In winter of 1990, a couple of friends of mine and I decided to pile into my friend Tim's car to go visit Denison University, the college we'd only just graduated from the previous Spring. None of us having yet procured steady jobs at the time (not that any of us were exactly burning the midnight oil in pursuit of same, mind you), we felt that the moment was as right as any to go haunt our alma mater. Once we arrived, I remember strolling around the town -- Granville, Ohio -- and feeling a strange sense of disconnection. We came upon the former off-campus house of another friend of ours (who'd also since graduated). Apparently, in the ensuing months since our graduation, a fire had taken place. We stood there in the cold January air, incredulously looking up at the blackened, spindly remains of the comparatively stately two-story house our friend had rented. Each of us had our own memory of hours spent inside it. "It seems like only yesterday I was at a party there," my friend Steve solemnly said, pointing up to where the second floor had been. "I danced there -- I danced in what is now mid-air!" It was a sobering, sad little moment that summed up the entire trip for us. You can't go back.
Sixteen years later, I have those same feelings every time I walk down East 12th Street between Broadway and University Place and look up. In late September of 1996, I finally moved out of my long-suffering Mom's apartment on the Upper East Side and bought a place of my own, a loft at 39 East 12th Street. It was a bit out of my price range at the time, but when I first went to look at it, its vaulted, 14-foot ceilings and towering corinthian columns (one in the front of the apartment and another in the living room) convinced me that it would be worth the investment. I was entirely blown away. It was perfect.
I remember nervously fretting before the co-op board interview. I wore my best tie and talked up my job at the TIME Magazine news desk, hoping to create the impression that I was just the sort of responsible, up'n'coming young professional they'd want in their building. For the most part, they bought it. One of my interviewers, however, wasn't quite convinced. "You understand, Mr. Smith," she sniffed, peering over her glasses, "that our building is not a rock'n'roll hotel!" "Maybe now it's not, lady" I thought to myself, already planning my house-warming shindig. Her suspicions temporarily waylayed, I passed the co-op board interview with flying colors (weeks after I moved in, they invited me to actually join the co-op board, which I somewhat foolishly agreed to). I was in! The loft was mine!
Though essentially a studio (i.e. one room with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen), the apartment came with a free-standing "loft bed." When you walked in, it sort've looked like there was a giant dog house in the middle of the room. Upstairs (in the balcony-like "command center," as I came to call it), there was a platform for a queen-sized bed, room for a bureau, enough headroom for a tall fella like m'self to comfortably stand, and a handsome triangular bookshelf that provided some privacy from the front area (or "dining room"). Facing the other direction, the view from upstairs was not unlike a d.j. booth, overlooking the living room/dancefloor below. Underneath the loft bed, there was a crawl-in closet (summarily dubbed "the Crypt"). The previous occupant used it as her child's room (a child that invariably deals with a few issues today, I'd wager). It was perfect for storage.
Adjacent to the bathroom, there was a passage/tunnel from the front of the apartment into the living room. As living rooms go, it wasn't any great shakes, but the cathedralesque ceilings made the place seem vast. The bathroom was entirely standard. The kitchen was a tight, inefficient space, but being that I was only using it to store beer, it hardly mattered to me.
It wasn't all gravy, though. The walls were pretty thin (I was regularly treated at adverse hours to my next-door neighbor's inexplicable fondness for then-hip "drum'n'bass" music, although given my penchant for high volume Punk Rock and stentorian Heavy Metal, I'm sure I wasn't exactly a picnic to live next to either). Directly across the street at the time was a twenty-four hour pool hall called "Le Q," which seemingly catered exclusively to sleepless Hip Hoppers and Asian gang members (one night I once watched a massive gang initiation from the safety of my living room as at least thirty teenage gang members brutally swarmed on one hopeful newbie outside of Le Q, and beat the tar out of him in a coldly-calculated spectacle that was both fascinating and horrifying). Tricked-out jeeps with boomin' trunks-o'-funk would idle in front of Le Q in the wee hours, cranking rafter-shaking hip hop. Slang-shouting, self-styled thugs would loiter out front, swiggin' 40 ouncers and talkin' trash. Some nights, you'd never have known you were living in such an exclusive neighborhood.
There was also a weird mosquito problem. For some reason -- given that I never bothered finding screens to fit my lengthy windows, I was routinely beset upon by famished swarms of the tiny winged vampires. It was like sleeping in an Amazonian rain forest. It also got mighty warm upstairs during the Summer. Life without a fan up there was unthinkable. Many nights found me (and, later, my wife and I) camping out on the sofa downstairs.
But it was far and away the coolest place I've ever lived -- and probably ever will live. Early on, my apartment became the regular spot for my visiting comrades, most notably Rob, Tim and Ed. Ed -- who'd spent years crashing on my Mom's couch -- spent so much time at my place on 12th street that he repaid my hospitality with a television (well, in truth, given that he planned on continuing to ride the couch, he no longer could abide by the crappy little black'n'white piece of shit Zenith I'd appropriated from an ex-girl friend).
At the tail end of 1998, I met the woman who would become my wife at a Halloween party in Soho. We went out for two years before I popped the question, and we married in the Summer of 2001. Peggy moved into my loft, freeing her from the lengthy back'n'forth trek from her Upper West Side apartment. With Peggy came her staggering collection of literature, which fought tooth'n'nail for space on our shelves with my then-ever-expanding compact disc collection. In relatively short order, the loft filled up with a lot more stuff. While we loved the loft, we knew we were gradually outgrowing it. We actually toyed with the idea of trying to buy the loft next door and knocking a wall down, but that was financially impossible (and would have resulted in a strangely layed-out apartment). As much as we adored living in the space, we knew deep down that it was no place for a couple with a child. Being that having a child was squarely on the agenda, we started taking steps to look for another place, and we put my beloved loft up for sale.
While I knew that in order to move forward with our lives, we had to find a bigger, more practical space, I'd been hugely happy in the loft. I was entirely distraught at the thought of leaving it. I begrudginly welcomed a stream of potential buyers in and out of the apartment, grumbling not-so-quietly to myself as real estate agents pointed out my apartment's myriad finer points. Jennifer Lopez's entirely better-looking sister even came to look at it a couple of times, but ended up passing on it. At the same time, Peggy and I scoured Manhattan for a suitable new locale, looking at soulless deathtraps on the far east end of the Upper East Side (a neighborhood I'd only just left in `96) and squalid veal-fattening pens in drab midtown. Nothing was really coming together, and finding a buyer for the loft was becoming difficult enough in itself.
By a miraculous turn of fate, Peggy spotted a listing for an apartment in our price range in the same neighborhood just three blocks away. We acted swiftly. Roughly around the same time -- give or take a couple of highly tense months wherein I was paying two maintenances -- I managed to snag a buyer for the loft. In an attempt to save money, we did as much of the moving ourselves (being that it was only a three block trek). For weeks, I'd shuttle boxes of our belongings back and forth, getting entirely misty and moist-eyed every time I walked into the gradually emptying loft. I vivily remember my last visit to the space. All that was left in it was our sofa and my stereo -- both items that I was giving to the building's super. I remember playing an old mixtape on the stereo and sitting on my dusty couch in the otherwise empty space, thinking about all the events that had transpired in the six or so years I'd lived there. I knew I was going onto bigger and better things, but I left with a heavy heart.
The dude that bought it from me, I've heard, ended up inexplicably tearing down the eleveated loft bed, reducing the space to just a cavernous big room. I'll never understand that, but to each their own, I guess. Even though said loft had been built for someone else before I got there, I take some odd solace in the fact that it doesn't exist anymore. I've been back to the building since, but never to the apartment, which is probably a good thing. We've been living three blocks away from that place for a little over four years now, and my days in the loft now seem like they were from a lifetime ago. I'm exceptionally blessed and lucky now and haven't the complaint or regret about our current situation or our decision to move. But I'll always remember my days in that place.
As I've mentioned, my family is now perched precariously on the precipice of having to move again -- this time possibly out of Manhattan entirely. Given the spriraling costs of living in New York City, it's entirely conceivable that we might end up in Brooklyn or --- time to open a beer at the thought of it --- Westchester. While I'm resigned to the fact that I'm going to have to leave this great borough eventually, I'll always remember my time here fondly. And when I think back to living here -- probably when crammed elbow-to-elbow on some hellish MetroNorth commuter torture-train bound for Cracksmellawhack Heights -- I'll invariably think back to my days on 12th street. I'll think back to my time in the loft.
Recent Comments