It’s a hurry-and-wait, hurry-and-wait sorta day in my cubicle today, and list-making is an easy way to offer content without having to go off and actually have adventures to write about.
Places I’ve Lived
- North Railroad Avenue (1970–1990): The house in Staten Island where I grew up with my folks, my three brothers, two sisters, and eventually an assortment of their spouses and children. It was originally a 2-story, 2-family home bult by my contractor uncle who built it sold it to my parents after their landlord suggested that a two-bedroom apartment might not be the best place for them and their four kids, not to mention the one gestating in my mother’s womb. Seeing as I had a pretty bucolic childhood (for New York City) and spent all of it here, I’ve always been very attached to this house, and was pretty weirded out when my parents sold it a few years ago and moved to Florida. I still have the key to the front door.
- Sleeper Hall, West Campus (1988–1989): West Campus is three identical cinderblock boxes arranged around B.U.’s football field. If you’ve ever taken the Massachusetts Turnpike into downtown Boston, you’ve seen it. John Fox (another art-scholarship student) and I lived on the thirteenth floor, at the end of a hallway filled with jocks who practiced their pitching by throwing apples at the storage-closet door next to our room.
- Boyd Hall (1989–1990): Zubby pulled me in to share his fantastically huge room in a turn-of-the-century brownstone reserved for people in our scholarship program. (Peter Paige lived there the year before I did.) Since we were a neurotic, over-achieving lot, Boyd Hall was High Drama at all times. Still, I had bay windows, a mantle, and 11-foot ceilings in my dorm room, which was nice.
- Kegremont (1990–1991): My first off-campus apartment was closer to B.C. than B.U., so we were far from any of our friends but close to dozens of hard-drinking frat boys. Our street was Egremont Road, but we could see that the boys upstairs (who had a party every other weekend, and a wet bar instead of a kitchen table) had hung the street sign above their mantle and put a “K” at the start of the name. Perfection. My bedroom was in an enclosed porch over the parking lot, so most Friday nights I was lulled to sleep by the sound of guys pissing against a wall below me.
- Brighton Ave. (1991–1992): Apartment in a neighborhood near B.U. that was effectively the off-campus dorms, where kids moved so they could escape any supervision but still walk to class. A student slum, but much easier to get back to if you ever stayed out after the T stopped running.
- Wenham Street (1992–1995): After graduation, Zubby, Matt, Dani, and I discovered Jamaica Plain, a fantastic Boston neighborhood that had been totally off our radar until that point. We scored an incredible 2-story, 9-room apartment for $950 bucks a month. The landlord a mellow tree surgeon who lived across the street agreed to pay for a lot of badly needed renovation as long as we did the actual work. So we painted every wall, redid most of the kitchen, and had our first adult-type apartment. Miki and Brin did the same thing a few blocks away, so we had an instant neighborhood vibe. Over the course of our few years there we had lots of people come and go, and to the best of my knowledge the same lease kept changing hands for at least another four years after the original four of us had left.
- Tremont Street (1995–1996): While shopping around for a place to live with my boyfriend at the time who had moved into Wenham St. with us for a while I had an epiphany about how ill-suited we actually were for one another. Since I was in better financial shape, I moved out and found a sweet little garret studio in the gay, gay, gay South End. This was the smallest place I’ve ever had, but it had a great view and a teeny little balcony outside the drafty bay windows. I also had a hot architect move in next door, who provided distraction after my next horrendous break-up.
- Palmetto Street (1996–1997): When I moved back to New York, Mark and I scored an incredible 4,000-square-foot loft in Bushwick for a mere $1,500 a month. It was the place everyone fantasizes about when they imagine living in New York, before they realize that regular people can only afford to live like that if they go as far away as Bushwick. We had enough space to play whiffleball or ride bikes inside, which we did from time to time. There were many ridiculously dramatic aspects to the whole deal that made it all too ghetto for us to handle for more than a year or so, but it kind of rocked, too.
- Clermont Ave. #1 (1997–1998): After Mark and I beat a hasty retreat from our crooked overtenant in Bushwick we found an apartment for each of us in a little old building on the sketchy side of Fort Greene. It was nice to be alone for a change while having a good friend live just upstairs. The owner/super lived next door, and he was a terrible repairman, so we lived in fear of things deteriorating worse than they already had. I often called the building “The Slanty Shanty.”
- Clermont Ave. #2 (1998–1999): My second year in Fort Greene, I turned my apartment over to Mark and moved upstairs to an apartment that was the same size, but set up as a 2-bedroom instead of a 1-bedroom, because I wanted to make a little love nest for what would prove to be an ill-conceived reunion with the guy from the horrendous break-up of the Tremont Street apartment in Boston. He still owes me a few months rent that I don’t expect to ever see again.
- The Swanktuary (1999–2003): after a couple of years in Fort Greene, I was jonesing to get back to loft living. I scored a cool (literally) basement loft in scenic East Williamsburg (which ain’t Bushwick, it’s only next to Bushwick), which became the de facto NYC B&B for scores or visiting and wayward bloggers over the years. There’s a lot to read about the Swanktuary in this site’s archives, but now it’s in the custody of Glenn, Charlie, and Michael.
