Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  Meanwhile, I suspected that it couldn’t be too hard to sell our town house and settle on an apartment uptown, even for someone as clueless as I was. After all, in New York City, town houses are status symbols of the first and highest order. For Manhattanites, having your own stand-alone dwelling, with no one above or below you, is an unusual, highly prized, and highly desirable way to live. It is supposed to confer privacy, which we prize in the West, and a certain spatial grandeur in a town where you pay by the square foot. And so, in spite of our place being relatively modest—the kitchen was small, and there was no elevator—prospective buyers were lining up to see it. I was forever making it look pristine and then rushing out the door so a broker and client could “view” it.

  I used this time in exile to call brokers from a nearby café. Most were women. They would keep me on the phone for a while, somehow peppering me with questions—about my husband’s job, my job, where I was from, where I went to school, even our net worth—rather than the other way around.

  Manhattanites also do a version of this at parties and other gatherings, with all the subtlety of census workers, in order to peg who you are. The first time it happened to me, I was bewildered. “Oh, they did Jewish Geography with you,” my Jewish husband observed. “They wanted to know where you stood.” As far as I could see, though, the game knew no religion. In a huge town, knowing whether and how you might be connected to someone, whether they know someone you know or want to know—the Chinese call it being guanxi, a system of connectedness in a country of billions—makes a certain amount of sense. Even if it seems a little (or a lot) mercenary.

  After each inquest, the brokers would inevitably tell me they didn’t have the specific listing I was asking about, but they had some other things to show me. In fact, it seemed that none of the beautiful apartments I saw online or in print advertisements actually existed—phone calls revealed that they were “already sold” or “in contract” or were listed as available because “the website needs to be updated.” When I told my husband about this, he pronounced it a typical bait and switch and suggested we needed a “buyer’s broker” of our own. “Sort of like a native informant? Or a guide?” I wondered excitedly, and my husband affirmed that she would be just that. Like the loyal trackers who helped Dian Fossey find her gorillas day after day, and the Inuit people of Baffin Island who took it upon themselves to explain their ways to Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology, when he alit among them, I needed an insider to advise and enlighten me.

  My husband gave me the number of a woman who had helped him sell his small Upper East Side studio years before—and the next day I gave her a ring, introduced myself, and told her I’d like to see some apartments. I thought that, having someone on my side, it would all be easy. I was so naïve. I had merely opened the door. Now the real work began.

  Inga had a glamorous accent—my husband told me she was Danish, and a former model—and was brisk and businesslike. “First of all, you have someone selling your town house, right? Because I don’t usually work downtown.” She explained that uptown and downtown real estate were vastly different worlds. And that the Upper West Side wasn’t her strongest suit; she was primarily an Upper East Side broker.

  “Okay, well, yes, we want to live on the East Side.” I stumbled a little here, taking in the apparently immense, insuperable differences between the neighborhoods as far as brokerage practices were concerned. “And”—I found my footing now—“we want a place in the good public school district.” There was a long pause. Then came the curt pronouncement: “That’s not going to be easy.” I had disappointed her somehow with my requirements, and I found myself suddenly crestfallen and hopeless. This was not going to be easy.

  “But”—Inga spoke in a Scandinavian singsong I already found endearing—“we’re going to try. I have things to show you.” Here I brightened and felt a rush of optimism and relief. She had things to show me! Yes, I had a guide! Inga wouldn’t just help me find a place to live, I had a feeling as I hung up the phone. She would also teach me the grammar of the Upper East Side. Every anthropologist needs at least one reliable, insightful native informant who is willing to show the way, translate the language, explain the customs, and spill his or her culture’s dirty secrets and tacit social codes. In short, informants help you find a way in. And I was pretty sure I had found mine.

  “Is your boss coming today?” the well-dressed woman with an Hermès scarf tied around her neck asked me doubtfully. Her shiny, Botox-frozen brow telegraphed a faint shadow of what must have been confusion as I showed up in an ornate lobby on Park Avenue before Inga for our first day of apartment hunting.

  “Um . . . I don’t . . . have a boss . . .” I managed, extending my hand and introducing myself. She had obviously taken me for Inga’s client’s assistant, based on my casual “nerdy hipster” Marc Jacobs outfit, all the rage downtown. Here was my first clue that women without jobs in my town had personal assistants to scout apartments for them. And that I needed a new apartment-hunting uniform. Inga showed up just then, a tall, razor-thin, beautiful brunette in an exquisite and stylish off-white suit, and I discerned that the other broker admired her, which put me suddenly at ease about everything—what I was wearing, our move, and the entire process of finding a place. It was like magic.

  I wasn’t so far off the mark. The brokerage business in Manhattan—apartment buying and selling—is an ecological niche by, for, and about women. This is especially true on the Upper East Side. Brokerage’s language is clothing. The seller’s broker dresses to channel the respect she wants to garner for her seller; the buyer’s broker dresses to impress and intimidate the seller’s broker, and to project an image on behalf of her prospective buyer, who in turn dresses to convey her seriousness to both brokers (if she is extremely rich, she can dress down, thus conveying that she knows that they know that she doesn’t need to play this game; they are dressing up for her). It all culminates in a kind of dress-off in lobby after lobby, showing after showing, day after day. Imagine Sergio Leone music and women bedecked in Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana at dawn.

  Bags seemed especially important; many of the brokers I saw that first day, when we “viewed” four or five apartments, had purses by Chanel, quilted and lustrous, with chains and heavy flaps and interlocking Cs. Or rectangular calf affairs with open tops and handles, the Cs just under them, easy and elegant. “If we’re going to find an apartment, I need a new bag,” I half-joked to my husband after I arrived home in the early evening that first day. I was shot from the walking (had I been a different kind of client, one more in tune with the practices of the Upper East Side, I would have arranged a driver for me and Inga) and also the unexpected psychological gymnastics, the emotional exertion, of looking at the apartments and interacting with the brokers and contorting my standards and desires to whatever each place presented, wondering whether it could work.

  Every morning for the next several weeks, I would don my Upper East Side apartment-hunting uniform: demure sheath dress, Agnès B. or French Sole flats, and the most ladylike bag I owned—no slouchy satchel would do for my errand. The final touch was a sleek (I hoped) ponytail. After all, I was headed up to the Land of the Sleek. Thus attired, I would hail a cab and, after what was usually a half hour’s ride north and east, meet Inga in a given lobby of a given prewar building, almost always west of Lexington Avenue. Our search area was dictated by the boundaries of the excellent public school district, so, basically, we were looking in the most expensive neighborhood in all of Manhattan. In order to eventually send our kid to school there for free. The irony of this was not lost on me, my husband, or Inga, who quickly became the third person in our marriage. “We could really see a lot more things if you were flexible about the school district,” she suggested diplomatically to me once we had gotten to know each other. “But I know what you and your husband want,” she added quickly when I shot her a look. “So we’ll keep going in the district.”

  It seemed to take forever to
find an apartment. After all, this was during the boom, and the real estate market was tight. Sellers were asking for sky-high prices; buyers were at their mercy. The spot we wanted to be in, Inga intimated over and over, was the toughest nut in the city to crack. We looked and looked and looked.

  We looked at “classic sixes” and “classic sevens” and “classic eights” in “nice buildings” and “good buildings” and even “white-glove buildings,” where the staff literally wear white gloves. All the buildings had doormen to greet you and many had attended elevators, meaning someone to push the buttons for you. But they were all different from a “great building,” which might be on the same block and look exactly the same from the outside, yet demand a massive down payment, refuse mortgages, and require the prospective buyer to prove she has three or five or even ten times the apartment’s value in liquid assets. Great buildings can ask for these things, and also make certain exceptions for certain people if they feel like it, Inga explained early on, because they are essentially private clubs, run by boards of residents who make and enforce rules as they see fit. These are the types of buildings that routinely refuse the applications of wealthy celebrities, buildings that sent Richard Nixon and Madonna alike down the path of town-house living, no doubt disgusted and wounded by their rejection. Great buildings are inhabited by titans of industry and their socialite wives and are known by their addresses: 740 Park. 927 Fifth. 834 Fifth. 1040 Fifth. Others have names: The Beresford. The San Remo. The Dakota. River House. They are made of limestone and designed by architects of note, such as Rosario Candela and Emery Roth. These buildings were not for us, but neither, apparently, were the “family” buildings, which sounded perfect to me. “No,” Inga explained patiently when I asked, “that doesn’t mean they have playrooms. It means they allow ninety percent financing. We can do better.” Just as Inga’s outfits—Jil Sander, Piazza Sempione, Prada, she told me when I asked—were a reflection of my status, so would the building I wound up in be a reflection of hers. She wanted the best for us—because she had skin in this game, too.

  I wasn’t fussy about these distinctions—we just needed a good enough place in the right school district. But to my surprise and eventual frustration, being flexible didn’t make finding a place or the process of looking any easier. There just wasn’t a lot of “inventory,” brokers told us over and over. And it was overwhelmingly, unexpectedly strange to enter people’s lives and spaces in such an intimate way—to see their things and their habits, or, for that matter, to see the absence of any traces of people in perfectly pristine places. I noticed the particular style of decoration on the Upper East Side. There was lots of toile. And yellow. And blue. Again and again. It was hard to imagine what I would do differently, how our furniture would fit here, how we would live in every one of these apartments, my husband and son and I. Which corner would be best for the toddler bed? If we decided to have another child, where would he or she go? Could I work from home in this apartment? And so on.

  If the apartment passed muster initially—in the right school district, with the right number of bathrooms and some nice light and views—then the next day my husband, like all husbands, would come have a look, and the women (Inga and I, the seller’s broker, perhaps the seller, too) would be infused with another kind of energy, an anxious attention, an eagerness to please. I felt like Vanna White, ridiculous, as the other women and I “demonstrated” the apartment, opening doors and showing linen closets. It was not like me to simper and serve, but here I was doing it, as if we were all in a play and knew our roles. In further adherence to this apartment-hunting script, my husband would sniff around, the brokers hanging on his every word and gesture, looking for the subtlest clues to his dis/pleasure. He tended to be polite but by no means overly friendly in these situations. He gave nothing away in front of the brokers, and after a quick circle of the premises, would soon head back to the Important World of Men’s Work. Then he would call me and tell me what he thought.

  It all would have made me feel like Marion Cunningham on Happy Days but for the fact that I knew I was ultimately the one deciding where we would live. It was a woman thing, the home sphere. That’s why all the brokers and potential buyers were women. The men were there to provide gravitas and a bit of frisson, and then disappear, and then sign off. Or not. After which we would do whatever we wanted. Welcome to the Upper East Side.

  As I pondered these gendered divisions of work and meaning in what would be my new habitat, I couldn’t help but focus on more practical matters as well. Namely, in spite of a budget that in Atlanta or Grand Rapids would get us a mansion with a pool, many of the apartments were disappointments. There was a pattern: a gorgeous, gilded, attended lobby at a “prestigious” address on Park or Madison or Fifth. We went up, entered the apartment . . . and I thought I might faint. Is this where all the well-turned-out women of the Upper East Side were living? I frequently wondered in disbelief. Some of the places were immaculate, even “triple mint,” but many if not most were in a state of gentle or not-so-gentle neglect. Frayed rugs and old carpeting. Worn kitchens. Yellowed paint. And, almost always, a maid dusting or polishing the silver or folding laundry.

  And then, every time, without fail, the framed photos and mementos in the living room told the same story. I was transfixed by them, in apartment after apartment: a picture of a young woman next to a diploma from Brearley or Spence. A young man in his graduation photo . . . near a framed diploma, all gold-leafed letters and Latin script, from Horace Mann or Buckley or St. Bernard’s. The perfect hair. The unlined young faces. The airbrushed smiles and teeth adjusted to perfection by orthodontia. It hit me like a sledgehammer one day at a place on Madison Avenue in the low Eighties—these people were downsizing or selling because they had to. Their kids, in whom they had invested so much, so intensively, had finally graduated and fledged. The parents had pushed themselves to their outer financial limit for . . . housekeepers and private schools. They’d rather move than give up either. So now they would sell and move into a smaller place. And bring the diplomas and housekeepers along.

  “Can you believe it?” I said to my husband on the night of my big realization as I flopped into bed, exhausted and depressed from seeing four consecutive apartments with gilded lobbies, frayed carpets, and fancy diplomas.

  “I can,” he said with a sigh. A Brooklynite who had moved to the Upper East Side as a teen, he was a New York but not a Manhattan native, fluent in the desires and beliefs and strivings and anxieties and priorities of the people whose apartments I was in every day, yet also able to see the strangeness of it all. “All that stuff, the housekeepers and private-school diplomas—isn’t just window dressing,” he told me now. “It’s who they are.”

  He yawned, but I was suddenly wide-awake. I remembered an anthropology professor trying to help us understand the concept of honor among the tribe he studied in Yemen. “It’s not an abstract idea,” he explained to the roomful of us in the undergraduate seminar that day so many years before. “When someone sullies your honor, you can’t ignore it and go on, just feeling embarrassed.” No, he told us, it’s like someone has hacked away a piece of your flesh. Something is missing, and you are damaged and injured. Private school diplomas and housekeepers, I realized now, were clearly not just fetishized markers of status, not merely something to wear or have or display with pride. They were also utterly intrinsic to one’s identity on the Upper East Side, so crucial, so fundamental, that you would forgo fresh sisal and a kitchen redo and an apartment in “triple-mint” condition to hold on to them.

  So that explained it, then. The way, all around me, women—brokers with kids, women whose apartments I was looking at, friends of friends on the Upper East Side—talked about where their kids went to school, and used their children’s ages and school affiliations during introductions. Yes, it was a way to describe themselves and do a little coalition building in the process. But it was also who they were. Period. “Hi, I’m Alicia. My kids Andrew and Adam go to Allen-S
tevenson—I think yours do, too?”

  “No, my kids go to Collegiate [Bam! Here she establishes superior rank owing to her children’s enrollment in a TT—top tier—school] but my friend Marjorie’s four boys are all at AS. [Subtext: My friend Marjorie is really rich—you have to be to have four kids—and by association, so am I.] Maybe you know her. How old are your kids?”

  “Oh, wait, really? My nephews are both at Collegiate. [Here she reveals that she is a mere degree from TT school status herself, since her sister’s kids go to a TT school, and thus she is something like an equal.] They’re twins, in second grade: Devon and Dayton?” And so on.

  Private-school affiliation was so important that, without exception, these women seemed dumbfounded that I planned to send my son to the neighborhood’s excellent public school, PS6, when the time came. They might raise their eyebrows and say politely, after a pause, “Yes, you’ll see at the time where he ends up.” Others were more blunt. “Come on,” one broker said with a forced smile, sounding a little exasperated, as she opened kitchen cabinets to show me they were lighted inside. “You’re going to send your kid to private school like everybody else. You’ll drop him off with your driver. Like everybody else. So you can buy anywhere.”

  But my husband and I were adamant. We had gone to public schools, and so could our son. It seemed normal and sensible, and we continued to push for a place near the excellent public school on East Eighty-First Street between Madison and Park. This is an area brokers refer to as “Upper East Side Prime.” Which just made our quest that much harder.

  Now that we had come this far, I needed some tutoring from my husband and Inga. I knew I had bridged the first, fundamental divide in Manhattan real estate social identity, the one that separates “renters” from “owners,” when I got married. My husband put me on the deed to his house, and it became ours, and that was that, but apparently it meant a lot in our town. Many people who rent in Manhattan keep it a secret, or at least don’t talk about it, owing to some sense of inferiority, a feeling that renting is second-class and contingent. “You own, correct?” was one of the first questions brokers asked me (or, more often, asked Inga about us before agreeing to show us apartments), wanting to make sure we weren’t presenting them with an additional hurdle, pleased to have it confirmed that we were already members of the tribe of owners.