My First Adult Apartment

New York’s current housing crisis matters not only for economic reasons, but for personal ones — because home is the most intimate terrain in the city. The city might afford us less personal space than we’d like, but scarcity means that when we do find a home, we typically hold onto it with all our might (even as we endlessly complain about it).

Finding a place in New York isn’t easy, even for native New Yorkers. Recognizing this, we asked a handful of New Yorkers to tell us about the first place they called home as an adult. For those who settled here from elsewhere, that meant their first foothold in this often intimidating metropolis. For those who grew up in the city and already knew how to navigate its streets and subways, it meant the first place they lived under their own roof and paid their own rent. 

Stories run the gamut, but this is the common thread: Regardless of how often the roof leaked or the paint peeled or the neighbor kept them awake, it is hard to overstate the importance of having a room of one’s own in the greatest city in the world.

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I Found It in the Voice

By Dan Smith

In 1992, New York City was a different world — pre-9/11, pre-internet, pre-smartphones. Having grown up in Newton, Massachusetts, I was 21 and fresh out of NYU. No job, no credit history, no tax returns — but I knew it was time to leap into adulthood. I had been living with a couple of friends in a two-bedroom railroad apartment on East 1st and Avenue A, across from Katz’s Deli. Nice guys, but they had one crucial flaw: They lived with me. I needed my own place. 

So when I spotted a studio listed in the Village Voice for $425, I hopped on the 1 train to the Upper West Side, a neighborhood I barely knew.

When I arrived, the rent had magically jumped to $575. The landlady didn’t ask for any financials — just my parents’ phone number. I’m pretty sure she never called them. Questionable business practices? Yup. Could I afford it? Nope. But once I signed the lease, it was mine.

West 75th Street, between West End and Riverside. A short walk to Riverside Park and Fairway, which, back then, was a quaint corner grocery compared to the two-level gastronomic mecca it grew into. A far cry from the grit of the Lower East Side. I felt like I was movin’ on up — even if the Jeffersons technically lived across the park.

The studio was tiny — definitely under 100 square feet — and four creaky flights up. There were some rusty pipes and cracks in the walls. I did my dishes in the bathroom sink. The “kitchen” was a two-burner gas stove and a mini fridge underneath the loft bed. Air conditioners were forbidden. This point was driven home when I turned on the TV and toaster at the same time and blew a fuse. It was perfect. 

This was more than a place to live. It was a transformational chamber. I paid a lot of dues and shed a lot of skin there. I got the kind of education NYU could never offer. I wrote my first songs there, taught my first guitar students and designed some of the first flyers that would become a New York City staple. It was the first tangible manifestation of my New York independence, and I’ll never forget it. 

Since then, I’ve watched the “Starbucksification” of New York: mom-and-pop shops replaced by sterile corporate chains, the urban jungle systematically morphing into the suburban mall I came here to escape. But will all that “progress” erase the danger, romance and humanity that drew me here? Has all the grit been scrubbed away? Have all the cracks been sealed up?

I hope not.

I firmly believe that New York shouldn’t be easy. It’s good that it challenges you, tests your resolve and weeds out the wimps and the whiners. But I wonder about the next generation of artists and adventurers trying to make their mark here. No question they’re navigating a very different landscape. I hope they can still find a few cracks to sneak through the way I did.

Dan Smith will teach you guitar.

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Where I Lay My Head and Stomach

By Ayo Balogun

Before the boy was born, before the restaurants, before the move to Bed-Stuy with hipsters, I lived in a little mustard seed at the corner of Jay Street and Willoughby Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn. It was a very noisy fourth-floor walk-up that was full of fashion designers who designed clothing for the apocalypse and filmmakers who made high-concept movies that were almost porn. We called it the Jay Willy.

My tenure at the Jay Willy began with lots of ambitions. I wanted to become a documentary filmmaker or a war photographer, whichever was more dangerous. These ambitions were muted immediately when my first rent was due. My newfound aspiration became avoiding homelessness during winter. 

Nothing sharpens young senses quicker than the anticipation of rent. If you make $300 a week and your rent is $900 a month, there needs to be a bit of Tetris in planning to survive. 

Luckily, breakfast was a given. From the bodega downstairs, the waft of the 99-cent breakfast trumpeted like reveille — in different tunes each morning based on who was on the grill and how they decided to spice it — and was the reason to wake up before 9 a.m.

Now, what was a 99-cent breakfast? What did it consist of? Where was it served? And what did it do to you? 

These are very good questions.

The Soprano who sang the 99-cent breakfast hit a range that the sirens of the Odyssey have nothing on. 

This meal was supposed to consist of two eggs, bacon, toast and coffee. As you can guess, whatever that substance was, it was not eggs; I’m equally sure that rubbery matter was not bacon. The toast was toasted bread, and the coffee was bad.

What did this do to you? I will leave that to your imagination. Yet that smell in the morning was like a symphony, and that — and the price — kept me coming back.

For lunch, we developed a cheat sheet at Popeyes. If you place your order by saying “May I have half a dozen biscuits?” they push a different button than when you ordered a batch of six biscuits instead of one at a time. This is very important for young survival. I still think the most delicious biscuits in the world might be found at Popeyes. 

For dinner, my exotic roommates dined in whatever fancy restaurant was a hit that week. Looking back, this usually contributed to my inability to make rent. But still, it felt like there was no kind of calculation, no kind of adjustment to my lifestyle, that would make it possible for me to afford rent.

I was poor. But being poor at the Jay Willy was quite exciting. We made movies, discussed philosophy that we didn’t understand and, of course, hated everything mainstream, only because we were jealous of it.

Most apartments can be described by their fancy finishes or amenities or pictures on the wall. I can’t quite remember any picture or decoration. I remember the smells from the illegal barbecue downstairs, the noise of constant fighting and harassment on the streets, the songs of 99-cent breakfast and, most especially, the very colorful creatures who resided in my little mustard seed at the Jay Willy.

Ayo Balogun is a chef based in Bed-Stuy and the proprietor of Nigerian restaurants Dept. of Culture and Radio Kwara, and The Bureau BK.

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Such a Great Place

By Megan McArdle

The apartment was 435 square feet and half-underground. The kitchen was a tiny stove, an even smaller fridge, and a jury-rigged island that used to rock alarmingly when I chopped vegetables too aggressively. The hot water was at best erratic and often absent altogether. I had to keep the windows covered at all times unless I wanted to watch my neighbors staring at me.

And yet, when people visited, they would gush that it was such a great place. It was a block from Central Park and two blocks from the C train! Had prewar charm, of a decidedly tattered vintage, and offered ground-floor access for convenient grocery hauling! Contained a separate, postage-stamp-sized bedroom with a full-size closet! And all this bounty for only $1,100 a month (about $2,000 in today’s dollars)? Who had I murdered to score such an incredible deal?

Welcome to New York, where rental prices are themselves a form of murder.

But I loved that apartment with my whole heart and soul. My bullmastiff and I moved in on June 1, 2003, and I immediately set about improving it. With my extremely limited funds — working as an entry-level journalist, I had a couple of hundred bucks left over each month after student loans, rent and taxes — I customized every inch of that apartment to make the most of its tiny attractions.

I scoured the Paramus furniture stores for a love seat that would fit into the unforgiving 49-inch clearance between the apartment’s outer wall and the island, and spent hours hanging and rehanging cheap prints I’d picked up on Craigslist, or from the garbage. I went all over the city in pursuit of furniture deals, which I hauled back on the subway, assaulting my shins and my fellow passengers at every stop. I covered the kitchen window glass in pretty privacy film and got a friend to build me custom shelves that fit over the window to provide storage for my dishes. I splurged on honeycomb shades for the bedroom. They lowered from the top as well as rising from the bottom, so I could get a little light into that great place without watching the steady parade of shoes on the sidewalk.

A couple of years into my tenure, after I was burglarized by a juvenile who jimmied the bedroom window and simply reached in from the sidewalk to swipe the contents of my top two dresser drawers, a police officer escorted me to the promenade of the housing project across the street, from which, it turned out, the interior of my apartment was fully visible.

“I’d guess you’ve had every 13-year-old boy in the neighborhood watching you change for two years,” he said, not unkindly. “Please close those shades.”

This bothered me less than you might think, because I was born and raised in New York City, breeding a certain indifference to the gaze of strangers. But I closed the shades and continued loving my apartment. After all, there is nothing a true New Yorker loves more than a real estate bargain. At parties — you can cram 30 or 40 people into 435 square feet, if they are not fussy — I could often be heard passionately declaring that I never intended to leave.

Then I got evicted.

My apartment was a sponsor unit in an elderly co-op with an incompetent manager. Eventually, that manager died. The new manager briskly set about fixing the building’s finances, a project that included renovating my unit and selling it off. I looked at my options and moved to Washington, D.C., where you could enjoy space and light without selling a kidney. I was stunned when I walked into a 750-square-foot second-floor unit and realized it would cost just $50 a month more than I’d been paying for my semicustom cave.

Yet it never gave me the thrill of that first apartment. It was not, for one thing, in New York. It was just the place I happened to live.

Megan McArdle is a columnist for the Washington Post.

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A Bit Insane

By Majora Carter

In 1988, I earned an MFA in Cinema Studies from Wesleyan University, and the image of my diploma freshly calligraphed with my full government name danced happily in my head. My parents and I had a running joke about me giving them my diploma on a silver platter, and I fulfilled the promise, delivering it with a curtsy on an aluminum serving tray, the closest we had to a silver platter. Despite their wish for a more sensible degree, my parents, who came from the South during the Great Migration and raised seven children in Hunts Point, South Bronx, were incredibly proud and celebrated their baby daughter graduating from an elite university.

However, when I announced I’d found an apartment in Brooklyn, they didn’t understand why I would want to move out of their loving and comfortable home at all, and they especially did not consider the move from one distressed neighborhood to another, to “Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy,” a step in the right direction. But I reminded them I was from the South Bronx. There wasn’t much I couldn’t handle.

It was a gray and rainy afternoon when I first emerged from the Nostrand Avenue A train station to view what would be my first apartment. Hardly anyone was on the street; it seemed very quiet, sleepy almost. There was a KFC on the corner, a pharmacy, a fruit stand and some discount stores. I walked to a block with antique row houses, most in good condition. The apartment building near the corner, next to a former warehouse building that had seen better days and now housed a low-grade candy store, would soon be my home. 

It was a four-story limestone apartment building. The top three floors each had two very large, ornate windows with an oculus in the top center and curved sills underneath, giving the building the appearance that it had six crystal butterflies affixed to it. Once inside, it was easy to see the building had not been well loved.

The butterfly windows had some serious draft action going on — Nothing a good caulking couldn’t fix! I had always wanted wooden floors, but these hadn’t been finished and were even splintered in places — Sandpaper and polyurethane to the rescue! And there were cracks along some baseboards — Stock up on steel wool and metal plates, and mouse traps for good measure! The last one really did give me pause, but the $417-a-month stabilized rent was almost too good to be true — and I thought, in 1988, that it would have been insane to turn that down.

Turns out it was a bit insane to rent it.

After months of DIY renovations, the place looked and felt great, with walls painted in rich tones of copper, sapphire and emerald; wood floors restored by hand; repaired cracks; and well-caulked windows. The candy store next door was an informal hangout for low-level drug dealers, but they made sure I knew that they would always look out for me — which was helpful because I didn’t always feel safe. I could not believe how loud the neighborhood was, often well into the wee hours of the morning on work days, for crying out loud. Once, I actually called the police precinct to report it; the officer apologized profusely and said there was no one to send because they were out taking care of more serious crimes. The dilapidated former warehouse building next door that housed the friendly drug dealers was eventually condemned and torn down, leaving a shallow pile of rubble.

Eventually, I moved back home to Hunts Point.

About 10 years later, after dedicating myself to urban revitalization, both living and mostly working in the South Bronx, an old friend invited me to a housewarming party near the Nostrand Avenue A train. I was shocked to see white ladies pushing top-of-the-line Maclaren strollers, and there were designer dogs too — this wasn’t the Bed-Stuy I knew. It was my first experience seeing how a neighborhood could transition into a “better” area that was not inclusive of local residents. This laid the foundation for what would become my approach to community revitalization projects — designing systems to benefit neighborhoods without displacing residents and encouraging residents to believe they do not have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one. 

Majora Carter is a real estate developer, urban revitalization strategy consultant, lecturer at Princeton University, MacArthur Fellow and lifelong resident.

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A Classroom of Sorts

By Arthur Goldstein

My first apartment was in Middle Village, Queens. I was starting work as a teacher at Lehman High School in the Bronx in the fall of 1984. I had no training, no experience and no idea what I was doing. I brought that same total lack of sophistication to apartment hunting and took the very first one I was shown, above a real estate office on Metropolitan Avenue. 

It was a pretty crude one-bedroom. Having no plates or pots, I filled the kitchen cabinets with books. The woman who’d vacated the place was kind enough to leave me all her dead or dying flowers. It gave the place that festive touch. 

I’m pretty sure I was making about $13,000 as a teacher. That was not quite enough money to pay rent, so I spent weekends playing guitar and fiddle with an Irish singer. 

He’d discovered me playing in a country band in Suffolk County. He asked me how much I was making. I lied and said a hundred bucks. He said, “I happen to know you’re only making $50, but if you play with me, I’ll pay you $100 a night.” I was sold. One St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 1985, I made over $500 at an Irish bar. Upon hearing about my gig over a lunchroom conversation, a teacher I worked with, who spent nights and weekends dispatching taxis, never spoke to me again. 

The singer brought his young son by my place once, looked around in disbelief and told the boy, “Son, this is a bachelor pad.” I was not quite cognizant of his sarcasm at the time. For me, it was just a place to sleep. I had standards nonetheless. I determined the green walls were a turnoff, perhaps. I decided to paint them. I bought some blue paint, not realizing it was too dark or that it was enamel. I painted the whole apartment and managed to make it look even worse than before. 

One weekend, playing at Action Park with the Irish singer, I met a young woman I really liked. This was a lucky break for me. I’d noticed, to my deep disappointment, that women tended not to be attracted to band members uniformed in Kelly green sport jackets. Nonetheless, she came all the way from Darkest New Jersey to visit me. She took one look around the apartment, walked out, and I never saw her again. This was not good. 

Worse, though, was when the movie theater two doors down closed. Evidently, it had been infested with mice. With no buttery popcorn to draw them to the movie theater any longer, they sought greener (or bluer) pastures. I’d gotten the apartment because I was tired of roommates, and these particular roommates were not only no more desirable than the ones I left, but further, paid no rent. 

I bid farewell to Middle Village. My next apartment was sunny, clean and free of uninvited guests. Experience is a tough teacher, but if you’re careful, you only need to learn hard lessons once. 

Arthur Goldstein is vice chair of the UFT Retired Teacher Chapter. He writes Union Matters on Substack.

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A Different Place and Time

By Suketu Mehta

My wife and I moved back to New York, where I had grown up, from Iowa City, where I’d gone to study writing, in 1993. Browsing through the apartment ads in the Village Voice, which I ran to collect from the Voice building on Tuesdays when the weekly came out, I found a place in a small condominium building right by Tompkins Square Park. Our landlady was an Australian communist gynecologist who had left for Asheville to be with her lover, who was a jockey. She rented us a nicely furnished one-bedroom with a study for $950 a month. When I went to meet her the first time, I found a large picture of a naked woman with her legs spread apart hung up on the wall of the living room. She told us, with some pride, that it was a portrait of her.

My mother came from New Jersey to check out the area before I signed the lease. We sat at a sidewalk table outside a cafe on Avenue A, and my mother regarded the drug dealers, the pierced and tattooed polysexuals, the teens with boom boxes walking by. Then she called my father, who asked her what kind of neighborhood it was. “It’s full of …” she said, and paused, thinking carefully, “… artists.”

On one of our first nights in the apartment, my wife’s cousin, a young hothead who had come by to visit, got into an argument with a group of young men when he went downstairs for a smoke. “I’m going to come back here with an army,” the cousin threatened them.

A few minutes later, a stocky man named Hector came up to our door and introduced himself. “Melanie must have told you about me?” The landlady had. Hector, an ex-Green Beret (or so it was rumored), was the leader of a drug gang that had been on the block for 15 years. His Puerto Rican father was our janitor and raised roosters for cockfights; his Irish mother did our laundry in the laundromat on the first floor. Hector taught karate to the kids on the block, whom he then recruited into his gang.

“Now you live on the block. Any of my guys,” he promised, thumping a fist on his heart, “We’ll take a bullet for you.”

When I drove home late at night, his boys would guide me into a parking space. 

Some 30 years later, I was at a steakhouse in the Bronx with a couple of detectives, shooting the shit. I told them I lived on East 7th Street in the ’90s. One of the detectives said, “I put away a heroin dealer there for 25 years. He sold it out of a laundromat.”

And the single most violent incident I’ve ever been witness to in my life replayed before me. One night in the ’90s, my wife and our 2-year-old son and I awoke to the sound of a helicopter low overhead; it sounded like Vietnam in the war movies. Soon, it was followed by an army of 50, 100 cops, some of them in a kind of armored vehicle, four of them with submachine guns. When I opened the door, heavily armed men in black armor yelled at me to “STAY INSIDE!” and ran up the stairs toward the roof. The block had been, literally, invaded. 

All these years later, the detective at the steakhouse would fill me in on the details about the raid on 7th Street. The NYPD used a “Trojan Horse.” For a month before the raid, two cops dressed shabbily, “like hippies,” and would drive down the block in a beat-up truck. The first couple of times, Hector’s lookouts chased them away. Then they got used to them, and waved at them as they passed by, and directed them to a parking place like anybody else.

The day of the raid, the truck was stuffed with cops hiding as it drove into the block. Then they burst out of the back of the truck, with guns.

This I remember: As the cops led the last of the gang away in handcuffs, an eerie sound floated out over the East Village in the dead of night — one of the cops, singing some sort of operatic song of triumph in a high tenor, like a victory song sung by a castrato.

The week after, my car got broken into on the block, for the first time in five years. The watchers were all gone. Years later, the parking lot next door got turned into a luxury condominium. Its lobby features large black-and-white photographs of the anarchists and junkies that the bankers and lawyers moving into the building had replaced in the area. Young white and Asian women strode determinedly out of the building early in the mornings, wearing business suits and sneakers, holding handbags to carry the heels they would change into when they got to the office.

Suketu Mehta is the author of “This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto” and “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”

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Love Shack, Baby

By Chris Policano

This all happened in the late 1970s.

I don’t remember how I did the math, but while attending City College and working part-time hawking TV Guide subscriptions and Montgomery Ward Auto Club memberships for a telemarketing firm, I determined that the rent would be too damn high if it exceeded $200 a month. (That’s less than half of what it now costs to park my car in a Queens garage, by the way.)

The options were limited and unappealing:

• Live alone under squalid conditions that would certainly appall my hardworking parents, who took pride in raising their three kids in a 4-bedroom house built in 1940 on a 6,000 square foot lot in southeast Queens;
• Live with one or more of the plethora of strangers — emphasis on strange — who sought roommates through the classified section of The Village Voice; or
• Continue to live with the aforementioned parents.

And then love played a hand. More specifically, very young love — because you have to be very young to believe you can actually pull off living with a significant other in a Manhattan studio apartment.

Tina and I were 19 years old, maybe 20, and we’d only been together 18 months or so. The city was falling apart; all the papers said so. But as far as we were concerned, its streets were paved with roses and ice cream.

So I am here to report that we almost pulled it off.

Back then — and even now, I suppose — 92nd Street between First and Second Avenues was not considered the “fashionable” Upper East Side. It was too far east and too high up.

For $275 a month, doable with pooled resources, we could live on the second floor of a five-story walk-up, in a unit approximately 10 feet wide and 20 feet long, kitchen included. The apartment’s best features were an exposed brick wall and a fire escape that we lovingly referred to as “the terrace.”

From that “terrace,” we observed the routinely chaotic life of the block. One of the buildings across from us warehoused Sabrett hot dog carts that vendors would pick up early in the morning while navigating around the loud, high drama often being played out at the closing time of the dive bar up the street.

As a kid from Queens, residing in Manhattan was like living in a movie. Sometimes literally.

On the way to the subway one morning, we passed a group of what appeared to be well-heeled revelers standing outside a restaurant on Second Avenue, looking profoundly out of place in broad daylight. This odd tableau repeated itself over the next few days. Turned out the restaurant was Elaine’s, the partiers were extras, and the film being shot was Woody Allen’s “Manhattan.”

In the weeks and months that followed, we started taking friends to the bar of the world-famous restaurant on Friday nights, ordering Michelobs because they were 25 cents cheaper than Heinekens, and delighted to be bystanders at the best ongoing cocktail party in the city.

Eventually, alas, the walls of that tiny studio closed in on us, the mattress of the pullout couch lost its shape, the “terrace” lost its charm — and the relationship failed to survive the growing pains of its participants. But you never forget your first love, or how it played out in your first apartment.

Christopher Policano is the director of external relations at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.