i blogged a long time ago about "the hunt", one of my favorite columns in the NYtimes. the most recent one features a girl (umich grad! woot!) who's looking for a 1-bedroom apartment in which she could create a second bedroom by building a wall. sounds pretty good. then the usual folly ensues, where we discover people's hidden prejudices and sheer stupidity.i highlight only the best quotes:
A wall divided the living room, creating a third bedroom. The guys were investment bankers, “and were making way more money” than she and the friends she was planning to live with earned, Ms. Stephens said. (Two-bedrooms in Stuyvesant Town start at $4,025.) The wall was so nicely installed it looked like “part of the original structure," she said.
It was on to Brooklyn. “Every place I looked, I looked because people had told me about it,” Ms. Stephens said. “It was all hearsay: So-and-so is living in this neighborhood; you should look there. I guess we were looking in Park Slope. We didn’t know much about Brooklyn.” But it felt far away, and nothing there seemed worth the price.
[Ed note: these girls were willing to spend nearly $2,500 for a 1-bedroom. What were they looking at?!]
Ms. Stephens had Stuyvesant Town in the back of her mind. Now that she was certain she had a roommate, they could afford a one-bedroom. With a wall, of course. Ms. Pakfar wasn’t sure what Stuyvesant Town was. “I had seen it in a cab going down the F.D.R., and I always thought it was projects,” she said.
Both are happy in their new home. “It feels very grown up and clean,” Ms. Stephens said. Some of her colleagues and former sorority sisters also live in Stuyvesant Town, so “I have neighbors I know, which is nice when you are moving away from home.”[Note to self: don't go to Stuy-town]
4 comments:
I'm honestly perplexed by Manhattanites like this. There are parts of the Island that are so remote that living there cannot be justified by the mere presence of "New York, NY" in your postal address alone: the eastern reaches of Stuy Town and Yorkville come to mind.
As a former resident of the latter, I can attest to the misery of the five-avenue long walk home from the 86th Street 6. How, then, is it that these people can get away with saying things about Brooklyn like "it felt far away." If you live next to the F-train in Park Slope, you're more centrally located than if you live on 14th and FDR. What gives? Oh, yeah, these people don't believe in the subway. Thank you, Sarah Jessica Parker, you sack of shit.
I hadn't randomly ranted about New York living in a while. Thanks, E, for the opportunity.
i would also like to point out the fact that these girls' parents subsidize their rents yet one of them was taking a cab down FDR.
well, the L train is right by stuy-town, not to mention a lovely strip mall featuring not only a citibank but a footlocker. let's see brooklyn beat THAT.
What? The L-train is some sort of urban apocrypha, not unlike Canarsie, its alleged terminus.
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