My Life In 4 NYC Apartments

It was the '90s. They were all tiny and each one of them made me a New Yorker.

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A few weeks ago, I took the 4 train uptown to visit the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian’s new Triennial show (it’s called “Making Home” and it’s exquisite).

Getting off at 86th Street, I headed west, walking across 88th Street. It wasn’t a random choice, but more of a sentimental one, like an invisible magnet tugging me along the sidewalk. And yet, it wasn’t invisible at all. The facade of 105 East 88th Street is not much to look at (like, at all). But standing outside the building—my first home in New York City—filled me with what I can only describe as a sort of contented wonder.

There are many things to love about living in NYC, especially when you’re young, but there is also this other bit of it, that I’ve only begun to appreciate now that I’m older and have lived here a while. Walking the streets just doing your thing, heading to here and back from there, every day can become some version of a tiny time capsule. Each of us inevitably crossing paths with an old neighborhood, lover, apartment, the ghost of a place that’s no longer there. And also, all the old versions of us that maybe we’ve lost track of or left behind.

Standing in front of the 88th Street building, I got up a little closer (trying not to be creepy) to peer inside the front door (creepy). I could see on the left the elevator, which, back when I lived here, had the most beautiful ancient industrial-style door that required summoning ALL your upper body strength to open and close it. I can’t remember much about things I ate for lunch last week or what I saw on my commute to SoHo yesterday, but standing there in that moment, I remembered the elevator door. And almost everything else about that apartment. My wooden dresser, the portable CD player that sat outside the bathroom when I was showering. Cooking a whole giant squash for dinner for all of us (it was cheap and healthy). As well as who I was back then (a 24/7 magazine assistant). Where I ate (Live Bait, Benny’s Burritos, street carts). What I loved (Donna Tartt and regularly sneaking into Nell’s or The Royalton hoping to see somebody/pretending to BE somebody).

This was the early-to-mid ‘90s, and with those pre-smart phone days I don’t have much in the way of visual documentation or a text thread of wild things we planned or overheard. But I can remember specific details about living there, memories that have never faded despite the decades of new memories piled on top of them. And more importantly, recalling how these images + experiences prepared me, in some mysterious ways, for how to live happily with myself in a smaller space, and also how to live with other people in those tiny spaces, too.

That first apartment couldn’t have been more than 500 square-feet, and yet it felt grand, especially since from one tiny window in the living room you could see a sliver of Park Avenue. Park Avenue!!

I had made it.

And the three apartments that followed were even smaller. But as small as they were, each one was its own spectacular kind of NYC easter egg, with perks and cracks and plenty of endearing wonkiness you can always count on in a 100+ year-old apartment building. I really didn’t know who I was back then (who did?)…but each of these apartments gave me glimpses…tiny clues to keep me moving along the path, and occasionally (luckily) off the path.

These apartments took good care of me while I ran around town in my black leather Espace boots and vintage motorcycle jacket from Canal Jeans, racked up credit card debt, and discovered the majesty of the Guggenheim, the Morgan Library, and CBGBs. Each apartment offered me a place to write and read. To learn to be a magazine editor, an aspiring host, an expert thrifter/small space savant, and eventually, in the early aughts, a person who would fatefully leave the mythical world of magazines to discover something new in a strange, emerging alternate universe called Digital.

(NYC loves A Beginning.)

When I left the show at the Cooper Hewitt, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other apartments that formed this real estate cornerstone in my life—three of them scattered about nearby, all within a few blocks of each other on the Upper East Side. And right there, I decided it had been too long. I needed to visit them and pay a (tiny) tribute to the different kinds of home they gave me, and those homes still inside me. So, I cleared two hours and started walking, to each of them. To say HI, and also to remember…

Not just what happened there, but how each of them led to what happened here...❤️

1. 105 East 88th Street.

• There were four of us sharing a two-bedroom apartment, and each of us paid $500/month. My salary from my first job helping to launch Worth magazine was $19,500/year, just enough to cover my portion of the rent.

• I learned to thrift here…really thrift. As this apartment was located in the “gold coast” of fancy thrift shops, including the legendary Spence thrift shop (which I don’t think exists anymore) but it was where I first discovered Claude Montana, Jean Muir, and Valentino. I couldn’t afford a glass of wine at a bar, but I wore vintage couture, so it didn’t really matter.

• While living here, I met a man at a bar one night. He was a lawyer in his 30s, seemingly very grown up with his shit very together. He was ridiculously handsome, (toooo handsome), like a cross between Splash-era Tom Hanks and JFK Jr. And, I’d never met anyone like him before. He asked me out and I accepted. But when the evening came around to meet him, I got scared. Didn’t know what to wear. What to say. How to act. So, I brought my roommate with me…to the date, which was at Ludlow Street Cafe. And even though he was surprised to see two of us upon arrival, instead of only me, he was gracious. And bought us both drinks while we chatted and pretended it was perfectly normal for a 24-year-old woman to bring her roommate on a date with her. He never called me again.

• One night coming home late from a party at (the old) Delia’s, I was grabbing a slice of pizza around the corner from my apartment. I was alone and it was probably 1 or 2 in the morning. I was standing on line next to a police officer, older, grizzled, the two of us staring into space while we quietly waited for our slices. And then this song came on the speaker, filling the pizzeria. With just the two of us there, the song swirling around us, he turned to me finally and said, “this song could break your heart.” I never forgot it.

• My close friend at the time slept over one night during the week. We both took the day off from work so she could get an abortion. The morning of, we woke up early and started getting ready, and one of my roommates who knew what we were doing/where we were going knocked on the bedroom door half asleep in her underwear to wish us good luck. And standing there together in our pjs before the sun was up, we all cried.

• I stayed up every night three days in a row reading The Secret History. I even started dressing like Donna Tartt and doing my eyebrows like her, too. I made so many notes in that book, I had to buy a backup.

• We hosted our first party in this apartment. I’d never hosted a real party in my life. And even though I can’t remember anything that we did to prepare other than buying cheap beer and probably concocting some revolting libation, I remember we hung Christmas lights everywhere. But not the colored ones—I insisted on the clear ones because I thought they looked more elegant, like fairy lights or something Marie-Anne Oudejans, my style idol at Tocca, might have done around the same time. And we played this album all night and well into the morning.

• To celebrate the launch day of the first issue of Worth magazine, the publisher took the tiny launch team to lunch at La Grenouille. I’d never eaten in such a beautiful restaurant before, and everything—from the coat check to the unbelievable flowers to the silverware ASTONISHED me. After we took our seats, the servers came around to take our plates and each of us had an envelope with a check inside underneath—a Thank You bonus for working around the clock on the launch. Mine was for $500.

I thought I was rich.

2. 340 East 66th Street.

• My best friend Kelly and I moved here together with our friend Carri from college. The landlord from my 88th Street apartment tipped us off about it, and as outrageously insane as he always seemed, he had a soft spot for us and immediately built a wall in the living room so Carri could have her own room. The guys that lived here before us left us whatever furniture we wanted, which was all surprisingly fancy—a glass dining table and four tufted stools, a Lane hope chest, and a bamboo desk by Ralph Lauren. My mother still has the hope chest.

When I texted these photos of our old apartment building to my friend Kelly, she simply texted me back, “Not bad.”

• My room was the biggest, with two closets, one of which was cedar and smelled incredible inside. I’ve never had a cedar closet since, but someday I will again.

• After work one night when Kelly was running a bath, she found a prehistoric sized water bug swimming in the tub. It was easily five inches long and the most horrifying thing either of us had ever seen. The two of us spent two hours trying to figure out how to capture and dispose of it. We managed to catch it in a tupperware container and fling it out the bathroom window. It became such a legendary moment in our friendship and domestic life together that I wrote a short story about it called “Pet Sound” because we first heard it splashing in the bath water.

• About six months after we started living here, we would occasionally detect a strange smell by the sofa. It came and went, and despite our best efforts to locate the peculiar scent we never could determine what was causing it. At the end of our lease when we were moving our sofa out, we found a perfectly preserved dried up BIRD.

Mystery solved.

• One night after seeing a show at Wetland’s, a bunch of us left the venue at the same time as Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard. This was the height of Reality Bites era, and, well, a very big deal. We tried to be cool, saying hello shyly (likely very UNcool) and then proceeded to pile into a taxi. There were three or four of us packed in the back seat when we noticed as we were stopped at a red light that there was a cab beside us…it was ES and RSL inside, motioning us to roll down the window. “Where r u headed?” one of them said. But before we could answer their taxi sped away.

• I was now an assistant at The New Yorker and Tina Brown was the new editor. She enlisted Richard Avedon to be the first-ever staff photographer for the nearly 70 year-old magazine, and one of my jobs was to sit with him and help him while he signed stacks (and stacks) of copies of his book An Autobiography. I didn’t really know who he was, not really, but I knew he was important. Over the weeks he was signing his book, I read everything I could about him. Went to museums to see his work. I couldn’t actually believe this was the person I was sitting on a stool beside chit-chatting about the Algonquin across the street and Lord only knows what else. On the last day before a big launch party at the New York Public library, he handed me my own signed copy of his book, and said to me almost a little brusquely, “Smart girl.”

3. 330 East 76th Street.

The awning wasn’t draped in fake pink roses back when I lived here. But I wish it had.

• I was now the personal assistant to the CEO of Condé Nast, and I spent weeks hunting for a new apartment for Kelly and I. When this one came up—a railroad book-ended by two bedrooms and two doors to the hallway—I just kind of knew it was ours. Kelly wasn’t in town for the open house, so she gave me permission to take it on the spot. We joined a waiting list of a jillion other 20-somethings looking for a $1,200/ month 2-bedroom apartment in a building complete with a nail salon on the first floor. I wrote a (long) Love Letter to the management company and hand delivered it with a box of every new Condé Nast magazine I could get my hands on. And we got it.

• I do not know where it came from or why we had it, but I remember we had a black or brown overstuffed leather sofa In the center room, which served as our living area. (A leather sofa, even retrospectively, seems very off-brand for me.)

• Kelly worked at EMI records and with her job came tickets to any live shows we wanted. Mazzy Star, Matthew Sweet, Big Head Todd, Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, Oasis, and on and on (I think we counted going to close to 60 shows that year). One night she asked me to go see a band called Radiohead at a club in Chelsea called Tramps (maybe my FAVORITE club, May She Rest). Thom Yorke sang “Creep” and I remember thinking, God, I feel so lucky to be alive...

For fun: All the (mostly now defunct) music venues we frequented while Kelly worked at EMI. Image courtesy of Popspot.

• It was in this apartment that I began to love/learn about interior design. I had a beautiful platform bed frame that seemed very modern with a nod to minimalism, even though I had no idea what minimalism was. I began wearing my hair parted down the center, and almost exclusively wore black. My lipstick was Revlon’s Toast of New York, and sometimes after work I would roam around Barneys New York, taking note of the luxe apricot carpeting and my first taste of Prada. I was still broke, but there was this whole new part of New York City that began to unfold to me…and I loved it. Really, really loved it.

• It was 1994 and Kurt Cobain had just died. Everyone I knew was destroyed, people wept openly to strangers at lunch counters and bars. You didn’t have to be a Nirvana fan to know how tragic and empty the world felt now that he was gone. A few days after he died, I went to bed thinking about him, and was awoken a few hours later when a picture on my wall crashed to the floor. I remember thinking, in my twilight state, it was him.

• It was in this apartment that I came home late from a dinner one night after being sexually assaulted in the back of a town car by someone I knew and trusted. It was awful and frightening and mostly heartbreaking, and I cried in Kelly’s lap for hours. We slept in the same bed that night, too.

4. 400 East 82nd Street.

• After a six-year hiatus living back at home on Long Island with my parents, getting out of debt—and figuring out what I really wanted my 30s to be about—I moved into this apartment, a 200-300 sf studio that I wrote more intimately/extensively about in this essay. I took the lease over from a couple I knew who wanted a bigger place. The building was cold and depressing and the apartment itself was nothing special, but the price was right having sworn myself to never get into credit card debt ever again.

The building, from a distance (the coffee at the downstairs deli was delightfully mediocre, and I loved it). And below, a peek inside the foyer, which has not changed a lick in the 20 years since I lived here.

• When I first moved in, I slept on the twin mattress that the couple had left for me (two people for years on a twin mattress…it’s New York). But eventually I took a press trip to China and met a photographer’s assistant who I fell hopelessly in love with. He lived abroad, and a few months after we met, he called that he was coming to town, and would I see him? I immediately upgraded to a full-size mattress. When he left I knew I would never see him again. And to soothe myself, I awoke early for weeks and walked the whole way from 82nd Street to my CITY magazine job in SoHo down First Avenue, listening to this album 💔.

A Polaroid of my first solo NYC apartment and a grown-up sized bed…home for eight years. The smile painting, mirror, leopard rug, Danish chair, Russel Wright pitcher…I still have them all.

• When my friend and former boss Rebecca came over to see this tiny apartment for the first time, I remember her saying with regard to my shortage of storage, “You can put your sweaters in the oven or in that cabinet over the sink. I think Carrie Bradshaw does that, too.”

• I learned a lot of things in this apartment (like that I’m a truly terrible baker). But maybe the biggest thing I learned here was how to pray. Not the formal or religious kind of prayer I grew up learning/observing, but my own kind of prayer. Communing with myself and with solitude, and starting to really listen to what my heart wanted and where my life might be headed. I wrote in a few other essays here how I would regularly spend my Friday or Saturday evenings home alone, cleaning my apartment, and then sitting down in the middle of my floor to light a candle, asking for guidance with a sort of spiritual free-styling. I would say all the things I wanted out loud…sometimes even the things I was embarrassed to write down or say at all. And I would finish the ritual off with what my friend Sister Karol calls “an offering”….a cookie or a shell or smoking a cigarette out the window. Something to honor the connection as well as my gratitude. And sometimes now on the (very) rare occasion when I’m alone, I still do this…mostly to remember what it was like sitting in the middle of my floor before this whole life I’m living now now even existed.

• I was living in this studio when I met my co-founders of Refinery29. It was 2003, and our first meeting was at the Merc Bar on Mercer Street to talk about the kind of digital company they wanted to build, and would I be interested in coming onboard? I’ve spoken about this before, but I remember how clear my head was that evening. Looking at the wood paneling in the bar and thinking, as we were talking, if I don’t do this, I am absolutely certain I will regret it. In retrospect, I think it was that Friday/Saturday night ritual, over and over again in the years leading up to that decision, that helped me to clear away all the stuff in my head and my heart that didn’t need to be there anymore. That I’d outgrown. It was a new decade…and a new life was beginning. (Kind of like the way it feels now.)

• A year or two later, I left the Upper East Side for Brooklyn, to live with my now husband. I was ready. And, when I was moving out and everything was packed up, I decided to leave a gold-gilded vintage mirror in the kitchen. Something I thrifted during my years in NYC. I still loved that mirror, but I also hoped the people taking my apartment over (another couple) would love it, too.

An offering. Of something small and beautiful and used and loved…to where I came from…xxCb

My favorite tailor Olga is still next-door to my last apartment in NYC, too. LIFE goes on…✨

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