Scenes from a Manhattan Apartment Hunt

No, we aren’t looking to move! But I was flipping through a book in which I kept notes about my apartment hunt in 2005. I had 54 apartments on my list and looked at 30 of them – yep, 30 different one room apartments at the bottom of the market on the Upper East Side. Here are a few notes from that experience – I’ve substituted “#” for the street numbers.

9/5/2005 ### East 95th: Scummy.

9/12/2005 ### East 89th St. Apt 2D: Big but serious fixer upper.

9/12/2005 ### East 90th. Apt 1B: Garden access meant crawl through window onto someone else’s patio. The agent thought they wouldn’t mind.

9/12/2005 ### East 75th. Apt 3D: Kitchen cabinet door fell off in my face.

9/13/2005 ### East 78th Street Apt. 2: Window opened on a brick wall.

9/20/2005 ### East 90th Street Apt. 3A: Dumpy building again. 80s kitchen, small bath.

 

By Jacob Riis (How the other Half Lives (1890) [1]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

About Becky Fifield

Becky Fifield is a cultural heritage professional with 25 years experience in institutions large and small. She is currently Head of Collection Management for the Special Collections of the New York Public Library. An advocate for preventive conservation, Ms. Fifield is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation, Chair of the AIC Collection Care Network, and former Chair of Alliance for Response NYC. She is also a scholar of 18th century female unfree labor and dress. There's a bit of pun in the title The Still Room, delineating a quiet space brimming with the ingredients of memory, where consideration, analysis, and wordcraft can take place. Ms. Fifield’s interests include museum practice, dress history, historic preservation, transit, social and women’s history, food, current events, geneaology, roadtrips, and considerations on general sense of place. Becky and her husband, Dr. V, live in the Hudson Valley.

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