You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Apartment Life.”
Quality of life during my ten-year stay in London Terrace Gardens (the ten-building brick behemoth spanning an entire square block at Ninth avenue and 23rd Street) was greatly enhanced by the presence of elevator men. These were resourceful men, mostly of Hispanic descent who grew up in Chelsea, who kept watch over the building, picked up your UPS packages, and [...]
First came the mice. It was early winter when I heard them scratching their way across the long wall of my studio, setting up camp in the wall behind my bed. At first, I thought knocking for minutes at a time could scare them away. When that didn't work, I tried banging the wall with a hammer and later, blasting [...]
Having lived in Manhattan for most of my life, I saw a move to Brooklyn as a giant step in the wrong direction. And Greenpoint, well, Greenpoint was a digression I wasn’t sure I could handle. I was thirty-six years old and by god, I had standards. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the bank account to afford them. So when my [...]
I was waiting for the elevator on my floor when I saw a sign on the bulletin board that an elderly painter was going into a nursing home and her work was in the basement, free to residents. I live in Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village; the note was from the management office and it said something [...]
Most of the time, I find that living in a doorman building is like having all the perks of living with my parents, but without any of the frustration. The doormen in my building are wonderful -- in the morning, the daytime doorman tells me that I look nice and then orders me to have a good day, just like [...]
In the 60's, I lived with my brother and my parents in The Eldorado, an apartment house on Central Park West between 90th and 91st Street. My Dad was a Member of the New York Stock Exchange, My Mom was a Mom and my brother and I were in school (Bronx Science). It was and is a great old building, [...]
It was January 1st, 2001. New Years Day. The sky was exceptionally blue. Snow had fallen heavily two days earlier. It was still on the ground in drifts, white and pretty, but the air was balmy. My girlfriend and I were taking a long meandering stroll in search of a place to eat brunch. It was such a nice day [...]
I electrocuted a rat early this morning. It was approximately 2:20 am. There were no eyewitnesses. I heard the electrical noise. It was a sustained bug-zapping sound that went on for a good thirty seconds. I knew immediately what was happening when I was startled awake. I just listened, victorious, with a great feeling that my vigilante justice had been [...]
I was sitting in a bathroom stall in late June on the third or fourth floor of The New York Public Library, back past the Charles Addams drawings, and I began to think about my old schoolmate Derrick Foster. I ran into Derrick about 10 years ago, long after I had known him in grammar school, and we chatted about [...]
Several summers ago, my central air conditioning let loose. A fast drip became a flood. My daughter discovered the problem during the eleven o’clock news, walking around in socks that became cold and wet. I called the doorman, requesting that the superintendent come immediately. Often surly, Ely intimidates many residents in the building, who naturally resent him. We live in [...]
The Great London Terrace Rent Strike began in the Fall of 1992 over the swimming pool. Once billed as "the largest apartment complex in the world," London Terrace occupies an entire square city block on the north side of 23rd street between Ninth and 10th avenues. The "Great Briton in Manhattan" opened in 1929 with elegant dining rooms, stores, London [...]
At 7:30 on a Monday evening, my apartment on 122nd Street and Broadway fills with the voices of young Mormons singing hymns. From 7 on, around 40 clean-cut, blonde, smiling 20-somethings, some bearing baked goods, arrived in a continuous stream. They bustled down my bowling alley of a hallway to the living room, where they proceeded to comment on their [...]
1. Recently, a cousin of mine stopped over on his way from Beirut, a city which now has most of its politics in the street, but almost no sanitation services. Standing outside my door, he looked down the Bowery and marveled, "They keep it so clean!" 2. My most persistent fantasy is that one day, when I'm gathering up the [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper I know I'm not alone. Off the top of my head I can think of two friends, single women, Upper West Siders living alone, who are experiencing a similar ordeal. "It's traumatic," I agreed when Nina called, frantic about the leak in her bathroom ceiling and the building's lack of a super. "You'll be okay," I [...]
I long ago decided that my next-door neighbors were mass murderers. They are nice, quiet, neat, and “keep to themselves.” In fact, I couldn’t confidently identify either one of them on the sidewalk or in a police line-up, I so rarely see them come or go. And I have never heard any noise coming from their apartment. I only know [...]
My life lies in piles around my feet. It is mostly paper things; boxes of musical scores, boxes marked STORAGE and HOME. Why does the Rilke go to STORAGE and the Hesiod makes it to HOME? Who knows? I take the G train to my studio at the Classon stop in central Brooklyn. The G train is mired in the [...]
Mara from upstairs, who lives off flute lessons in her dining room and touch-and-go pit orchestra gigs on Broadway, knocked on my door and everyone's door, begging us to start a tenant's union. We each had a reason. I was terrified of the dawn in July when half the sixth floor burned and everyone was out on the street in [...]
It was my first official piece of furniture purchased for my new apartment in Park Slope. Two overweight deliverymen, breathing and sweating heavily, carried it up the four flights to my apartment on the top floor of the Brooklyn brownstone. That's when they found that the angle of the doorway and the large wooden banister, made it impossible to get [...]
We got the phone call on a Tuesday night. It was Nick’s boss telling us he hadn’t been to work since Thursday and hadn’t called in sick either. That wasn’t like Nick, and his boss was worried. Nick was an older man who lived downstairs from us. Since he didn’t have a phone and we were his best friends in [...]
It's been one year since I moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant from Fort Greene, where I'd live for about fifteen years. Like most change, uprooting myself was uncomfortable, but not nearly as painful as I thought it would be. I remember telling people that if I ever moved from Fort Greene, I'd be moving out of New York because there was no [...]
We were from out of town. We had finished school, were about to get engaged, and were moving to New York at the end of the summer. They showed us a “model apartment.” They put the hard sell on us. They asked us for a deposit in the form of a money order (can’t cancel ‘em). Then they asked us [...]
In the summer of 1980 I was living on East Fifth Street and First Avenue with Alpha Lorraine and I was eighteen, feeling not so much on top of the world as right in the middle of it. Alpha was a new friend and when Yves, my French dancer friend from when I was a dishwasher at Food Restaurant, went [...]
About a week after the WTC attack we began to hear weeping from the apartment next door. It came to us in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping, a small, very private sound that forced its way into my thoughts until I found myself lying awake listening to it. Its volume rose and fell, as weeping usually [...]
For years I’ve been answering the questions: “You live in New York City? Like, right in New York City?” I live in Brooklyn Heights, but this is a distinction meaningful only to those with 100- zip code prefixes, so I would say yes and try to explain. It wasn’t what they thought, I would say, it’s not a swirling mass [...]
When I left the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1996, the stores on either side of my building included a bodega that sold heroin out the back and an empty, bombed-out hole. Today, a "funky" bridal shop and a tattoo parlor stand in their places. When a tattoo parlor is a sign of urban renewal, you know the neighborhood [...]
"There is a certain shade of red brick--a dark, almost melodious red, somber and riddled with blue--that is my childhood in St. Louis," wrote Harold Brodkey in State of Grace. Well, there is a certain shade of red brick--somber and melodious--that is my neighborhood in the West Village, and Ferron Brown is the custodian of that color. Mr. Brown's material [...]
I first went to the northernmost point in Brooklyn after reading an article in The New Yorker about the oil spill there – 17 million gallons, half again as big as the Exxon Valdez – which at a geologic pace, made its way from a long gone Standard Oil holding tank in the eastern part of Greenpoint, to the aquifer [...]
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