WATER
LOCATION
Hudson River, across from the World Trade Center, Manhattan
PRICE
$20,000 in 2000 ($750 dockage fee)
SQUARE FEET
34 (1972 sailboat)
OCCUPANT
Colin Stanfield (production manager, Independent Feature Project; saxophone player)
Hey sailor, got a match? Who would have thought that to board your apartment, I mean, boat, one would have to pass through white marble halls with clapping tourists, 5,000 gift shops—the World Trade Center—and then move outside to the vast stone plaza of the North Cove and get on the water taxi to your marina, where all you can hear is the lonely creaking of the boats in the gray soup of a fog. You’ve been living on the water, with the sea as your mistress, for almost a year. Is this a real-estate alternative?
It’s not really cheaper than living in an apartment. You have to buy the boat. I have a mortgage. Dockage fees can run to $5500 a season. I’m at Liberty Landing now. Chelsea Piers is more expensive—I was there in the summer, but they close in winter. I’ll be back at Chelsea April 15. One guy there, an actuary, has quite a livable boat—real couch, refrigerator. I moved to New York from Canada two years ago. I was sharing an apartment with a friend in Chelsea. I’d always toyed with getting a boat. I had friends living on boats in other cities. I bought one, took my stuff right down 22nd Street, most painless move ever. I just threw all my furniture in the garbage, which is where I got some of it in the first place.
It’s pretty intimate in your cabin, with its two-foot passageway. We’re squashed in the bunk with six portable heaters cooking. Do you, ah, have a girlfriend?
Yes, I do.
Oh.
This cabin is like a really small studio. I wouldn’t advocate it for a lot of people. I did a seven-day trip with three friends to the East Hampton Film Festival. There’s so much work keeping an old boat together. It’s a commitment to becoming a handyman, which is exacerbated by living aboard. You become keenly aware of everything you’d like to fix.
It’s hard.
Also, some marinas don’t encourage people to live aboard—there are all these issues, pro and con, about people living on the water. I participate in discussion groups online. The amount of information-sharing going on is extraordinary.
I skimmed through the live-aboard Web site. There were ninety-nine entries under suggestions for upgrading the AC circuitry and thirteen on the matter of installing tiles on a wooden boat. A man named Larry wrote in wondering why silicon adhesive didn’t work. I got so dozy. I thought people on boats would be talking about the soft wind off Woona Woona. You have a Domino sugar package in the kitchen, some dish detergent. Let’s turn our heads around and look at the ship’s library. The Water In Between by Kevin Patterson. There he is on the book jacket with his beard.
He felt sorry for himself after he broke up with his girlfriend, and he sailed across the Atlantic by himself.
Seeking ruin and catastrophe! You have a book on Edie Sedgwick.
My mom gave me that. I grew up on a farm, hippie commune, Prince Edward Island.
Is that where you get your love for the sea?
From a very young age I considered myself a surfer guy. I used to teach windsurfing at a resort. I was in a band.
You must have been very popular with the guests.
I thought you’d be asking me more about the pros and cons of living on boats. You know, what’s dangerous is they sink from time to time. There are all these holes in boats. Now if water gets in and freezes, it can crack, and in spring, when it thaws, there’s a hole.
Can’t we just cut loose and go to South America?
January 23, 2001
LOCATION
Sag Harbor, Suffolk County
RENT
$225 per weekend
SQUARE FEET
(two-story, six-and-a-half bedroom, mid-nineteenth-century whaling captain’s house)
OCCUPANTS
Eight or nine people each weekend (bankers, lawyers, insurance underwriters, real-estate agents, computer salespeople, etc.)
So Tony—you with the Monkey Bar hat and the golf club—you got here last night?
[TONY] Yeah, and boy were we howling. We were being, like, ma-has.
You were drinking Mai Tais?
No, ma-has, being like, you know, a maharajah. We were smoking cigars, having our cocktails at the American Hotel…
The white hotel with the red and blue bunting?
Yeah, then we went to Murfs, the dive bar behind the cop station. I’m just a guest at the house—I know a couple of the girls.
Debby, you’ve been renting a share here for five years?
[DEBBY] I take twelve out of seventeen weekends. We can come out during any of the weekdays if we rent one weekend or more.
So, do you hang out mostly in one of the two living rooms with the wing chairs and the hunting-dog lithographs or in the kitchen with all the white semigloss enamel and the harpoon?
We’re mainly on the porch or at the beach.
A race car driving show is on the television in the den.
ESPN is just always on. [TONY] I put it on ’cause I was feeling mopey.
Don’t be mopey. Oh Tony! You’re reading Moby Dick! Sag Harbor used to have a bustling whaling industry.
[TONY] I’ve been reading this book for two years. I’m struggling with it like Ahab struggled with the whale.
You said nine people are staying here this weekend and there are only six and a half bedrooms.
[DEBBY] One bedroom is called the Sea of Love Room. It got its name because it used to have a seafoam-green headboard. There’s the Red Rum. [TONY] Murder spelled backwards like in The Shining. [DEBBY] I think Larry and Jean were in there last night. I don’t know—it wasn’t my turn to watch! [TONY] I stayed in the Voodoo Lounge, which is what we call the cottage out back. [DEBBY] I was in the room with the twin beds. It’s not my favorite.
Steve, the volunteer house manager, said he changes room assignments every week so early arrivals won’t always get the best ones.
[TONY] Last night I could have slept on a slab. [DEBBY] It was extreme. [TONY] We were all decompressing. When you work as hard as we do, it’s like a champagne bottle being uncorked.
Steve said more women rent summer shares because the men are busy in Manhattan dating younger women.
[SARAH] Whaaat! That’s not true! [JEAN] Absolutely not. [SARAH] And anyway, I know so many women involved with younger men.
Since you all live alone in the city, wouldn’t it be cozier to live together like this all the time?
[DEBBY] We talk about it sometimes. [SARAH] Coming out here is like being in high school, all the gossiping.
Maybe you could get a ski house?
[TONY] A ski house wouldn’t be the same at all. You can’t just lie around. You gotta get up and go whooossh.
August 12, 1997
LOCATION
Inwood, Manhattan
RENT
$1,002.60 (rent stabilized)
SQUARE FEET
700 (four-room apartment in 1907 building)
OCCUPANT
Captain Max Patterson (woodworker, marine and terrestrial)
You have a captain’s certificate: “Master of Steam, Motor, or Auxiliary Sail Vessels of Not More Than 100 Gross Tons Upon Inland Waters.” What about the ocean?
I can go on the ocean but it’s very complicated.
Atlantic or Pacific?
In the last five years, I sailed across the Gulf of Mexico four times. In ‘99, I sailed from Salvador, Brazil, to Ghana.
The PBS special Middle Passage Voyage! With your love for the sea, why are you in Inwood?
It’s part of my quirky lifestyle. I love New York. When I moved into this neighborhood about eleven years ago, it was the last decent deal in Manhattan, my first real adult home. I didn’t have to have a roommate.
If you lived in Titusville, Florida, where you grew up, would you be partly on land?
No, I have my urban lifestyle and my more far-flung life. Variety is the spice of life. A lot of my sea adventures happen in winter. I was on my sailboat during 9-11. I was behind the Statue of Liberty in Liberty Marina, in New Jersey. The night before, it had rained really hard; I was in my boat bailing out water. May I demonstrate something? [He comes over, put his hands on my shoulders, and...]
Oof.
I felt the percussion from the first airplane hit. It felt like somebody pushing—like I pushed you. The sound went right across the water. We hopped in a launch to see what we could do. All these people charred and covered with ash were going across the river. That afternoon, there was nobody around North Cove—a few loose dogs. My boat is now out on City Island. I have a great photo of her.
Where do you go in her?
I’m going to take her to Martha’s Vineyard this summer.
Where did you get all the scabbards?
Samurai swords—I found them. I found the musket in a trash can.
I’m feeling an era here but I’m not sure what. What haven’t you seen?
[He shakes his finger.] No television, no computer. I make these wooden vases. I turn them on a lathe. I just spent several years working on the Maritime Hotel, the Matsuri restaurant. It’s quite a spectacle. I did all the walnut work.
Walnut...
is a European/American wood. It’s very somber, very soothing. It’s dark and deep. It is extremely hard—that’s why they use it for gun stocks and pipes. Real hardwood trees take years to grow. When they grow slowly and under the right conditions, they produce a very stable wood.
I wonder if that applies to human intelligence.
Pine grows very fast. People buy pine futons and they’re out in the trash in a year.
You work on luxurious apartments.
Last week I built an African mahogany deck on Barrow Street. It’s a very rare wood. It’s got fire in it. The owner saw another deck just like it and wanted one. I started doing woodwork when I was on boats. Sailors are called jacks. That’s where jack-of-all-trades comes from. Sailors have to be very stable people because what they’re on is constantly moving.
You just showed me an old bag with ropes and string.
I like to do fancy knot work at sea. It’s a sailor’s ditty bag. That’s a Turk’s head and that’s a crown sennit. [He puts a small object on the table.]
A wooden seashell, how transgressive!
I model them after real shells. Shells are all one line, interior and exterior.
Like the Guggenheim...sort of.
Remember the Möbius strip? It’s never ending.
Is the animal born first or are they born inside the shell?
I think mollusks grow their shell, but there are other animals who adapt to recycled shells. Hermit crabs do that.
August 10, 2005
LOCATION
Coney Island, Brooklyn
RENT
$780 (market)
SQUARE FEET
700 (two-bedroom apartment)
O C C U PA N T S
g8s (photographer; waiter, Florent), Patrick Burlingham (painter; waiter, The Park), Dennis Bowling (waiter, Cafeteria)
How can you possibly go to work when you can hop around in the sand, ride the Scooter, have an ear of corn or something, and stare at the seagulls that fly to “There You’ll Be” playing at the refreshment stand where the men with tan stomachs sit on white plastic chairs screaming at each other, “I don’t want shit”? Then there’s the old Shore Hotel with the laundry out front. This place is compelling.
[G8S] We don’t go to work until the graveyard shift. [DENNIS] So in the mornings, we can sleep on the beach for hours. [G8S] It’s low key around here. You can walk out in your bathing suit, hair a mess. I got the apartment over two years ago. I was living in Park Slope, but I was down here taking photos. I thought it would be nice to live here. I couldn’t find a realestate agency. The woman at the deli said most buildings are owned by government agencies, seventeen blocks of projects. She’d heard of a landlord who was remodeling a building. All of us came to New York a few years ago from Kalamazoo College in Michigan.
You’re the boys of summer. I was just looking at a book of Bruce Davidson’s photos from ’59, kids from Prospect Park going to Coney Island, boys in T-shirts, with long arms, big hands, tattoos, who spent their days smoking cigarettes and kissing their girlfriends on blankets under the boardwalk, and then the famous photo of the blond girl combing her hair in the mirror of a cigarette machine. She was very beautiful. Then I read, “She was always sad, always fixing her hair,” and when she grew up she “put a shotgun in her mouth and blew her head off.”
Like in Requiem for a Dream, which took place around here. [PATRICK] Our neighborhood—we’re just west of the water—is mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican, though a Russian laundry just opened. [G8S] It’s all mixed. I eat a lot at La Frontera, a Mexican restaurant near the subway. It’s across from Carolina’s, where you see old Italians come on weekends. [PATRICK] There’s a lot of action in the Little Mermaid Bagel Shop. [G8S] One of the bagel ladies manages Astroland in the summer. [PATRICK] She looks very tired sometimes.
This apartment is so old looking, stucco ceiling, crumbly sash windows, like where someone would be in a T-shirt in the forties hoping he’d get the dough to put on the feedbag.
[DENNIS] I do feel like I’m being pulled back in time. [G8S] The light here is so amazing. It bounces around through the space all day long. [PATRICK] We like to sit in the kitchen and look out the window at the restaurant across the street. Everybody’s always out in front, like twenty people. [G8S] They have roosters in back. [PATRICK] People think I’m insane when I say roosters are keeping me up. [G8S] Then I’ll be on the phone and my mother will say, “What’s that?” “Oh, that’s just the Cyclone.”
Are you going to be here forever with calliope music in your brain?
The winters are hard. It’s so cold near the ocean. There’s a lot more blue in the light. It’s very empty. [PATRICK] It’s hard to get friends to visit. I’d say gentrification begins and ends with us. [G8S] It’s an hour commute. [DENNIS] I probably pay twice as much on car service as I do on rent. My roommates make fun of me. The car service pulls up. I don’t even have to tell them where I’m going.
They know—Cafeteria in Chelsea for your waiter job. You get out, flashbulbs popping.
Oh, sure. Sometimes we all go to Manhattan together for dinners, parties. We’ll be all punked out. There was a period where we all dyed our hair primary colors.
You’re like the celebrities of Coney Island.
The neighborhood has names for us. G8s is Chino. Patrick is Blanquito. I don’t know if I want to know what mine is.
July 17, 2001
L O C AT I O N
East Village, Manhattan
R E N T
$0
S Q U A R E F E E T
500 (three-room apartment in church)
O C C U PA N T
Edward Bordas (executive director, Shelter and Food for the Homeless, Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish)
It seems we should begin speaking of your destiny, since you’ve already run into it. As we sit near your 175 editions of Moby Dick—more on that later—please begin.
I was living in Williamsburg a few years ago. A friend at work asked if I’d build him some bookshelves in his new apartment in Brooklyn. I said, “Sure.” A few days later, I said, “Serge, can I have the cheap apartment that you’re vacating on 9th Street?” This isn’t the one I’m in now, though it’s on the same street. Serge said, “A lot of people have expressed interest, but I’ll keep you in mind.” I forgot about it. A few months later, he said, “The apartment’s yours.” It was just over $400, significantly cheaper than Williamsburg, which was $600. The morning I got the apartment, I called my mother at work in Massachusetts. I was raised in New Bedford. I said, “Mom, I’m moving to Ninth Street.” She said, “Between what and what?” I said, “B and C.” She said, “Get out of here.” I said, “It’s a safe neighborhood.” She said, “I know it is. Do you know who lived there?” I said, “Who, Frank O’Hara?” She said, “No, your father! We met on that block, three doors away.”
Tell about your father, the Catholic priest.
He was ordained in ’67. In ’69 he came to New York from Iowa with a group of priests and seminarians to work in a poor neighborhood. The seven of them rented an apartment at 644 East Ninth. My mother’s good friend from high school lived on the block. When my mother was moving down to 13th and First, her friend said, “I know a bunch of young, strong guys.” So he got all the priests to help her move—well, except my father; he came later to the party she had to thank the priests.
Was it love at first sight?
I don’t know, but my mother said to my father, “You can’t be a priest; you’re too short.” Then it sort of blossomed from there. He decided to leave the priesthood. This was a time when so many were leaving. My mother’s friend next door on Ninth Street was a parole officer and got a job in New Bedford. My parents went, too, and got jobs as supervisors at a halfway house for mentally retarded men. We lived in the house. I remember one guy, Uncle Bernie. He never knew what day it was, but he had social skills. He’d take us to the dog pound—a wonderful guy, a sweetheart. I went to Brandeis. After college, ’94, I commuted to Boston from New Bedford, three hours each way—I couldn’t afford an apartment on my salary—and worked in Boston for City Year, an urban peace corps. Then I was at a VA hospital in Maryland, a Red Cross Disaster Relief Center—there was some flooding in Washington State—the Community Service Society of New York, the Family Center...
Now you run a soup kitchen where homeless people come to eat.
I always wanted to do this kind of work. I feel I have an obligation to help other people. It’s just the values my parents instilled in me.
But you do get to live in the church’s cheerfully renovated apartment that comes along with your job, which you got by accident online over a year ago, after you lost that other apartment. We don’t have room to discuss your girlfriend in Hell’s Kitchen—you met her when she was working at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and you said to your friend Josh, “Who’s the one in the brown cords?”—but how do the 175 editions of Moby Dick fit in the picture?
When I was in AmeriCorps in Maryland, I had a friend on my team, and we’d hit all the used-book stores. I began seeing different editions. I said, “I’m going to start a collection.” You see, New Bedford suffers from a terrible inferiority complex. It fell on hard times like a lot of smaller cities in the Northeast. Moby Dick celebrates New Bedford as the wealthy whaling port of the nineteenth century. So the greatest American novel begins in New Bedford. Though, wait, Moby Dick actually starts in Manhattan.
The same fate may be thine.
April 16, 2002
LOCATION
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
RENT
$236.80 (government subsidized)
SQUARE FEET
450 (one-bedroom apartment in 1960s Mitchell-Lama regulated high rise)
OCCUPANT
Etta Sherez (retired hatmaker; retired supervising clerk, Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity)
You’re going away from here soon, from your apartment on the boardwalk where the Russian couples walk arm in arm and the air comes in from the sea. I notice you have an avocado velveteen couch, gold vertical blinds, and a framed photo of Einstein. When did you move here?
I’m here about nineteen years in this building. I’m from the Lower East Side, then Williamsburg. I came to visit in the twenties. My family always went to the baths.
The Brighton Baths opened in 1907—swimming pool, knish-eating contests, mah-jongg. In later years, Milton Berle, Herman’s Hermits. Those were the days!
I took a locker. I was always here. My sister Minnie came with me. She said, “This is no-man’s-land. It’s all women.” She was a big hit with the men. She married three times. My father went to yeshiva in Europe, Austria. He didn’t have a trade. In the yeshiva they told the boys they should go to the new country. He left my mother. She was angry. She came here to get a divorce but she decided not to. My father was a very handsome man and she thought she’d have attractive children. I have two beautiful sisters who look like my father. I look like my mother. If it weren’t for Poppa coming here, we’d have been in Auschwitz. At first, he slept in the back of a shop. He didn’t have an apartment. He bought a house in Williamsburg. He said it was beneath him to live in somebody else’s house. Peter Luger’s was a few blocks from our house. I’ve never eaten there. Who comes to a neighborhood like that and pays those prices? We had this mortgage on the house. So I only went to school to 9-B. I took typing. It was the Depression.
You got a job in millinery?
Arlé Hats, with embroidery, very expensive. I lived at home all the time. The others got married. I lost my mother in ’55. I moved out, to the Belleclaire, 77th and Broadway. My friends from millinery were there. These gals were like sisters to me. I hated the Belleclaire. My two girlfriends had a three-room apartment they shared. I had a room. I couldn’t live like that. My brother-in-law walked in and said, “This place is going to be a hot box in the summer.” I moved to Crown Heights in Brooklyn ’cause my brother lived there. Crown Heights changed. I moved to Flatbush, Garfield’s Cafeteria. Wherever I lived, I went to the Brighton Baths. When I worked for the city, I’d get off at four, ride to the baths instead of going home. Of course then I’d jump in the ocean and swim.
Did you always know you’d move to Brighton Beach?
I was going to move to Kings Highway. I said, “What am I doing? I’ll move here.” One of the girls in millinery, her cousin lived here, in this building, which is for senior citizens. It’s only a block from the baths. On the building’s twenty-fifth anniversary they made a beautiful party—unlimited liquor. There’s nothing here anymore. The baths closed. Only Russian restaurants. I can’t go in the ocean—I get ear infections. I look out. I cry. I see them jump in the water. I can’t take one step on that sand. The sand shifts. I’m arthritic. I’m ninety. I won’t be here very long. I don’t kid myself. I just want my last years to be comfortable. Where I’m going, they include one meal a day.
Seabrook in New Jersey—one of the new senior “campus style” communities.
They have a lovely pool, classes. I’ll take computer. It’s $148,000 down for one bedroom but you get it back if you move, or it goes into your estate. Rent’s $1,290 a month. For dinner they have a very nice restaurant.
There’s a photo in the Seabrook brochure of all these men wearing yachting caps and working on model sailboats.
The thing is, you don’t have to worry about the weather. You don’t have to worry is it raining or snowing. You never have to go out.
September 7, 1999
The city can be so dark during the day. The tall buildings of Wall Street, the black eyes of the garment district, the buildings where money is made. But in the night, the earth and brick move into the shadow. Night Town turns liquid, all white and gold. More than 300,000 street lights go on, mercury green, sodium pumpkin. There is the street of chandeliers on the Bowery, the Empire State Building all colored on top for holidays, the nocturnal purple of where bats live at the zoo.
Rooms appear and disappear as lights go on and off. There’s a reading light all by itself.
I never wrote a “Shelter” column in the moonlight—most are white and blue, the light of people in the day or at sunset—though one time, way past midnight, a man showed me Jupiter light in a telescope.
I never went to Times Square in the mad neon night where new worlds await. Here it is now: the Madame Tussauds sign in orange—the “u” is out. “JVC” in white under a big globe, a video of a giant lizard, a shocking pink for NASDAQ.
The sky is a dark and blueless gray.
Wait, it’s turning yellow—a storm is coming. Got to go.