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I saw this store window on Madison Avenue and was immediately struck by the size and, likely, weight of that necklace. I wondered what woman had neck muscles that could support something like that. I also wondered what woman would be able to wear something potentially that heavy on a warm NYC day (at the same time she is wearing the sleeveless dress). We may have been liberated from corsets but now we have jewelry.
I snapped the photo to keep track of it as a fashion absurdity.
It’s very easy to walk around New York (or anywhere else, for that matter) and be focused on the minutiae that preoccupies most of us, most of the time. Do I have to stop for groceries? Am I going to be late? Do I have what I need for this appointment? Will I have time to finish this or that thing I started?
All those preoccupations, I’m convinced, keep our eyes from being wide open to the countless interesting images we pass daily. That may be why we take the most interesting photographs when we’re on a vacation. We just slow down and are determined to look around and actually see things.
I am in an interregnum for work, of sorts, when most of my design supplies are packed up in storage. I may have done that on purpose so I could simply experience what it’s like to live in New York City as a tourist.
After I saw this store window, I went to MOMA to see both the Cindy Sherman show and a little show of photographs by Eugene Atget. The Sherman show was certainly provocative and did have me rethinking the stereotypical images of women I’d seen in the countless portraits and photographs in hospital lobbies, on magazine covers, movie posters, etc. Sherman has a keen eye, although, at one point, I thought the show reminded me of the Woody Allen move, “Zelig”. She, like he, was everywhere.
The Atget show, however, was a gem and, if you are reading this and in New York City, you should go see it before it closes on April 9th. His photographs, “documents pour artists”, were taken in and around Paris at the turn of the century and were best described by one reviewer as a “poetic transformation of the ordinary”. I’m including one of the Atget mannequin photographs here:
Like Atget, I do enjoy documenting the texture of the city. There’s simply so much to see in the mundane that we walk by every day.
The original 2nd bedroom was divided by the previous owners into two smaller bedrooms, for their young children, each of which was the odd size of 8′ x 16′. The long, thin rooms, cell-like if only in proportions, were helped by the fact that they each had a nice, large window overlooking the Hudson.
Second bedroom with dividing wall
Part of my plan was to take down that wall and reunite the two parts of that original one bedroom to be both a home office and a study/guest bedroom. It was a spatially satisfying reunification of the original floor plan, and a clear advantage to having grown children.
Schematic plan for new office/study
Second bedroom wall demolished
It promises to be an extremely nice improvement in a room where I hope to be able to design and write with inspiration from the continuously changing views of the river as the seasons, weather and times of day change. I haven’t yet seen it during a sunset, when I’m sure it’s just spectacular.
After demolition!
The contractor’s 3-man crew jumped right in, starting their demolition in the kitchen, where plans called for knocking down most of the wall which separates the kitchen from the adjacent maid’s room. The kitchen is narrow, almost galley-like, and expanding it to include the maid’s room will definitely give it (and me) more breathing room. It will have now two north-facing windows with open city views, and even a glimpse of the Hudson and the GW Bridge at certain strategic angles.
The primary piece of furniture in the breakfast room will be a lovely oak, drop-leaf table, c. 1870, that I purchased several months ago from a 2nd hand furniture shop in Hudson, NY. The table appealed to me for many reasons. It was in excellent condition, having been owned most recently, and refinished, by a widowed doctor in Rensselaer County, NY, according to the eccentric owner of the shop on Warren Street. At $250, with 6 leaves, it was also a real bargain. However, what I do with the 6 leaves in that little breakfast room remains to be seen.
The concept of a maid’s room is, of course, a throw back to a life style long past. We get glimpses of it now in segments of Downton Abbey in England but many of New York’s middle-and-upper-middle-class residents lived in these gracious Manhattan pre-war buildings in prior decades with staff. My apartment had one maid’s room but some very high end buildings in Manhattan had upwards of 3 and 4.
The plan below is not my apartment but it is one of many I looked at in the Photographs Collection on the 3rd floor of the Midtown Manhattan Public Library, another recent and extraordinary neighborhood find in my temporary stay in Murray Hill. They may be hard to see but the 3 small maid’s rooms are to the left of the semi-circular service stair in the back of the apartment; to the right is the butler’s bedroom.
Pre-war floor plan with 3 maid's and 1 butler's room for prewar apartment at 447 East 57th Street
As a new resident of the building, I was exquisitely sensitive to the noise issues of the renovation and several weeks before I had put notes under the doors of neighbors who the contractor thought would be most affected. The weekend before the demolition I also left little daffodil plants on each of 4 doormats of these most affected neighbors, with notes thanking people for their patience and promising an end to it all by the time the daffodils bloomed in Riverside Park in the spring. The contractor had also asked the super to contact those same neighbors so that one member of his crew could photograph the adjacent walls and ceilings to document any possible damage.
I received an email from the contractor’s right-hand man at the end of that first day saying all had gone fine and, with the exception of one complaint from a resident on the 8th floor about them making noise at 9:00 am, instead of 9:30 am, the time established by the building after which noisy construction work can begin, the sun set on Day 1.
Shopping bag art displayed in a window in Chelsea
Walking, unquestionably, helped ground me in the first phase of this transition from my prior 35 years residing in Brooklyn to being a new resident of Manhattan. During those first few weeks, and even now as I am approaching the 2nd month mark, I am walking to most places. My most ambitious walk so far has been back from my new apartment on the Upper West Side, after a meeting with the contractor, to my temporary digs in Murray Hill.
My most memorable walk occurred one morning as I went to the F train station adjacent to Bryant Park, on 42nd Street, and discovered “Library Way”, one block between Madison and Fifth Avenues. On that block, unremarkable in any way for land use, which consists of the usual New York City gritty mix of delis, manicure shops, entrances to worn mid-block commercial office buildings and the like, are these miraculous bronze plaques set into the sidewalk. The plaques, about 30″ x 40″ in size and spaced approximately every 8′ or so, offer inspirational quotes about reading, writing and literature from notable writers.
The plaques are not in pristine condition. Thousands and thousands of feet have walked over them, and even stopping to photograph them can be dangerous in the steady stream of pedestrian traffic on a typical rush hour morning in Midtown. Some old gum, now black, even soils one of the bronze doilies in the Dickinson quote. However, by the end of that one block walk, which, not coincidentally, terminates in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library across Fifth Avenue, the plaques had worked their magic and I felt almost buoyant. It was one of those experiences that affirmed my determination to treat this entire experience as one great adventure, filled with possible discoveries at every turn.
Bronze sidewalk plaque with Emily Dickinson quote
Floor plans
Anyone who has ever done a major renovation knows time is elastic. I closed on my coop in a prewar building on the Upper West Side on October 7th. I hired an excellent Brooklyn architect, who happened to be another woman of about my age, and a friend, who had done a number of coop renovations, and she began design work almost immediately. The design process was actually quite expeditious, helped by the fact that we have very similar design philosophies.
The plan was to remove the maid’s bathroom and enlarge the kitchen, install new cabinets and appliances, remove a wall that the prior owners had built in the second bedroom, run new electrical wiring throughout the apartment, put in a washer/dryer, paint and finish the floors. The architect told me the actual physical renovation would take about 3 months. What was uncertain was how long the coop board and the NYC Department of Buildings would take to approve the plans.
By the time I moved out of the Brooklyn brownstone and into my temporary rental apartment, the plans had been approved by the building’s architect, which was the first of the mandated approvals. That process took a solid 2 months. By the 2nd week of January, the plans had made it to the inbox of a plan examiner in the Manhattan Office of the DOB.
It took another three weeks for the Manhattan plan examiner at DOB to approve the plans and finally issue the building permit. All in, it took 3 months just to get the plans approved both by the building and the City DOB. I have been told by some veterans of Manhattan renovations that that is lightening fast.
The next square on the board was signing a contract with the general contractor. I chose the contractor primarily because he and the architect have worked amicably together in the past. It helped that his bid for the job was one of the lowest of the four we got. He also took us to see an apartment on which he had worked about 7 years ago, which held up extremely well. Both owners had only glowing remarks about him and his crew. They also told me, “how the entire building staff loved him”. Those are magical recommendations in Manhattan apartment buildings where renovation time is slowed or hastened by a cooperative building staff.
After the contract signing on February 9th, I had a starting date for the renovation– Wednesday, February 15th. Now, finally, there was progress for the actual 2-1/2 months the contractor said he would need to finish the work.
My physical move to the temporary apartment I rented in the East 30’s in Manhattan, while the apartment on the Upper Side was being renovated, took all of about 35 minutes to accomplish, as I drove a fully-loaded car across the Brooklyn Bridge, onto the FDR Drive and in mid-afternoon traffic on Third Avenue.
Third Avenue
Almost immediately I realized the delight of high rise living. I pulled up in front of the building and both the building security person (who doubles as a doorman) and the concierge, greeted me with a luggage cart which can roll onto an elevator. The 4 flights of stairs in my brownstone, which I walked up and down countless times each day, was fast fading into memory. I decided I would never take luggage carts for granted.
Luggage Cart (partially loaded with Brooklyn grapefruit and IKEA bag)
There are two extraordinary features of this 650 square foot 1-BR apartment. The first is its view, which is simply stunning if you like vistas of Midtown.
View From the Bedroom Window
The second is the combination washer/dyer, tucked away in a closet. What they lose in a size competition with my previous Brooklyn machines, located in the basement, these machines make up for with pure convenience. And convenience is certainly what this little apartment is about. I can get just about anywhere in about 15 steps. After the brownstone, I felt like Alice in Wonderland eating the other cookie.
The Washer Dryer!
My first afternoon in Manhattan was not without feelings of enormous dislocation and disorientation. I felt as if I was in a hotel but not on a business trip or vacation. I was in a very familiar city but wasn’t at all sure whether I was a tourist or a resident.
I decided that one way to feel like a resident is to go to the nearby supermarket, which was also necessary because I brought very little food with me. The Manhattan high evaporated almost from the minute I walked through the lackluster produce department, did some price comparisons with brands of packaged foods I usually bought and saw the lines at the cashier. I present as evidence a comparison between one Manhattan grapefruit I bought for the same price as its Brooklyn brethren, a few of which I did bring. I will let you draw your conclusions about the relative cost of living in both places.
The Grapefruit Bowl
I could also not help but notice how many elderly people were walking (slowly) in the supermarket or with walkers or canes on the sidewalk. Brownstone neighborhoods, with their stairs, are incompatible with aging. At some point, if you have joint problems, you have to live horizontally. Overnight, I had truly moved into a different world.
I set my alarm for 7:00 am, dressed, stripped the bed and collected the blankets and bed linens to launder and then take with me to the temporary apartment. Breakfast was a bowl of cereal from a Tupperware container I found (with all the dishes in the warehouse in the South Bronx, I was glad to have it) which I carefully balanced on my lap. There was just one folding chair left to sit on.
That last morning was a blur of doing laundry, packing last-minute toiletries and groceries and watching as the bed was picked up to go to the dump.
I definitely had more things to bring with me than I ever anticipated. It’s totally different from going on a vacation or business trip. You can’t leave behind anything for when you come home. Since my temporary stay would be for several months, and a change in season from winter to spring, I also needed to be sure I had clothing that would work on possible 20 degree days with snow and 70 degree days with sun.
I walked the 4 blocks to the garage where I parked, dropped the lantern off en route at my neighbor’s, and left an automatic garage door opener I owned on a neighbor’s car windshield with a note saying I was moving and wouldn’t need it anymore. Here, at least, was a place which I had no regrets leaving. For $275 a month, I had to painstakingly maneuver my Subaru past another neighboring car which was an enormous 1980 black Pontiac with license plates which read, “Dark Girl”. A skull and cross bones plaque hung from the rear view mirror. My new temporary space in a garage in the East 30’s, with attended parking, would be $300 a month. Good riddance, Dark Girl.
It took me about 40 minutes, and much lugging, carrying and pulling, to get everything into the car, which was, finally, packed to its welded seams. This is when moving when you’re not old and infirm is advantageous, I thought.
Before I pulled away from the curb space I had adjacent to the house, I gave one final look at the 3 street trees I planted years ago, and the side elevation of the house with its graceful bay window. Best to drive and see clearly without tears, I thought. I turned the key in the ignition.
There were a few overhead lights in the house, turned on with wall switches, but all of the lamps were packed by the movers and put into storage earlier in the day. I knew that the house would be pretty dark when I came home from dinner that last night from my neighbor’s house around the corner. She kindly lent me a battery-power lantern with a very bright, although slightly bluish, LED light, something she had bought in anticipation of a power failure from Hurricane Irene.
I felt like a character in a Dickens novel walking up to this 1870 house with the lantern in my hand. My literary reference was helped by the fact that a light rain had just begun to fall and on this cold, damp night in January, Brooklyn could almost feel like London.
I came in through the ground floor entrance, as usual. Fortunately, that ground floor front room, used as a family room, had a wall switch with an overhead light, as did the kitchen and all the stairways. The “front room”, as we called it, was totally bare.
I walked into the kitchen, where I had left the 2 suitcases and 6 big Ikea shopping bags filled with the food from the pantry, and other household things, that I’d be taking to the temporary apartment the next day.
With lantern in hand, I turned out the ground floor lights and walked up the stairs to the parlor. Everything was gone except for a stack of cartons with books my son was picking up over the weekend. With 12′ ceilings on that parlor floor, all the sounds I made echoed.
I stood in front of the dining room, also bare, and visualized Thanksgiving, with a full table around which sat many family members. My husband sat at the head. I had a mental flashback to one of my favorite childhood movies, “How Green Was My Valley,” a tear-jerker set in a Welsh mining town, but it had obviously imprinted in my memory a visual depiction of the relentless march of time in a family’s narrative. I was part of that same script now and the ghosts of the past were all around me.
I continued up the stairs and knew that the bedroom would be an emotional ground zero. Fortunately, a 60 watt ceiling fixture with a wall switch was above an old marble sink set between two closets. The room was bare except for the bed and my husband’s dresser, which my son was also keeping. I put the lantern down on the dresser and turned it on. Its bluish light made the room look cold, and, honestly, a bit foreboding, so I decided to made do with the yellowish light from the 60 watt incandescent bulb.
Unfortunately, the sink light switch was a good 12 feet from the bed, and without the lantern on, the trip to the bed was totally dark.
I had begun to instinctively numerate all the “lasts”, including the last time I’d be getting into that bed, which was going to be picked up the next day to go to a dump. Lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling was when all the emotional upheaval of this day finally came out. And through it all, I tried very hard to remind myself of something I told both my son and daughter countless times when they were little, that after the darkness there will come the morning.
I had planned with the mover to come the day before the actual move to pack furniture, breakables and everything else I didn’t pack. However, when the truck and 5-man crew arrived at 9:30 am on brilliantly sunny packing day, the foreman suggested that they do both the pack AND the move that day and not run the risk of having to deal with a snow storm threatening to hit New York City on the following move day. I had some added flexibility because, except for the things I was taking to the temporary apartment, my possessions were all going into a storage warehouse in the South Bronx into which I could move until 8:00 pm.
The plan made sense and, with my agreeing to it, the foreman called in another 5-man moving crew to help. By 10:30, there were 10 guys almost demonically packing, wrapping, hauling, throughout the 4-story house. It was a cacophony of tape gun noise, mixed with wrapping paper and punctuated by the sound of their heavy footfalls on the stairs. By 1:30, the moving truck pulled away from the curb and was en route to the storage warehouse.
Packing the Lamps
The next stop: a 10’x20′ storage room in the South Bronx.
Now Unrecognizable Possessions About to be Stored
Completing the Move into the Storage Room
I signed a lease for the room, padlocked it shut and returned back to the now practically empty house, where a bed and just a few other pieces of furniture and some boxes of books remained that my son or daughter wanted to keep. Yes, it was extraordinarily hard to see the empty rooms, and hear the echoes.
Empty Study
Empty Dining Room
Empty Bedroom
A neighbor invited me over for dinner, with another neighbor, but the house and I were to spend one last night together when I came home later. The next day I would move to a temporary apartment in Manhattan.
widowingon 