• Home
  • Archive
  • About
  • Awards & Media
  • Contact
    • Facebook
    • Pinterest
    • Twitter

Courting Destiny

  • Courting Classics
  • Fiction
  • Mainstream Media
  • New York Stories
  • My Parents
  • Mental Health
  • N. Myrtle Beach

Sign Up For My Weekly Newsletter!

Winner takes all: New York in 2006

November 26, 2006 By pia

I have a post up at Blog Critics as I need a home for issues.

Monika is this weeks guest at My Music Highway Project. She picked a great song. I feel strongly about this project for two reasons: I adore Shayna, and dare anybody not to, and I love music. It can unite us.

This week is action packed and filled with very exciting events that aren’t worth mentioning here. I have been taking pictures. Don’t expect any of Christmas trees as I would rather take pictures of holiday things found in unexpected places. I was at Penn Station today. The first train I saw mentioned was The Silver Meter that goes to Miami. I first took a train with that name when I was eighteen months old, and my mother and I were going to winter in Miami Beach. We never did that again, but it sounds so grand. We stayed in a very cheap hotel in South Beach called The Waves. I was too big a distraction for my father and it was tax season.

I had a deep desire to get on that train. Then I saw a train to Boston, then one to DC, then….I almost bought a ticket for any destination. But I did the responsible thing and took the train to the train to Newark airport to pick somebody up.

I realized that I’m suffering from wanderlust or a deep desire to be irresponsible and to travel anywhere. For a few minutes I dreamed of taking trains everywhere in America. At the airport I wanted to get onto a plane to London. Then Zurich. When Warsaw seemed exciting, I realized that I have an insatiable desire to go anywhere.

This post doesn’t mean that I’m leaving. New York worked its magic on me many years ago. It takes me a long long time to make a decision like this since I do have to sell my apartment, and the majority of my close friends and family are here.

I feel very at home in New York in a way that I know I will never feel anywhere else. However there are quality of life issues, and New York’s a hard place to be in 24/7. Had I bought a summer home when I bought my apartment–couldn’t have, the coop board doesn’t allow you to buy another home the first year-in the two years to five years after that I might feel very different.

But I had an elderly mother, and my attention was focused on her and other family matters. Then after my Mom died, I was totally screwed up. I realize now that my reaction was healthy. That to mourn for my own mother was more important for me than to mourn for strangers who died in the attacks.

Thanks to bloggers I have been able to work through my grief, and don’t even remember how it feels anymore as I don’t remember how horrible pain feels afterward.

There are no people in the world like real New Yorker’s. Opinionated, brash, funny and caring. But so many have moved.

There’s a statute of Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden at The Port Authority. I decided yesterday that there should be a statue of Larry David on the center mall on Broadway. Most of his lines are so brilliantly New York, my uh very smart friend Lucia assumed that they had been in the lexicon forever. He lives in California but is a very real New Yorker.

I guess most people would want a statue of Jerry Seinfeld who does live in The Beresford on Central Park West where I rejected an apartment that was much larger than this one, cheaper, and in need of much more work. I didn’t look at real estate strictly as an investment but as a place that I wanted to live in.

It’s probably worth twice as much as mine now, but it didn’t have the light or the views and that is priceless to me. Oh, I don’t think Seinfeld should be the statute because David wrote the words, but maybe Seinfeld in the puffy white shirt…..

The info in the following articles does make leaving harder rather than easier because if I don’t sell my apartment, I would have to find a tenant willing to go through the board and to pay at least $2,500 a month for a small apartment. If I sold it, I don’t know if I could ever afford to move back if I wanted to.

The New York Times had several interesting articles about New York this weekend. Actually they were very depressing.

Our city used to be a multi-industry town. Now our economy is all Wall Street all the time. And while the average salary is $8,300 a week, it’s about to layoff employees.

But yes I said “average $8,300 a week, and they all seem to live in my building, or in da hood. Obviously “average” isn’t a precise term, and most people on Wall Street make considerably less because a gilded few make so much, but Wall Street is about to lay off employees.

So the job growth is in non-lucrative service industries, and where are people supposed to live? Though coop and condo prices are falling, the average apartment though not mine, goes for over a mil.

I bought my apartment nine years ago, when there were only seven condo’s on The Upper West Side, and I disliked them all. Last night I thought about the nine references my coop board required: three career; three professional, I used my accountant and two brokers, three personal; fortunately I have many friends in da hood. Lucia’s made me cry it was so beautiful. But nine references to show that I’m not dead wood. Even then I was amazed that I could get the references.

I would never buy a coop or shares in the coop’s corporation again. Living with a coop’s rules is like living in a very luxe dorm.

I was in the fortunate position of being able to pay cash as I bought my apartment just before the country went real estate crazy. While many people would have gotten a mortgage, I didn’t trust the stock market and wanted to ensure that I would always have a home. My ohmigod I’m going to be bag lady scenario. I know that I’m not alone in that fantasy.

However it still makes more economic sense to buy, then to rent a market rate apartment which most are as when people move, the landlord does a landlord renovation and rents the apartment for a small fortune. If you want to rent a $2,00 studio, well here—

That means that if you want to rent a studio for $2,000 a month, you need to earn $80,000 to $90,000 a year (much higher figures, by the way, than the 36 times the monthly rent required in the rest of the country).

The next time I’m in Santa Monica, I’m going to Von’s and do a phone podcast with Lucia in Fairway, our cheap supermarket. The differences are amazing.

Today was an incredible day. Lucia and I walked on Riverside to about 110th, and there wasn’t any other place in the world that I wanted to be. I took many pictures that I have to sort through.

I understand that many people want New York to be a romantic fantasy, and I wish it were the way Nora Ephron makes it look in film.

I prefer writing about New York in the 70’s and 80’s because it had a wonderful edge, and you could live here and be a not very highly paid person in the arts.

Most mom and pop stores left my part of da hood years ago, and they’re leaving the 100’s which is the romantic, great neighborhood restaurant, ambience, charm part of the Upper West Side. I go there whenever possible.

It’s an easy less crowded walk and I can pretend that this is my New York.

Really I just need to make some changes and shake my life up

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

« The sun came out
Net, lock, flipped: an exercise in fiction; three word Wednesday »

Comments

  1. Sar says

    November 26, 2006 at 9:24 pm

    Are you kidding me?!?! You ARE New York City!

    Wanted to wish you a belated Happy Thanksgiving and mention I *high fived* you for your comment at WA this weekend.

    You rock.

  2. Shayna says

    November 26, 2006 at 11:17 pm

    I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!!! So are you leaving New York and moving to Santa Monica… I know you had thought about it before! 🙂

  3. Doug says

    November 27, 2006 at 8:02 am

    Santa Monica has it’s gilded few to. The guy filling your bag at Von’s? $2,900/wk on average.

  4. jacob says

    November 27, 2006 at 12:06 pm

    I bet you are NY, but you could just as easily be Santa Monica.

    I would choose Larry David too, never loved Seinfield.

  5. G says

    November 27, 2006 at 3:41 pm

    A Larry David statue gets my vote. We were quoting from Curb Your Enthusiasm over Thanksgiving.

  6. Elvira Black says

    November 27, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    Pia, thanks for visiting my blog, and it’s good to meet another fellow BC’er too. I’ve been reading through some of your archives, and I’m fascinated, though you do seem a bit mysterious. I’m so curious to know why you plan to leave NY, especially since you seem to love it so. I do know that it’s not the same town it was back in the day, though a lot of it has changed for the better–but perhaps in some ways for the worse. Somehow whenever a fellow New Yorker opts to leave, it makes me sad.

    I’d love to e-mail you, but I can’t access your address. In any case, I wish you luck in selling or subletting your place!

  7. Miz BoheMia says

    November 28, 2006 at 3:44 am

    Action packed with events not worth mentioning? I am intrigued!

    And I wanna see the pics!

  8. cooper says

    November 29, 2006 at 12:36 am

    I’m with sar on this one.

    I will have to go over and check out the BC article. I seem to be late on most things these days.

Trackbacks

  1. Rightwing Guy says:
    November 27, 2006 at 12:02 pm

    Freedom Is Not Free

    Most Americans take it for granted everyday and millions of people around the world yearn for it, but is fighting for the freedom of others worth the money, the blood and the tears? I think so.

Search for your favorite post!

Follow Me!

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Sign up Now!

Sign up now and get my latest posts delivered right to your inbox!

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.

Categories

Archives

All material contained herewith is owned by Pia Savage, LLC

Copyright © 2021 Courting Destiny · Designed by Technology-Therapist