New York City can depend greatly on where you live. It affects where you eat, what bars you frequent, even who you date. As ridiculous as it sounds, I've based my decision to not date someone when I found out she lived in Harlem while I was in Park Slope. I did date a girl with whom it took three trains to get to her apartment, and they weren't connecting trains. I can't think of anything that was a bigger pain in my life at that time (the commute, not the girl).
After living in New York for almost six years, I've definitely experienced a wide range of this city. It seems easiest to sum up the chapters of my New York experience with which neighborhood I resided in.
My first New York abode was in the East Village. It will also most likely be my last in Manhattan unless I become rich and/or famous.
It was the most appropriate area I can think of to fully immerse myself in the new metropolis. I can vividly recall walking down 1st Avenue thinking it was so far and foreign from the 8th Avenue area that I was more familiar with. In retrospect, it was really as if I had been placed in the heart of all the action.
I worked, slept and played within a one mile radius, which blew my mind. "Played" is a loose term since I was also cripplingly poor at this time.
They say that New York is an expensive place to live and I found that to be 100% true. It didn't help that I had a low paying job and had to periodically support my girlfriend/roommate who was in school so had zero income.
The apartment itself was a rude wakeup call that I wasn't in Texas anymore. Listed as a two-bedroom, it was in actuality a one-bedroom with a wall put up around the living room. The result was an awkward and claustrophobic layout of tiny rooms and cramped hallways.
For $2,000 per month, it was a far cry from my house in Austin which was a third of the cost.
Moving in and unpacking was like playing a large version of Jenga. Displacing one box didn't free up any space but rather created a more haphazard arrangement that threatened to collapse and bury you at any moment.
This theme of shifting objects for valuable room played itself out again during cooking. Preparing a meal required chopping an ingredient, stacking it on top of other ingredients and cleaning off the area to allow room to move on to the next step.
This was because the kitchen was little more than a wall in the hallway with a mini stove and an under-the-counter dorm fridge. Yeah that's right, two grown-up post-graduate adults relying on one dorm fridge. You couldn't fit a liter container of milk, and nothing in the freezer section would ever completely freeze. Yet anything on the top shelf of the fridge section would ice over.
The city seemed to be actively against cooking at home. The kitchen was a joke, the local grocery stores overcharged for ludicrously low quality food, and there were restaurants lining every street that literally had employees stand on the sidewalk to beg you to go inside to eat.
But being financially strapped meant that eating out was never an option. In the long run, this was actually a blessing since it forced me to learn how to cook. I was too poor to go out often and couldn't afford cable, yet my TV got the Food Network reception so I spent a lot of time watching their shows.
All the New York apartment stereotypes rang true for me. The space was abysmally small, the super was an old curmudgeon who never missed an opportunity to yell at me, and it was impossible to ignore the neighbors. I saw them naked, they saw me naked, I heard their activities, they probably heard mine.
I didn't actually see the apartment before I signed the lease. I was looking for a job and my girlfriend was in charge of the apartment hunt. She proclaimed it a dump upon first sight, saying that she couldn't even see the floor due to all the trash strewn about. But we were desperate and had limited options. Since we had previous lost out on an apartment because we waited to decide, we realized that landing a lease in the city was more of a mad dash with no room for deliberation. And it was still a fight to get the place. I had to ask my parents to sign on as guarantors. Not the most auspicious beginning for an aspiring, independent New Yorker.
To this day I don't know anyone who's lived in more of a shithole. Everyone who walked into my place was horrified, as if they'd stumbled onto a murder scene.
And the garbage. Good lord, the garbage. Every night, trash bags blockaded the entire street. So frequently did I walk along and get startled by a rat underfoot that I learned to stomp as I walked to my place in order to warn the rats of my coming.
Even today, I consider the East Village one of the dirtiest areas of the city. When I walk through the area now, there's a nostalgic charm I feel. But I know full well that dwelling within it was not a pleasant experience.
Despite this, I endured. Partly because there was no other choice and partly because the city was still new and wondrous. Everything was a new experience. I accepted anything good or bad as simply the way it was in New York.
And I never lost sight of the fact that as tough as it ever got, there were many people out there that had it worse. I was young, educated, and hard-working. I never truly feared for my survival.
I see that first year and that first apartment as a trial by fire. As if New York was testing me for toughness. I knew it wasn't personal. New York is not an easy place to be. As many people who make it their home, I'm sure there are just as many who high-tail it out of here, balked or defeated.
It was then that I knew I wouldn't let New York defeat me. If and when I leave this city, it will be on my own terms.
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