Good-bye to Ninety-sixth Street.
Good-bye to Ninety-sixth Street.
The Boxes have — as they so often do in the life of the urban millennial renter — come out from their hiding places. Some of The Boxes have been with me for four or five years. They spend most of their existence collapsed under a bed or in the back of a closet, waiting for a shake-up. Occasionally, looking for a power socket behind the couch, I will come across a few of them and feel a latent sense of doom bubbling up.
The popular image of moving in New York involves crying out in agony with a full-size couch held vertically in a stairwell, but the horror begins a few days earlier when the condemned grabs the first box and a roll of tape and heads for the bookshelf. Carrying a couch down four flights of stairs is temporary and resolved through brute force, but the packing is a slow-burning, cerebral agony. To set out the first box out in plain sight is to set off on the sordid, entropic ritual and to acknowledge that even the vaguest sense of peace will remain a foreign concept for at least a month.
I packed the first box on Friday night and, if I continue at this pace, I should be ready to go in a year or so. (This is unfortunate because the movers will arrive a week from Tuesday and I am going out of town for Easter.) The first box contains railway timetables and non-fiction books on urban planning. If history is any guide, the contents of the last box will be something like three socks, two matchbooks, a whisk, and a half-eaten chicken sandwich.
Next Tuesday morning, three people will arrive and — at a cost not all that different from that of moving the same boxes all the way from Michigan — take the boxes four flights downstairs, seventy-five blocks downtown, and ten floors up in an elevator (an elevator!!!).
The last edition of the Newsletter concerned a hopeless apartment search which pushed me to the very edge of sanity and filled the camera roll of my phone with photographs that looked like they might have come from a colorized version of How the Other Half Lives. “We’ll take it!” I had cried at one point before my two future roommates (yes, roommates!) talked me off the ledge about an apartment where I had decided that a washing machine was a perfectly good substitute for windows.
The search mercifully concluded one Sunday afternoon when a broker (who has now ascended to a sort of saint-like status in our minds) led us to an apartment affordable to us only through a miracle. “Are you hugging?” the broker had asked when he found us doing just that while on the verge of tears in the kitchen — a separate room with a dishwasher and view of the East River.
The apartment is in a massive Robert Moses-era housing development with a population approximately equal to that of Wyandotte, Michigan (that’s about five Zeelands for the west siders). I talk a big game about hating Robert Moses, but a dishwasher is a dishwasher, and you can’t fight two full bathrooms.
The building — situated in a vast tree-covered superblock — is not on a street or an avenue, but on a “road,” a rare street suffix indeed.
“ROAD?” the woman at ConEdison asked incredulously when I called to provide my forwarding address. “In Manhattan??” It stands to reason that the folks at ConEd would not deal with the address very often — electricity is included with the rent, and we have already resolved to blast the air conditioning all summer even if it means we have to wear parkas indoors in July. (There are solar panels on the roof — how bad can it be?)
I thought that leaving my current apartment would be a funereal exercise, but the new apartment has sharpened my focus on the old one’s shortcomings. The ambulance sirens on 96th Street are more grating now, and the small refrigerator is more offensive. I find myself thinking of new ways to quantify the time until the move as I wash dishes. (“Well, when I consider that it’s after midnight now and that I’ll be out of town for a few days before the move, I really only have five full days of dishwashing left.”)
I will miss the old place, though. If not the shower for which no curtain is the appropriate size or the kitchen drawer that cannot open unless the oven is open, certainly I will miss the airshaft, which gives a nice cross breeze, good bird watching, and a strange window into the lives of my neighbors. The wood floors are fantastic, even if they have started to give me splinters this week as if to punish my unfaithfulness. And such lovely exposed brick!
“Your rent pays for what’s outside the apartment,” people love to say, seemingly forgetting that laundry still costs extra. This is still true, which makes leaving the neighborhood the particularly painful part of the move.
In a place where just about everyone gets around on foot, weird little connections start to develop. They are not such that I feel I should give a tearful goodbye or forwarding address to the man who runs the laundromat, but they are close enough that it feels strange to leave. “What ever happened to him?” one of the neighborhood distributors of carbohydrates might think in a few months, but nothing more.
I am on first-name terms with Adam, the night man at the bodega on Second Avenue. He has picked up on the fact that I prefer American cheese but am embarrassed to admit it in front of others, so it is now the wordless default on my sandwiches unless I specify otherwise.
A few blocks down the avenue (past the crossing guard who says “good morning” on the way to work), my bagel order is down to “toasted” or “not toasted” depending on the day, the result of which is always an everything bagel with plain cream cheese produced by a man whose name I do not know but who I would recognize on the street.
A man called Kevin lives above me and we have said polite hellos to each other in the hall ever since I helped rescue the vacuum filter he dropped on my fire escape.
Giulia, who cuts my hair, remembers the appropriate buzzer number for the side of my head because I never do. The counterman at Schaller and Weber knows my prosciutto preference because the Italian names all sound the same to me and I can’t remember the one I like.
I had hoped to work one more election day — an activity that always makes the neighborhood seem a little smaller and more personal — with Katie and Gloria at Public School 198 on the next block, but I’ll be re-registered downtown for the June primary.
My new neighborhood also has bagel stores and bodegas and election sites and neighbors and barbers and delis, but it’s difficult to start over entirely. Seventy-five blocks is a long way in a place like this.
This is the plight of the urban millennial renter. You can build whatever life you want for yourself, but prices will rise and circumstances will change and The Boxes are always there. They might be obscured behind the couch or hiding behind the hangers in the closet but they are still around, warning of an uprooting to come. Just when you think you might get involved in a civic organization or apply for a spot on a Community Board, The Boxes ask, “Why bother?”
This move is different, though, because of a miracle. The new apartment — the beautiful new apartment — has something better than any dishwasher or river view or square footage or tiled bathroom or carte blanche air conditioning: rent stabilization. It’s not the same as New York’s famous post-war fixed-price rent control, but it’s close. Rent increases are set by a government board and tenants have a statutory right to renew their leases.
There are about a million rent-stabilized units in New York City, which sounds like an enormous number until one considers that there are nearly nine million people in town, and those who enjoy rent stabilization tend to move a whole lot less. Can you blame them? To have rent stabilization is to live with the radical idea that you might somehow deserve to live a stable life of middle-class dignity — to sink your roots into a place — without the specter of The Boxes looming in the back of the closet.
To live such a life in such a city is nothing short of a miracle, and it will soon feel miraculous indeed when The Boxes make their greatest move of all: to the recycling room.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Scotland” by Alistair Reid.
There is nothing like a moment of good fortune to show you how truly superstitious you have become about good fortune. I come from people who, gazing upon a miracle, become terribly uneasy. My grandparents moved to a wonderful new house in the fall. I called my grandfather on the day they signed the papers and he said, “Well, we’ll just see about it.”
As I gazed out across the vast, rent-stabilized parquet floor of our new apartment for the first time, I felt the same thing. I find myself walking past my new building a few times each week now to make sure that it is still standing, or imagining that the landlord sent us the lease by accident. When one of my roommates said that the apartment might mark a “season of abundance,” I recoiled in horror.
I call this “a respectable sense of Calvinist fear.” My mother calls it “anxiety.” In any event, this poem captures it well.
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet, when larks rose on long thin strings of singing and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels. Greenness entered the body. The grasses shivered with presences, and sunlight stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills. Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat, the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’ cried I, like a sunstruck madman. And what did she have to say for it? Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves as she spoke with their ancient misery: ‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’
“Good-Bye to Forty-eighth Street” (Essays of E. B. White) and “Moving” (October 5, 1935 edition of the New Yorker) by E. B. White.
Yes, yet again. More of him. What can I say? It’s a season of E. B. White.
He moved not less than eight times in New York. Few can even hope to approach his talent for both writing and moving, let alone his knack for writing about moving.
As I sit here this afternoon in this disheveled room, surrounded by the boxes and bales that hold my undisposable treasure, I feel the onset of melancholy. I look out onto Forty-eighth Street; one out of every ten passers-by is familiar to me. After a dozen years of gazing idly at the passing show, I have assembled, white unbeknownst to them, a cast of characters that I depend on. They are the nameless actors who have a daily walk-on part in my play — the greatest of dramas… In New York, a citizen is likely to keep on the move, shopping for the perfect arrangement of rooms and vistas, changing his habitation according to fortune, whim, and need. And in every place he abandoned he leaves something vital, it seems to me, and starts his new life somewhat less encrusted, like a lobster that has shed its skin and is for a time soft and vulnerable.