say forty five later on.” “Great.” We’ve reached his floor, but the retired cardiologist won’t get out until he’s [...]
Photo: Lincoln Karim It looked like a crime scene. Yellow ticking cordoned off part of the sidewalk next to the awning of 927 Fifth Avenue, at 74th Street. Across the street a two-person camera crew stood shivering next to their tripod. They were journalists, it appeared from a distance; on closer inspection, they were journalism students from the graduate school [...]
Last week I was leaving my building when I saw my doorman Frank carrying two black guitar cases through the lobby. He was followed by a man who looked very similar to Elvis Costello. I live in the West Village in Manhattan, so every man looks like Elvis Costello. Later that evening I asked Mario, the other doorman, – was [...]
"We're out of luck," Steve said one Saturday afternoon as I returned to our apartment from doing my weekend errands. "The dryer just died. I have a load of whites in the washer and now I can't dry them." We were one of the fortunate people who actually had a washer and dryer in their apartment. Steve and his ex-girlfriend [...]
In his long running quest to be a perpetual house guest, Sherban had developed a new strategy: balconies. Something about a balcony reassured apartment owners that one's presence was only temporary, enjoyable almost. And life on a balcony turned out to be refreshingly casual, al fresco. By contrast to a "spare room" or fold-out sofa, one could be proud of [...]
Apartment-house neighbors don't go bad suddenly, like winter avocados. You get an alarming sense of them as soon as they appear. A week after my upstairs neighbor Thad moved in, we were already engaged in a mortal vendetta. I've shared walls with annoying people, but this character was off the charts. His schedule was bizarre, and his habits were strange. [...]
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is located at 97 Orchard Street. From the outside, it appears to be no different than any of the other buildings on the street, save for a plaque proclaiming it to be a National Historic Landmark. On the inside, it is a different story. Through painstaking research of the former inhabitants of the tenement, [...]
From the desk of Dave Prager, a slight shift of the head is all that’s required to look out the bedroom window. Following such a shift, one’s view is then dominated by a picturesque cement wall — a sideways monolith, capped by chain link fence, five feet past the bedroom wall, separating Dave’s property from the wilds beyond: a sliver [...]
In 1971 the man who ran me over with his car moved to Brooklyn Heights. My family had moved there earlier–in 1966–and so I spent my first birthday and the subsequent seventeen ones on Grace Court. My father, Brooklyn born and raised, had decided, not unreasonably, that a one-bedroom on West 10th Street was cramped for three. My mother, Boston [...]
I wasn’t always a compulsive cleaner. Quite the contrary: I was once slovenly and slothful– an unmitigated slob. The cleaning disease crept up on me over the years like a bad case of the measles; until, lo and behold, I’d become a fullblown clean freak. The kind who, at 6:00pm, reaches for the Fantastik with a couple of paper towels [...]
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