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