Lots of Mattresses on Lots of Floors, And a Bunk Bed That Smelled Like Italian Food (New…

Lots of Mattresses on Lots of Floors, And a Bunk Bed That Smelled Like Italian Food (New Yorrrrrkkkkkk!)

by Julie Buntin

Where have you lived, Julie Buntin?

95th Street between 1st & 2nd Avenue, Upper East Side/East Harlem, $600/mo. (my share), 10 months, 19 years old
The two-story basement apartment was on the invisible line between the UES and East Harlem, bracketed by a housing project on the East River and an Irish bar where I’d lose a good chunk of my sophomore year accepting free drinks from entry-level accountants in rumpled suits. My bedroom was on the first floor, directly by the front door, and it was just barely larger than a barred window I never opened, because it overlooked the building’s trash cans. An unexplainable outcropping jutted from the left wall, narrowing the room further. No closet. I bought a crappy futon from IKEA to try and maximize the space, though once I unfolded it I never folded it back up again, so my room was all bed. Street noise entered unfiltered. I never felt safe there — once I heard a rustling in the trash and stood on my knees on the bed, peeking between the bars, and caught an old dude jerking off aggressively as he stared up at me. My three roommates, whose big bedrooms downstairs cost almost twice as much as mine, were rich and benevolent and full-time students. After class, I worked as a cocktail waitress to pay my rent. At one or two in the morning, I’d sprawl on the floor in the kitchen and eat my free shift meals, weird bar appetizers, potato skins, and salads littered with soggy croutons. I was 19, and budgeting meant divvying up my tips into little envelopes — RENT, FUN, FOOD, EMERGENCIES. One of the girls had an idiotic Bichon Frise that would do anything for a dirty tampon and fell down the stairs so often it stopped being funny. We broke our lease after a big rainstorm, when two feet of water flooded the entire lower floor, drowning wardrobes of their expensive clothes.

47th Street and 2nd Avenue, Turtle Bay or midtown (doldrums) Manhattan, $400/mo., (my half of an $800 room), 11 months, 20 years old
I moved with the girls when their parents helped them find a new place. Like before, I took the smallest room, though this time the room was normal-small. No floods here — we were on the 16th floor of a high-rise in Turtle Bay, with a modern kitchen, two full bathrooms, and central air. The living room was converted into a bedroom (big enough for a king sized bed and then some), which left a tiny windowless alcove for our dining room table. After some frantic number crunching, I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford my $800 portion of the rent — I’d barely been scraping by paying $600. I asked a friend, one of the few people I knew in New York who, like me, had no parental support, if she wanted to share my new room — small, but not SO small. We could get bunk beds! $400 a month! She moved in, though we never got those bunk beds. Both of our mattresses were on the floor, so that if one of us rolled over or tossed an arm in her sleep, we’d bump into the other. I started staying at my then-boyfriend’s place a lot — less because of my hampered space than because my new apartment, which was on a floor undergoing construction, soon became overrun with mice and roaches. At night the mice shrieked as they chased each other across the stove. Once I picked a pizza box off the counter, and three tiny roaches shot across the marble surface.

15th Street and 3rd Avenue, Flatiron/Union Square, Nothing? My old rent?, 12 months, 21 years old
Slowly, one backpack full of clothes at a time, I moved into my then-boyfriend D’s studio. One morning I realized I never, ever left, and that by definition, if not by any legal agreement, I lived there, though I continued paying my portion of the rent for my “real” place. The apartment building, on 15th and 3rd, was called Hattan House. No matter how messy D was (absurdly, chaotically, sitcom messy) I’d never seen a roach. He cared little for his surroundings, and the apartment felt resolutely his, so we made do with furniture we recovered from the street. The tiny kitchen, tucked into a corner behind the sleeping area, had no dishwasher or counter space to speak of. The fridge came up to my chin. Two kitchens could easily fit into the walk-in closet. Drifts of his clothes piled up against the walls in there — no matter how I fought, I never managed to have all his clothes clean at any given time. We painted two walls a foresty shade of green, dark and light-swallowing, and another a pollen-y, oppressive gold, so the boxy room caved in on us. We’d live with this miscalculation for over a year. A few months before we moved out, there was a fire on our floor. We woke to smoke drifting in a hazy cloud above the bed. Outside, we watched our neighbor’s windows shatter out, studding the sidewalk with glass. The day we left, I turned on the bathroom light, to say goodbye I suppose, just in time to catch a cockroach the size of my palm idling toward the bathtub drain.

Gay Street, West Village, $1900/mo. (together), 12 months, 22 years old
Gay Street is the shortest street in Manhattan, little more than an alley between Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street, lined with brownstones and ancient carriage houses that were, at the turn of the century, horse stables for the brownstone dwellers on the West Village’s more heavily trafficked byways. Here’s a New York City real estate secret — in 2009, you could rent a fifth floor walk-up on Gay Street for under $2000, if you didn’t mind the stairs, the lack of amenities, and the fact that a litterbox shaped stain on the kitchen floor (that was not much bigger, itself, than a litterbox) released an ammoniac cat piss smell no matter how much you scrubbed and scrubbed. During rainstorms, the odor crescendoed to a hysterical potency. Despite the smell and worse, the crumbling bricks that glazed everything in the apartment with a cancerous dust, the noodles I found stuck to the wall near the stove, the pancaked mouse in the closet alcove, the man passed out in the unlockable foyer with a needle in his arm — I loved that apartment. In the summer, tour guides shouted Gay Street’s history to a gaggle of charmed travelers dozens of feet below my window. I liked to lean over the sill and wave. Who did they think I was? By the summer of 2010, the housing market was on firmer footing, and our landlord raised our rent over $500. I had just graduated from college, and was going straight to graduate school — do not pass go, do not collect a paycheck with benefits, make do with a measly stipend. I cried when we left, in the passenger’s seat of a Moishe’s moving van.

Lorimer Street & Bedford Avenue, on the Greenpoint side of McCarren Park, $2000/mo. (together, my rent subsidized by a part-time job working for his real estate agent mother), 9 months, 23 years old
Moving to Brooklyn would make us feel like a real couple. This time, we signed the lease together — at Gay Street, we’d decided to leave my credit history out of the equation (thanks to some medical stuff, my credit card history is tragic) and I paid his mother by working for her real estate business — helping complete/file paperwork and maintain her social media and web presence. This eased my conscience, and D’s — we kept up this arrangement when we moved to Lorimer Street. As if to prove something to myself, I took on a higher volume of work, proportionate to the uptick in rent, after we moved to BK. This 3rd floor apartment was as charming as Gay Street, in its way — railroad style with a yellow kitchen, deep brown wooden floors, and a tin ceiling in the dining area. The bedroom was separated from D’s office by sliding glass doors, and a filled-in fireplace provided a mantle for books we wanted to showcase. No amenities — no air conditioning unit, no dishwasher, no microwave, and the bathroom was a tiny triangle, clearly added as an afterthought when the row-house was portioned into three apartments. My knees touched the door when I sat on the toilet, and in the summer, the air inside the narrow apartment had the texture of pudding.

Seventh Avenue between 23rd and 24th St, right smack in the middle of Chelsea, 11th floor, FREE, 3 months, 23–24 years old
After it became clear that no place we lived in together would feel real because our relationship would forever be stuck in the desert all serious relationships get mired in when they start too soon and last too long, I left in a cab, with a rolling suitcase and a duffel bag, when D was out of town for the weekend. My friend, who lived in a two-bedroom family-owned movie-fancy apartment in Chelsea, offered to let me stay in the unoccupied second bedroom until I found my own place. He was in and out of the city for the summer, and the apartment was going through renovations — I could earn my keep by cleaning it before decorators dropped by to take measurements and compare paint swatches by the light of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking, literally, all of Manhattan. Whatever, my friend said, in response to me asking over and over if he was sure it was okay. It’s not like anyone’s using it. I could go on and on about how nice this place was — THE GYM, THE ROOF, THE WASHER/DRYER, MY OWN PERSONAL BATHROOM, THE KITCHEN ISLAND WHERE I COOKED ALL THE THINGS — but perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate the unreality of the situation is to say that the building’s residents included Penelope Cruz, Bobby Flay, and Lance Bass. I will never in my life live in a place that nice again.

Jackson Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint Avenue, in Italian Williamsburg, $500/mo. (my share), 8 months, 24 years old.
Thanks to my friend, I had a little buffer time to find a new room — which was great, because I had very little buffer in my graduate student checking account, no longer supplemented by my part-time job working for my boyfriend’s mother. I doubled my hours as an office assistant for the graduate program where I was also a student, and started saving. My budget was no more than $600, maybe $700 a month. I preferred not to sign a lease. Though I’d taken strides toward healing my wounded credit score, it was nowhere in the ball park of NYC rental territory. I looked at so many places. One $600 room in Crown Heights was full of bikes (way more bikes than humans) and a weird milky smell and had a ferocious dog that sprang out of a closet and tried to attack me when I was checking out the “extra storage.” An $800 room was the size of a twin bed, and the 2nd Avenue East Village location didn’t make up for the fact that literally everything about 2br place (probably, I swear, no bigger than 250 sq ft TOTAL) was weird — most especially the roommate, who wouldn’t stop stretching. Desperate, I considered answering an ad advertising a room near the LaGuardia airport, for $450 a month. This can only be temporary for anyone, explained the Craigslist post. Then, in a stroke of fortune so good it almost makes me believe in horoscopes, a call for a roommate was posted on my graduate program’s list serv. Tiny room, lots of natural light. $500 a month. It’s so cheap because it’s outside the main apartment, on the landing, with it’s own lock. I went to see it and was sold — the room was again, twin-sized bed small, but the apartment was airy and quirkily decorated, and the girls living there were smart and funny — the kind of people I’d imagined becoming friends with, all those years ago when I pictured my life in New York City. A couple times I locked my keys in the main apartment and had to wait to go to the bathroom for inhumanely long periods of time. Other than that, it was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time.

Jackson Street between Humboldt and Woodpoint Avenue, in Italian Williamsburg. $580 (my share), 10 months, 25 years old
One of my roommates moved out and I was in! Like, literally inside! I took over the baby room near the kitchen, about the same size as the black sheep bedroom in the hall that I’d previously occupied, except this new room had lots of built in closet space and a lofted bed, so I was able to fit a tiny desk (the kind they have in elementary schools) against the wall. The long window spied on our rage-addled Polish neighbor’s equally cranky Pitbull. I slept inches from the ceiling, where all the apartment’s cooking smells accumulated no matter how I tried to air it out. It smells like Italian food, the guy I was then dating said during one failed attempt at a sharing the tiny lofted space — he wound up sleeping on the couch.

Stuyvesant Oval, Stuyvesant Town, East Village, $800/mo., 3 months (and counting!), 25 years old
I fell in love with the guy with the sensitive nose, and when his roommate broke his lease early, I decided to do what worked out so horribly for me the first time, again: Move in with my boyfriend. Here’s the thing. When it works, it works — I hate those girls who say all dreamy-eyed, when you know you know, but if there’s anything I learned from the fiery explosion that was the end of my first serious relationship, it’s how to identify the opposite. In general, I had no interest in moving to Stuyvesant Town. My voyages from apartment to apartment, up and down the length of Manhattan, had, at some point, and almost without me noticing, turned me into a New Yorker — the kind of New Yorker who doesn’t believe Stuytown, with its lush summertime trees casting DAPPLED light all over the sidewalks like some kind of suburban wet dream, is a real city neighborhood. Agree with me or not — Soul Asylum is playing a private concert in the Oval in the coming weeks. That’s not New York, folks. (Then again, that’s precisely New York for countless people.) But my boyfriend’s been living in his place for a long time — since he moved to the city years and years ago, and unlike me — he’s attached. It’s not just an apartment anymore. It’s his home. I’ve grown fond of the separate kitchen, the noisy air conditioner, how quiet it is outside at night. And it’s really, truly rent stabilized. During the recent Stuytown rent hikes, I held my breath for two days, terrified that our rent would be jacked up too, and that we would have to leave. I’ve always had to leave. But this time this home, this life, feels real — it feels like mine.

Julie Buntin lives in New York.

Have you lived in some places? Tell us about them! PICK ONE: logan@thebillfold.com OR mike@thebillfold.com

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