remembering life through the apartments i've lived in

In about a month I will move into my first home.  I started looking just before the lockdown and the process was pretty painless - although finding a home I could afford in Brooklyn NY where I now live, or anywhere in New York was painful.  It's unfortunate really, because I'm a New Yorker.  Even though I've lived other places, New York is the place I've always felt most connected and when I leave, I'm always happy to come home to the sense of life that is always evident here.

 

It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday (click)

But in just a few weeks I will pack up my belongings, the husband and the young people, and head across the river to New Jersey.  And the anticipation has had me reminiscing about all the apartments I've ever had, and as I contemplated, I realized that the places I've lived can paint a picture of my life, allowing me a sometimes hard to find perspective about how far I've come and what I've accomplished. 

True New Yorkers know about basement apartments.  It's usually a young person's first place to call their own.  Usually, if your parents owned a home, when you came of age, you'd be allowed to move to the basement where you'd be afforded the privacy of a separate entrance and the space to live somewhat independently.  And if you had to move away to get the privacy you craved, you'd likely find your first apartment in someone's basement and you'd feel quite lucky. 

I've lived in six basement apartments throughout my life including one in my mother's house.  I was probably around nineteen when I moved into the first, a nice one bed in an affluent Queens neighborhood next door to the Coop where my best friend was renting a studio apartment. She was the only reason I wanted to live in that neighborhood.  We could hang out at each other's places whenever we wanted to and we would party until the early morning and both be home at the same time.  

Those days seem so far away now they were almost forgotten until I tried to remember my first apartment.  Then I also remembered the night of her twenty-first birthday party when neither of us could remember driving home and when we saw how the car was parked the next morning, we wondered how we made it home without incident.  

Then there was the first apartment I shared with a boyfriend in Queens Village. He was a barber and I worked as a bank teller and we were young and carefree.  Until we weren't.  Less than a year in, the relationship turned very sour with him going to jail for a few days and me eventually moving out a couple of months later.  

It's funny, when I think about that space it invokes a cold and empty feeling that I realize was always present there.  After that experience, I made radical changes to my life which brought me to Brooklyn where I've lived for the last twenty-seven years.  

    

I will always remember my first Brooklyn apartment , a third floor walk-up in a well-maintained brick building.  Crown Heights in the early nineties was very different than what I was accustomed to, but what I loved was the quick commute to the city where I worked for a temp agency during the day and at a bank in the evenings.  

I was only there a year when the landlord decided not to renew my lease.  I wasn't sure why but I did wonder if it was because he'd discovered that I'd painted the wood floor in my bedroom black.  Thinking back, that was nuts and I'm not sure I'd have been so calm if it was my home.  But it was my "black" phase as I recall and I was in love with the color.  Everything always seemed better in black.  It was also the time I fell in love with my life partner, started a retail business, began growing my locks, read everything I could find about everything, and wrote ferociously.  I had big dreams in that apartment, a cat, and no television.  It was the beginning of a delightful time where anything seemed possible.

Bed-Stuy today

After a short stint in a Brooklyn basement in Cypress Hills - which I shared with the owner's daughter who played Mary J's I'm Not Gon Cry on a loop (The movie Waiting to Exhale was out at the time) - I moved into what I now recognize as my favorite, a second floor walk-up in the heart of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.  

There, I became a vegetarian and practiced yoga and Tai-Chi on the roof; it was there I called home after a long day at the natural store I co-owned with my young love, and it was where I gave birth to my son in the middle of the night on the bathroom floor just the three of us because labor was a mere two hours and we didn't have time to call the mid-wife.  

As I stare out of the window from the desk in my second floor bedroom into the cloudy morning, I remember fondly that time of my life as electric and filled with the love and passion of youth.  Life there was courageous, scary, fun, difficult, and surreal.  I didn't realize it then but when we left that apartment in 2002 to move to Florida, it was also the beginning of the new Bed-Stuy that then Mayor Bloomberg encouraged and enabled to "revitalize" (read gentrify) the area.  

These days I don't get over to that side of Brooklyn often - and I definitely can't afford to live there - but when I do I always show my kids where my son was born and I always think about listening to live Jazz through the open window on a summer night from the cafe across the street which was also a den for serious activists who held Political Science classes in the back every Wednesday.  

Now that I think about it, that was probably the last time my young family was intact.  My son and I lived in Florida for two years but my partner got cold feet and although he supported us, he never actually made the move. 

  

Plantation, Florida

Our apartment in Plantation, South Florida was a newly renovated and gorgeous one bedroom with central air, an en-suite, and the living room opened out through beautiful french doors onto a glass enclosed balcony.  Even my hard to please mother was impressed.

With my background in banking, I easily found a job working at a Credit Union.  Life in Florida was nice.  My son went to Preschool for the first time practically next door to my workplace and we visited the beach as often as we could although I soon realized that when you live in a place, it's harder to enjoy the little things you love about it when you're just visiting.  

Anyhow, whilst we had family who lived close by, we missed the togetherness of our family so two years later we packed up and set off for home.  Truthfully though, moving back to Brooklyn and back into a basement apartment felt as if I was being propelled backwards, regressing, perhaps even making the wrong decision to return to New York.  As it turns out, it became a time of upheaval and uncertainty for our young family.  

We lived in that first apartment after moving back from Florida for about two years before we were evicted.  As it happens, unbeknownst to me, my partner stopped paying the landlord for several months to pursue a business opportunity with a woman he was also sleeping with while I was pregnant with our second child and working feverishly to complete the final year of my undergraduate studies.  

Still, I wouldn't know this until years later when we were living in the second basement after moving back.  The affair began just before my son and I returned and continued for five years of our sixteen year relationship before I even suspected he was cheating.  

It was the worst hurt I'd ever felt.  Even now - ten years later, nine years after he was tragically taken from our lives, and six years into a new marriage, tears still well up inside as I think back to those days of suffering and pain.  Those ten years of obstacles, transition, and overcoming in those two apartments I think were the hardest of my life.  

Today's second floor apartment in a two-family in East Flatbush isn't quite as electrifying as my favorite.  Life here is more predictable, I may even say settled which is not a bad place to be.  The neighborhood isn't beautiful but despite the noise, grime, and crazy ass downstairs neighbors, the wood floors, high ceilings, back porch and sky-lighted bathroom have provided much needed respite these last four years.  

This space has been the perfect representation of a time in my life that has been laser focused on work and progress and our new home is like the carrot at the end of the stick.  

We have become new people in this place that will likely be the last rented space I occupy.  We all have endured and matured and I know that even though it feels that way, it's probably not really the end of anything but rather the beginning of something that none of us has ever experienced.  A new chapter.  A revival of sorts.  And I definitely don't know why it all makes me think of this!