PART 28 10128

There was no reason why the experience of living together should have been changed by the fact that we were married, and yet it was: the apartment on 77th Street shrank. What Nancy had been saying all along, and I had been denying, now became evident to me. It was too small – not just because she had moved in her books and stereo and bottles and lotions, though she had, but because our relationship seemed to take up more space. A girlfriend is an adjunct; a wife is a partner. My cool bachelor’s pad, to revert to the idiom of the day, couldn’t become a couple’s starter apartment by a consent decree; the bathroom was tiny, the kitchen almost nonexistent, and my beloved patio inaccessible in winter and beside the point in summer, because we had started spending the warm months on Long Island. There were worn spots on the living room carpet that I hadn’t noticed before, and the place hadn’t been painted since before I moved in.

So, during 18 months of what increasingly felt like roughing it, we started to think seriously about moving. We knew we’d have to spend more in rent than the $135 we were paying currently, but rent money didn’t seem a problem. Three years after I had started at Brooklyn College I was granted tenure, and the financial security (such as it was) that went with it. Nancy was still free-lancing, but since she was the best production assistant in New York television (her successors put “Trained by Nancy Horwich” in their resume´s), she was always in demand. So we thought we could manage $300 a month, or even a little more. It didn’t occur to us to move anywhere else but to a nicer apartment on the West Side, and we started searching the Times’s real-estate section under heading “UWS 1 BR.”

And, traipsing all over the neighborhood tracking down leads, we found, to our surprise, very little. Apartments that sounded promising were often no larger than what we had, or looked out on an air shaft, or were fifth floor walk-ups, or were too far north – on both sides of Central Park, the boundary of the civilized world was universally held to be 96th Street, though Columbia faculty and staff would disagree. Apartments in the elevator buildings on West End and Riverside that had been rentals a few years before were now co-ops, as the tentacles of the newly affluent slithered from Central Park West toward the Hudson. The Puerto Rican community that had frightened white people away from all the side streets between Broadway and Columbus had been diluted to the point that, though muggings still occurred, there were no more “bad blocks,” as people called them then, and landlords started upgrading – modern appliances, parquet floors, elevators even – all of which were reflected in the doubled and tripled rents. The West Side wasn’t as hot as the West Village, but it had something of the same feel to it: there despite the bag ladies who spent their days on the benches of the grassy islands that separated the uptown and downtown lanes of Broadway, there were also artists and writers filtering uptown, and bookstores and coffee shops and art movie houses to serve their needs. ABC colonized West 67th Street and later West 66th, down by the river, building a complex of studios and broadcast centers. This was the terrain of Seinfeld et al, and the show got most of it right; the coffee shop where Jerry patiently listens to George’s complaints is still there. Educated, upwardly-mobile middle-class people in their 20’s and 30’s – that was them, that was us.

But many of the iconic restaurants, stores and cultural sites that had defined the neighborhood started to disappear under the pressure of gentrification. Zabar’s, Gitlitz, and Barney Greengrass are there to this day, as is the Citarella from which the chain sprang, but Steinberg’s, the Great Shanghai, Victor’s on 71st Street, and Tony’s Italian Kitchen have closed. Schrafft’s, on Broadway and 83rd, is gone, and so is Levy Brothers next door, the stationery store where all the neighborhood school kids bought their #2 pencils and Spaldines and caps for their cap pistols. (It’s now a branch of Papyrus, so it hasn’t completely severed its connection with stationery.)  H&H Bagels opened in about 1971, then closed in 2011, and then reopened. Woolworth’s shut its doors; the pool hall that Nancy and I frequented turned overnight into an ABC Carpet store. Indian Walk Shoes, where I was shod for my first twelve years, closed, depriving all us children of a singular pleasure: they had an X-ray machine which, when you stood in it and peered down into a screen, showed you a ghostly green image of your footbones and the shoes surrounding them, and no doubt contributed to the cancer rates decades later.  The Corn Exchange Bank and Trust, where we had our first checking accounts, merged with the Chemical Bank and then was folded into Chase.

We didn’t realize it immediately, but at the same time, we were outgrowing the West Side. We found ourselves venturing to other sections of the city much more often than we had in those first two years. The Toms – Jackson and Steiner – lived on the East Side now.  Our favorite bar was still Dorrian’s, on 2nd Avenue. and we liked the menu at Martell’s, a couple of blocks away, across the street from the high-rise into which Dorothy had moved. We’d go downtown to Ray’s Pizza on Prince Street (the original Ray’s, not one of the dozen knock-offs); to Ratner’s for their strawberry shortcake and wonderful rolls, which Nancy would surreptitiously slip into her purse for breakfast; to the Festival of San Gennaro in Little Italy to gorge on zeppoli; to Say Eng Look on Mott Street for authentic Cantonese dishes like fish fried in seaweed, which turned them green; and to City Island for clams and lobsters. We explored the Village, the Lower East Side, and Staten Island; once, we made the trek to Hoboken to eat at a trendy place called the Clam Broth House, where, if there was no room inside, men coule wait at the bar but women had to line up outside, no matter what the weather. (It was snowing the night we went there, and once was enough for Nancy.) Now that we had our brand-new Toyota Corona, we were possessed by the spirit of Robert Moses: just driving places was recreation. Keeping a car in the city, especially parking it on the street, was a huge time-waster; every other day, so that the streets could be cleaned, every parking space became illegal for two hours, and we car owners had to shuttle our vehicles back and forth, sitting in them on the “wrong” side until it became the “right” side. But mobility was everything to us.

We broadened our housing search, looking for comparable apartments in other neighborhoods, including the East Side, which held no particular appeal for us, but which had superior transportation, attractive perks like the Metropolitan Museum, and, since we planned to have a family one day in the indeterminate future, a raft of good schools, both public and private. And one day I came across an ad for a 1Br1Bth on the ninth floor of a building at 120 East 90th Street, on the corner of Lexington, which was busy and noisy, but with its entrance on the calmer side street. Nancy was at work, so I went to see it by myself, and found one of those much-maligned white-brick buildings that had been going up since the 1950s all over the East Side. And indeed, the architecture critics were right: it lacked distinction and charm. Those white bricks may have gleamed when the buildings were built, but were bound to turn a sooty gray in a few years. 

But Trafalgar House, as it called itself, made up for its cosmetic deficiencies in amenities. 338 was a walkup – not for us, of course, but any other brownstone we moved into on the UWS would probably involve stairs. Moreover, grocery shopping for 338 involved schlepping heavy bags from Broadway to Riverside Drive, whereas the side of Trafalgar House that faced Lex was a Gristede’s. There was a doorman who could sign for packages (Nancy would love that), and central forced-air heating and air-conditioning – which closed the deal for me. No more hot-water radiators clanking in the night, and the building supplied the a/c gratis from a cooling tower on the roof.

The apartment itself, 9C, was superior to anything we’d looked at back on the UWS. It ran the entire width of the building.The bedroom was in back, off the street, where a bedroom should be; there was plenty of room for a king-sized bed and the closet was spacious. The bath was off the hallway that led to quite a large living room with a dining alcove attached, which connected to the kitchen, which had a window in it. I stood in the middle of the living room listening. I could hear the sounds of the traffic on Lex, but our apartment faced 90th, so the noise was muted.

The living room of 9C, after we'd settled in

Tom, the building’s super, was with me. Guardedly, I asked him what the monthly rent was. “Three forty,” he said. I could feel my eyes opening in surprise. “I’ll take it,” I said. I was not accustomed to making decisions of this nature and magnitude without Nancy’s counsel; I have no brains when it comes to domestic and financial matters, but this was a no-brainer. I gave Tom fifty bucks to stop showing the apartment and called my bride from a pay phone. It was late in the afternoon; I reached her at her studio just as she was putting on her coat. “Get in a cab and meet me in the lobby of 120 East 90th,” I told her. “We’re going to live there.”

Waiting the half hour it took her to arrive gave me ample time to second-guess myself, but this was a no-brainer, and after all, I hadn’t signed a lease. And when she got there, and Tom obligingly took us back up, she gave me a big hug. “Yes, this is it,” she said. Each of us tried to think of possible drawbacks, and I felt bound to remind Nancy that my mother, who had moved to a studio on 94th and Park, would be our neighbor. But though Nancy was not Mom’s ideal daughter-in-law – that would have been Adrianne, who looked and spoke like the debutante she was – there were no overt hostilities.  And, Nancy reminded me, when we eventually produced heirs, Sally’s presence would convert instantly to a perk. (It did.)

Real estate agents called the neighborhood Carnegie Hill, and, indeed, the terrain sloped noticeably upward in the rectangle bordered by Fifth Avenue (Central Park) on the west, Lexington Avenue on the east, 86th Street on the south, and 96th on the north. 96th street is where the trains that leave Grand Central station emerge from their tunnels, replacing the islands of green in the middle of Park Avenue with an open cut containing eight tracks, always busily and noisily in use.

Our building was just on the eastern boundary of Carnegie Hill, but after we’d lived there for a while, we thought of it as Yorkville, an older name for the same area, one that goes back to the time in the 19th century when it was largely a German neighborhood, with a smattering of Irish, Poles and Hungarians as well. The original settlers were the blue collar workers who built the East Side’s infrastructure, but as they became more affluent, they spread to the suburbs and other boroughs, leaving behind a very nice collection of restaurants and food stores – Irish bars like our prized Dorrian’s Red Hand, Hungarian restaurants with goulash like Momma still made like Budapest, German butchers (Schaller and Weber’s windows were festooned with gigantic phallic  loops of sausage) and German cafes and eateries ranging from the funky Ideal Restaurant, which served Koenigsberger Klopse for five bucks at a formica counter under buzzing fluorescents, to the staid, respectable Kleine Konditorei, a semi-acceptable alternative to Lüchows on 14th Street, where we ordered schnitzel and black forest cake mit schlag.

When we left the lobby on the day we committed to the East Side, we glanced involuntarily back to at what would become our former neighborhood, and the sun was setting behind the twin towers of the El Dorado, visible on Central Park West – a very corny touch, I thought, like the ending of a story by a first-year writing student at Brooklyn College. I said to Nancy, “Let’s walk around the neighborhood. See where things are.” And, heading east, off we went.