Life in New York

by Laura Pedersen

  I’ve heard it said that you determine where to live in Manhattan not based on income but on age. Your number of years equals your appropriate street, in other words, nineteen-year-olds should live on 19th Street and eighty-one-year-olds should live on 81st Street. The truth is that it’s so hard to find an apartment a person can’t look only in one or two neighborhoods. You have to move based on what’s available and what you can afford. Live here long enough and you’ll know more than one couple staying together because neither partner is willing to vacate

  the apartment. Divorce isn’t just about money and custody of the dog but also rent control, leases, and who gets to hang out at the neighborhood Starbucks. In fact, sharing a rent-controlled apartment has been found to be much more effective in keeping couples together than any prenuptial agreements or marriage counseling. On the other hand, the prospect of giving up a rent-controlled studio apartment has kept many New Yorkers from ever marrying in the first place.

  Most city residents live in small, cramped apartments. My father, like many New York infants before and since, had a bureau drawer in his parents’ bedroom for a bassinet. Every available square inch counts, and that’s why spring cleaning often means taking the short-sleeved shirts and sandals out of the oven and replacing them with the scarves and boots. It’s challenging to become a hoarder in a New York dwelling, though some have managed spectacularly, like the two Collyer brothers of Harlem, with more than 130 tons of accumulated possessions.

  The city is also one of the few places where it’s not uncommon to live with roommates well into your forties. Solitude is rare and considered a luxury, and that’s why New Yorkers brag that they’ve lived in an apartment for ten years and never spoken to their neighbors. For the same reason, there aren’t any survivalists in New York. With two roommates and a stationary bicycle in the kitchen, there’s no place for beans, gallons of water, a backup generator, and Parcheesi. So bring on the apocalypse, but preferably the day before the rent is due.

  As a result of the housing situation, New Yorkers tend not to be big on camping. Number one, your first bare-bones living space is basically a campsite. Number two, when you can finally afford $2,000 a month for a studio apartment, heading out into the woods where there are no bathrooms, climate control, or restaurants that will deliver is no different than being homeless. That’s why there are no authorized campgrounds in New York City. Whenever we find “nature” inside our apartments we usually try to kill it. Calling a friend over for a late-night extermination has become a predictable scene in any New York–based movie or TV comedy. In fact, one could argue that it doesn’t make sense to go on any type of vacation or really even to a park for that

  matter because of all the rent money you’re losing whenever your room sits empty. If a New Yorker is going to die from exposure it’d better be the kind on Gawker or TMZ.

  High-density living also makes the appearance of film crews, celebrities, and visiting dignitaries annoying rather than exciting. New Yorkers are not pretending to be cool when they appear irritated by an episode of Law & Order shooting out front and the stars lingering on their front stoop. Celebrities can actually have a hard time getting past co-op boards because they’re famous and it’s automatically assumed they have too much National Enquirer–style nonsense in their lives for a building where respectable people want to live quietly. The Czech playwright and politician Václav Havel stayed in my building while he taught at Columbia University. He reeked of smoke and his burly entourage was always puffing unfiltered cigs in the driveway next to shiny black SUVs. We weren’t entirely surprised to hear that he’d died of lung cancer.

  Crammed into apartments together, people must often go out on the street with their cell phones to get some privacy. Don’t be startled to see someone arguing, breaking up, and crying on a street corner by phone or in person. However, if there’s a hat on the ground it could be performance art. Most people will leave you to your grief, but rest assured that those who do stop to offer comfort will share a much worse problem, along with the numbers of their therapists.

  Therefore, it’s good to know that New Yorkers don’t care if you eavesdrop. They’re convinced that their problems are much more interesting than anything going on in your life.

  A New York apartment is filled with noises and smells, and not necessarily your own. So many buildings have been reconfigured over the years that someone else’s kitchen vent probably leads to your bedroom radiator, hence the unavoidable aromas of soy sausage frying, sauerkraut fermenting, and five-spice cooking. Since lots of New Yorkers are aspiring musicians, you can count on having a house band conducting jam sessions at all hours and telling yourself that you’re getting in on the ground floor of the next Mambo Kings. In Buffalo, noises were explained away as the house “settling” or else ghostly inhabitation. In

  New York, the noise is strictly the result of boisterous neighbors who are very much alive. There are the de rigueur sounds of passionate lovemaking, crying babies, squabbling teenagers, loud TVs, and barking dogs. With regard to the connections between lovemaking and crying babies, one assumes there’s a reminder in there somewhere. As for all the heated debates about whose turn it is to buy toilet paper, it’s been said that the only one who listens to both sides of an argument is the person in an adjacent apartment or at the next restaurant table. It just may be that New Yorkers need their noise. They are the second largest users (after people in Hong Kong) of a website called Coffitivity, which simulates the sound of a busy coffee shop.

  When I arrived in New York there were still a number of buildings with elevator operators – usually an old guy in a uniform that hadn’t been cleaned in a few decades with a little wooden stool that had underneath it a transistor radio quietly tuned to a ballgame and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Elevator operators in residential and office buildings were often African American. However, in 1984 there were about as many black doormen as black men in that year’s Winter Olympics. While the elevator operators have since been rendered obsolete, the diversity among doormen has increased, though there are still about as many women doormen as women in the Oval Office.

  Maybe people don’t want women doorpeople for fear that they’d be too observant and gossipy: “I can’t believe she’s wearing those shoes with that suit.” “Has he ever heard of a barber?” “I doubt that’s going to be a business meeting.” “Isn’t that yesterday’s shirt and tie? Someone had a sleepover.” “He wouldn’t need to be out with a trainer at six a.m. if he quit the eleven p.m. pizza deliveries.” After sorting the prescriptions you might hear: “Look who got Viagra.” “She’s trying to get pregnant at this age!” “Guess who has an itch?” Women manning the doors might also complain about the temperature. The lobby is cold in the winter, and in the summer the air-conditioning is cranked up to freezing because the doors are constantly opening and letting in the hot outside air. They’d stop and make a huge fuss over babies, too. Then there’s the conundrum of whether etiquette-conscious male tenants would have to hold the door for women doorpeople. On the bright side,

  behind the desk would be static guard, nail glue, and hair spray, and the women would be happy to give restaurant recommendations (and condemnations).

  When I was twenty-eight, I had an eighty-two-year-old doorman I wouldn’t describe as robust. I found myself regularly dashing to open the door before he could get there and constantly afraid that he’d try and carry packages – mine or anyone else’s. For a person raised on the “respect and assist your elders” scheme, there is a real manners conundrum when it comes to having a much older person play the role of helper, even if you’re paying him to do so.

  Based on the low rate of turnover in the job and the union threatening to walk out once a year, it’s safe to assume that doormen make decent money. Doormen who retire early probably go on to get jobs in espionage the way police officers go into the security business. They keep many secrets, even more than bartenders and hairdressers, especially about what gets deliver
ed and who visits in the middle of the night. Doormen smile and pretend they saw nothing, heard nothing, and know nothing just like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. I’ve never read a murder mystery that ends up with the doorman having done it. The more residents have to hide, the more tips they give around the holidays. And speaking of holiday tips: For buildings with lackadaisical superintendents, December is also your one-month window to get anything in the apartment painted or repaired.

  The Nature Poets have nothing on New York doormen. These guys are prepared to make eight hours of conversation about the weather every day for more than forty years. Doormen also get paid to listen to a lot of bad jokes. Every time one of my doormen says he has a package for me there’s a good chance I’m going to say, “Is it a pony?” Unfortunately, he’s not allowed to wallop me over the head with the box or lock me inside the revolving door.

  Some people prefer a doorman building because grown children and parents can’t visit each other unless they’re announced. If kids move from the Midwest to New York, even though the parents fly here to visit they still have to be allowed up and can’t just wait for another resident to open the downstairs door and sneak inside. Another strategy

  is to rent a fifth-floor walk-up knowing the folks can’t make it much past the third-floor landing. And New York parents who finally got their children out of rent-controlled apartments can now safely guard the door from any boomerang offspring or laundry stops.

  But the doorman system cannot save you from houseguest requests. New York is the number-one tourist destination in the United States. As a result, New Yorkers host more visitors than anyone else, and yet we have the least space for them. With hotels starting at $300 a night plus hefty taxes, long-lost friends and distant relatives are constantly in touch. To New Yorkers, Facebook is a houseguest delivery system. People insist they want to see you, and when you say you’ll be away that week they say, “That’s okay, just leave the keys.” And they think they’re being generous by saying that you can come visit them in Duluth, Moose Jaw, or Fishkill anytime at all. Fortunately or not, health quarantines are pretty much a thing of the past, and if you tell people a plague has fallen on your apartment they’re certain to declare immunity. Saying that people are already there just leads to, “When are they leaving?” or “We’ll just sleep on the couch.” Likewise construction: “When is it over?”

  The way to get rid of unwanted houseguests, or “house pests” as they’re known in studio apartments, is to claim you already have vermin, aka bedbugs. It keeps people out but also markedly reduces your own invitations, and thus is a way of slimming down your social life all around if you’re in the mood. My neighbor had bedbugs, and so Henry the bedbug-sniffing beagle came to examine my apartment. Henry declared the place bug free, but in the meantime he peed on a couch and an armchair and crapped in my bedroom, so I’m not all that convinced about his training. The fact that I had my female dogs locked up in the bathroom may have had something to do with his wanting to leave his contact information, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Dating is hard in New York, even for beagles, but he’s clearly open to a workplace romance.

  tutorials, and therapy sessions while updating their Facebook profiles on cell phones. Some families have a nanny for each child à la Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, in addition to housekeepers, tutors, drivers, and personal assistants. The last decade has also seen the rise of the “manny,” especially where energetic boys or ones who aren’t getting enough “male influence” are concerned. These older brothers for hire are able to ride scooters long distances, spend hours at batting cages, never tire of laser tag, and have substantial experience building forts, rockets, and Lego robots. The conventional wisdom may be that women are more nurturing and compassionate, but more and more families are standing by their mannies. And not just for spirited children. New York’s adults decided they wanted a manny too, and elected Mayor Mike Bloomberg to three consecutive terms (2002–2014) to straighten up not just the city but its citizenry.

  When it comes to educating the kids, New York has chucked neighborhood high schools in favor of something called open enrollment admissions. Why? To promote desegregation, both racial and economic. Kids take subways and buses all over the five boroughs, traversing back and forth to school every day. That makes it difficult for parents to attend school functions such as concerts, conferences, and sporting events, especially if there are other kids in the family with simultaneous activities. Forget farm kids taking a bus twenty miles to school or your grandparents walking a mile in each direction, both uphill. There are teenagers in New York who ride two buses and two subways for two hours and that’s just one way! If you take out lunch, gym, and study hall, that was the entire length of my school day. Furthermore, these youngsters lug forty-pound backpacks that make it appear as if they’re shipping out with the military or heading to JFK Airport and then on to a product development meeting in Palo Alto.

  Sure, some kids saw High School Musical and want to go to performing arts school or other specialty schools. Many students attend parochial schools, and obviously Manhattanites are big on Montessori. Imagine if you were going in for heart surgery and saw a diploma on the wall saying your surgeon went to Montessori Medical School. I’ve always wondered what a space station run by Montessori grads all

  doing whatever they please would look like. If parents really wanted to do their kids a favor they’d send them to technical school. People who grow up in apartments rarely know how to use a wrench since the building superintendent or a maintenance man does even the simplest repairs.

  But for the 90 percent in need of a good but general high school education, there’s no reason a neighborhood school shouldn’t be able to provide it. If the school has a respectable academic reputation it tends to attract a more racially and economically diverse population than one with a bad ranking. And for all the engineers working on the overcrowding of subways during morning rush hour, a big step would be to remove the several hundred thousand kids clogging the morning commute by having them attend school close to home. On top of everything else, they are three-bowls-of-Trix-cereal awake while the rest of us are still dozing. The only bright side I can see to kids commuting is they can get homework help from the many journalists, editors, and professors on public transportation who make corrections for a living. However, it’s hard for them to do homework when they can’t sit down or even raise their arms to grab a pen. If we’re going to stick with the current commuting kid system, the least we can offer them is study cars with guaranteed seats.

  New York students don’t tell teachers their homework isn’t done because it was run over by the subway or eaten by rats but rather because they were “blocked,” the assignment was “too derivative,” the espresso machine broke, or they’ve “renounced directed learning.” New Yorkers also have fewer after-school activities as a result of their multiple therapy and tutoring appointments.

  Moving on to the younger generation, I feel sorry for elementary-school kids growing up in Manhattan when I compare their life with my free-range childhood of playing in the neighborhood, leaving home after breakfast, and returning when we kids could no longer see the baseball, jacks, or jump rope. However, when we became teens we grew bored, and hanging out at the mall or 7-Eleven was our main form of recreation. Sure, there was still skating, sledding, and soccer, but by then those activities were considered kid stuff. City teenagers have

  it great in that they can walk or take public transportation to stores, arcades, events, movies, and restaurants.

  At least they could walk if their parents would let them. I now present you with The Great Stroller Controversy. If tourists see a picture of a stroller with a red slash through it they may not understand the nature of this protest. Children of an age who can and should be walking and have no disabilities are pushed around in strollers because it’s more convenient for parents (and provides a place to hang shopping bags along with a Frappuccino holder). Singles and couples who
have not procreated, along with those whose offspring have grown and gone, claim this clogs up already narrow pedestrian walkways, staircases, subways, and so forth. The parents are eventually going to teach those kids to walk, right? Were they so busy studying for preschool and kindergarten exams that the whole personal mobility thing got overlooked?

  This wasn’t really an issue until the 1990s, when fertility treatments suddenly led to an explosion of multiple births in the city. As a result, the innocuous single-wide stroller suddenly became a high-tech double- or even triple-wide deluxe stroller known as a “travel system,” complete with swivel seats and foot-activated dual-rear parking brakes. You’ll find them blocking sidewalks, doorways, and store aisles, thus causing pedestrian gridlock. They require runways, traffic police, and parking garages.

  Meantime, the eight-year-olds riding in these strollers as minivans are rarely disciplined for bad behavior, but told to “make better choices.” New York parents feel that doing permanent psychological damage to their children is much more effective than disciplining them. Then again, these children use their experiences to write award-winning angst-filled TV sitcoms, movies, plays, books, video games, and comedy shows, and are able to pay for their parents to retire to Florida as well as hire a good limousine service for themselves.

  Having lots of different schools accessible to lots of students can make for intense competition. Most parents are going to spend thousands of hours helping their children with homework. When I was a kid and we asked our parents how to change miles into kilometers or solve for a square root they looked at us as if we’d lost our minds, and

  said stuff like “Everything is different now” or “We used a slide rule” (a what?) or “Never saw anything like that before. Maybe I was absent that week.” True, with kids nowadays getting the homework a grad student received in my time, parental involvement is mandatory. Everything those parents forgot or missed during the first eighteen years of life will now be revisited and relearned. In case they thought they’d read the Aeneid or did a logarithm for the last time, it’s all coming back, only this time on a notebook computer and with gender-neutral examples.