On the corner was La Caridad, the greatest Cuban-Chinese restaurant in the world, or so I told my friends, and I made a religion of it, too.But my true religious zeal focussed on the Apthorp itself. Rich men getting divorces moved in. I didn’t have twenty-four thousand dollars. The landlords were willing to give me a three-year lease—ten thousand dollars a month the first year, eleven thousand the second, twelve thousand the third.
Mucho grande cappuccinos.I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. One of them was a charming, courtly gentleman, active in all sorts of charities involving Holocaust survivors. It was the place where Max got his head stuck in a cake pan and Jacob learned to tie his shoelaces. The water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. I signed a new lease.I signed because I had enough money to pay the rent but not nearly enough to buy an apartment nearly as nice anywhere in the city.I signed because my accountant was able, in that way accountants have, to persuade me that the money I would pay in rent was less than I would pay in monthly maintenance plus mortgage interest on a co-op apartment.I signed because I was, as you already know, an expert in rationalization, and I convinced myself that there were huge savings involved in my staying in the building. I went blithely about my business. I was planning to live there forever. As I recall, I gave a tender speech about my love for the building. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you’ve always been loyal to, and the bakery’s gone. I refused to pay any attention. My cookbook crushes. I was a true believer, just like one of those French villagers in the Middle Ages who come to believe they’ve seen the tears of St. Cecilia on a scrap of oilcloth; I was a character in a story about mass delusion and the madness of crowds. Boxes of clothing went to charity. I could understand the new law applying to new tenants, but how on earth could it apply to those of us who had lived in the building for years under the implicit bargain involved in rent stabilization? But we would have paid that initial $24,000, too.Yes, it’s a good time to get a deal in Manhattan. New York is a very livable city.
At Halloween, those of us with small children turned the courtyard street lamps into a fantasy of pumpkin-headed ghosts; in December the landlords erected an electric menorah, which coexisted with a Christmas tree covered with twinkle lights.As it happened, I had several acquaintances who lived in the building, and a few of them became close friends—at least in part because we were neighbors. Rent stabilization was an indelible part of New York life, like Gray’s Papaya. Twenty-four thousand dollars a month—and you still couldn’t get the doorman to open the gate or have the Chinese food delivered to you. It had taken me significantly longer to come to that realization in the area of real estate than it ever had in the area of marriage, but I was finally, irrevocably there. She lived in New Jersey, but she spent Thursday nights in the building office, and rumor had it that she sneaked around in her bare feet, trying to catch the elevator operators napping. When Delia and I worked together writing movies, it was a simple matter of her coming down from her apartment, crossing the courtyard, and coming up to mine; on rainy days, she could even take an underground route. Meanwhile, you read that Manhattan rents are going up, they’re climbing higher, they’ve reached the stratosphere. It was a symbol of family. You had to be there. It was on the fifth floor of the Apthorp, a famous stone pile at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-ninth Street.
To move into the Apthorp was to enter a state of giddy, rent-stabilized delirium. The cost of moving, for instance. What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?On the other hand, I am never going to dream about this new apartment of mine.And I am never going to feel romantic about the neighborhood—although I have to say that it’s much more appealing than I would have guessed. How much did she drop it to? That’s how I figured it. The state legislature passed a luxury-decontrol law stating that any tenant whose rent was more than two thousand dollars a month and who earned more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year would automatically be removed from rent stabilization. Like most Apthorp doormen, George did not actually open the door—which was, incidentally, a huge, heavy iron gate that you often desperately needed help with—but he did provide a running commentary on everyone who lived in the building, and whenever I came home he filled me in on the whereabouts of my husband, my boys, my babysitter, my sister, my brother-in-law, and even Rosie, who painted her apartment orange, installed walls of shelves for her extensive collection of Happy Meal toys, feuded with her neighbors about her dogs, and fought with the landlords about the fact that her washing machine was somehow irrevocably hooked up to the bathtub drain. I’m too embarrassed to type the number. What’s more, it’s definitely warmer over here in winter, because it’s farther from the frigid blasts of wind coming off the Hudson River. In the spring, there are tulips and azaleas, in summer pale-blue hostas and hydrangeas.Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified, because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names. I was never going to leave. That’s right. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true.
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