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Doesn't seem possible

August 31, 2004 By pia

The sun’s setting over the Pacific. It’s shades of pink mixed with some yellow and a blue but not too blue sky.

So peaceful; so satisfying. Hard to believe that just yesterday morning I was debating going home so that I could be part of the streets of New York.

If it weren’t for my friends (who are my family) I wouldn’t ever go back again. Oh yes I forgot for a second, I have responsibilities at home. I even own a coop and somehow think that the coop board won’t let me sublet it just because I want to try living somewhere else.

When I was a kid we lived in a true coop where we paid $200 to move in and got the $200 when we moved out. We had the first coop credit union in the country, (my dad started it) and lived in a total wonderful CinemaScope image called the 1950’s, and pre-1963 when we moved and the world changed. I thought my life in the garden apartments was perfect; but I was just eleven and secure in my family’s love, and the love and friendship of our neighbors. Now those post-war flimsily constructed (it’s nice outside, get out) apartments sell for $250,000 and more.

My six hundred square foot coop on Riverside Drive in the 70’s is worth a small fortune. Our coop is more an exercise in Fascism than cooperative living and we have rules for everything.

Oh well, I’ll think about it when I get home on the day before 9/11–I’m not scared of flying on that day; I just like to be in New York then. It’s a city solidarity day.

Since I’m rambling–my coop board rejects people for the flimsiest of reasons. They only let me in because I had cash, good credit, good manners, was funny and articulate. I had been on vacation with a then soap star and his family. He had originally been rejected from his coop because he was an actor; then he was its president.

He’d shoot me every conceivable question, and I’d come up with an answer. Then we’d spend hours dissecting the answer. (He’s used to that; his wife is even more obsessive/compulsive than I am if that’s possible.)

The night before the board meeting my goddaughter had she ever been baptized was visiting a friend in the building on West End across from the building that I hoped to move into. I looked out the window and saw the apartment that had to be mine. When we left the apartment, Little Luce walked around my new building and touched it for luck. Little Luce is my lucky star.

The coop interview was the fastest ten minutes of my life. My apartment’s worth at least two and half to four times what I paid for it in 1997. But I’m always aware that should another terrorist attack occur it could be worthless. Honestly I don’t understand why people want to spend so much money on apartments when they could be incinerated tomorrow. But I seem to be unique in my thinking.

I do love New York. It just might be the love of my life.

Filed Under: New York Stories Tagged With: New York Stories

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About Me

I live in the South, not South Florida, a few blocks from the ocean, and two blocks from the main street. It's called Main Street. Amazes me too.

I'm from New York. I mostly lived in the Mid-Upper East Side, and the heart of the Upper West Side. It amazes me when people talk about how scared they were of Times Square in the 1970's and 1980's.

As my mother said: "know the streets, look out and you'll be fine."

What was scary was the invasion of the crack dens into "good buildings in good 'hoods." And the greedy landlords who did everything they could to get good tenants out of buildings.

I'm a Long Island girl, and proud of it now.
Then I hated everything about the suburbs. Yet somehow I lived in a few great Long Island Sound towns after high school.

Go to archives "August 2004" if you want to begin with the first posts.

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