Apartment Envy: A Studio Lost and Found
In New York’s crazy real estate market, it helps to have some divine intervention.
VALERIE REISS
10/23/2000
Studio: 300 square feet, $1242.74/month, rental. Ten months at that location. Hardwood floors, 10-foot ceilings, elevator building.
I was born in Manhattan and lived here until I was 18. As a native, I have a deep sense of entitlement, making it especially difficult to watch wealthy outsiders take over this city.
Around the time I left the city in 1991, Newsweek put a big, rotting apple on its cover. Crime in New York was up, prices were down. My mother gave up our $900-a-month, two-bedroom with wrap-around balcony on 25th Street and Third Avenue, and my father sold his one-bedroom on East 24th Street for under $80,000.
When I returned to New York eight years later, $1600 rents (for a studio in Williamsburg) were a shock. But I forged ahead. I called spurious classified ads and dealt with bait-and-switch realtors. I dialed brokers who answered their phones with, “I’m busy” and a slam. I paid for money-sucking, incompetent services. I groveled to a realtor friend whose best advice was, “Don’t go to a realtor.”
During the six months I looked for an apartment, I was living in my dad’s empty house, which was for sale in New Jersey. (Lesson: Grow up making fun of a state, and you will one day commute from it.) I saw $1100 East Village ground-floor hellholes (sorry, I’m sure they’re gone by now) and five-floor walkups on York Avenue. One place, a 150-square-foot studio on the Upper West Side in a building whose sunken black stairwell swayed, was, I thought, It. The bathroom was across the hall. When I tried to replace the couple living there, the landlord rejected me because of a late payment on my credit. I offered a year’s rent in advance. He refused.
One day, I got a call from a broker. “We’ve got a place in SoHo, $1500.” Nope, too high, thanks. Next day, same broker calls. “That place in SoHo, it’s down to $1400.” No thanks, too high. And SoHo? Who lives in SoHo? It’s tourist hell. The NEXT day, a different broker calls. “Hi, Valerie? A friend of yours wandered in here and said you were looking for a place. We’re an Upper East Side firm, but we have this place in SoHo. It was $1500, then $1400, but now it looks like it’ll be under $1300 and rent-stabilized. Interested?”
I was their first client to see it. An elevator building, two East-facing windows, high ceilings, across from a children’s playground. But I was still hemmy-hawwy. The broker and I went outside. “You feel like because you’re from here, you shouldn’t have to be looking for an apartment in this insane market, don’t you?” So much for feeling original. “Well, I’m not going to tell you what to do.” He paused. “Take it.”
I did. I moved into my new abode the same day, it turned out, that my dad and stepmom moved out of the New Jersey house. One more night and it would have been Sofa-Surfing City for me.
When I called my friend to thank him for talking to the broker, he said, “Don’t thank me, thank St. Anthony.” My friend, a Jew named Christopher, said he’d been praying to St. Anthony for weeks for me. Though I’m part non-religious Jew, part vague Christian, part Quaker-schooled, I do know that St. Anthony is the saint of finding lost things. Did that mean my apartment was mine the whole time, just lost?
One day Christopher came over. He walked through the door all big-eyed. “Are you aware,” he asked, “that the biggest St. Anthony church in New York City is on the end of your block?” That’s not all. The St. Anthony rectory and a convent of nuns devoted to St. A. are all within a one-block radius of my building.
That sense of entitlement? Gone. The feeling I get when I sit to write in my quiet, sun-filled, SoHo studio? Grateful. What I think of the rich invaders who are buying the two-bedroom apartment I grew up in for $875,000? Suckers.