rent

i will warn you right now that the next few posts will be filled with ridiculous details of our foray into the world of apartment hunting. if you're not someone who has rented an apartment in new york, these entries may be too upsetting, may even overwhelm you to the point you find yourself crouched in a dark room, rocking silently, tears streaming down your face. you have been warned. read on if you must.

our incredibly responsible landlord has decided to sell the jalopy of an old victorian house we live in. he lives here, too, and there's an older couple living on the second floor, living there since the seventies. i asked the landlord about this during the great fridge debacle of '09, asked him to let us know if he went into contract so we could start looking for a place to live. and he said, in exact words, these words: we haven't even had anyone looking. i'll be sure to let you know, though. nice, we thought. thanks, landlord, we thought. and we thought this right up until the point when, two days later, i walked into the entryway and found a fancy document for us and another for the sweet folks upstairs. a notice to vacate. hmmm. dated the week before. my, that's classy. nice, we thought. thanks, landlord, we thought.

so the sweetie and i set out to look for a new place to live. it turns out if you live somewhere for ten years or maybe a little more than that, you sort of lose touch with what things cost. sort of like when i was in high school and we went back to school shopping and my mom told me not to tell dad how much my fancy new wal-mart jeans cost. because dad thought jeans cost five bucks. so we learned that apartments that cost what ours cost tend to be in places where people like to shoot guns at other people more than i like to. a lot more. so we scaled up. more dollars a month up than i thought it was right to ask of people. and we found that we could move away from gunshots and toward poorly maintained things called "two bedroom".

let me explain to you what a two bedroom apartment in brooklyn has in it. first, go look at the closet in the smallest bedroom in your house. go stand inside it. pretend you are brushing your teeth. pretend you are taking a shower. this closet you're standing in is probably a few square feet larger than a bathroom in one of these apartments. now, if you can get yourself out of that closet and go to, say, a closet about three square feet larger, and if you can shove a thirty year old stove (in a "newly remodeled one", shove a factory second stove with three burners or something equally off) and two cabinets in there, then you've got a pretty representative kitchen. then there's a bedroom. if an ad says "box bedroom" what it means is you can't fit a queen bed in the room. not because it will be too crowded. because a queen bed is actually larger than the dimensions of the room. i'm not making this up. i asked. and then the second bedroom, that magnificent item that can kick a rent price up to dizzying heights is usually strangely situated, often off the first bedroom, shotgun style. it is also usually a four by six closet. you might want to add to that the incredible stairwells leading to these places. you know how those naturalist novels of the turn of the century described stairwells in tenements? they used words like stench and fetid and cabbage. they used foul soup. the stairwells we wandered through, built around the time these novels, novels like maggie, girl of the streets were written, managed to hang onto the stench that has evidently been clinging to them for the past hundred years. two bedroom was clearly out of our range.

but after a while searching, dealing with all sorts of ugliness, we found a place we liked. very small. very, very small. but with a landlord who clearly understood that refrigerators are meant to be running and bathrooms are not meant to be painted with whipped cream textured walls. a landlord who believes that there should be lights in the stairwells and that the stairs themselves should be sturdy enough to bear the weight of people. a landlord who is not likely to repair a hole in the ceiling by screwing a slab of metal over the hole. and we looked around outside. half a block to the prettiest city park in the entire country. another half the other way to a train. two blocks to our favorite diner. three to the vet. a co-op, four bookstores, a farm market, flea market, movie theater and dub pies all walking distance. if you don't know about dub pies, that's a whole other story. well, we liked what we saw and decided to go for it. and that's when we entered a dickensian world of paperwork and doublespeak. the world of realty. stay tuned.