Moving on...

I haven't posted in a couple of days because I've been scouring real estate listings. After my little into the big city I've expanded my range of possible locations. I'm thinking of moving closer to the action. In any event, I really need to move out this house. I don't think the mold here is toxic but the dampness seems to be impossible to get rid of and I'm sure it's not doing me any good. I've spent hours pouring through websites and trying to figure out my options.

Meanwhile, the thought of moving always reminds me of places I used to live and by chance I found these photos of my old apartment on South Street in lovely downtown Noho. I see the photog is calling the building McCormick condos but when I lived there we just it Dick Shea's place. That's the trouble with Noho, it got so popular that the big city folks came and in and gentrified the place. Most of the apartments in town became expensive condos, forcing out the young people and working class who built the charm of the town in the first place.

Anyway, I loved this apartment in many ways. I had some of my best times and some of my worst times there. I can't seem to save them to my computer but this shot is obviously of the front. You had to drive under the bridge to get to the parking lot. This next shot shows my place. It was huge having been the former community center of the building when the place was first built. It had four bedrooms but unfortunately only one bath. Since I had a long string of roommates while I was there, this presented some challenging mornings when schedules collided. But otherwise there was enough space to foster more or less peaceful co-existence. At least as peaceful as it can be when you have four to ten people staying at any given time. A lot of the housemates were musicians and were forever bringing stray crashers home.

The apartment ran the whole length of the black rail fence all the way through to the elevator. As you can see the back porch was huge and that also helped keep the peace. You could always go outside if it got too hectic indoors. When I lived there, I always had tons of plants out there. My room was the second window down right before the wooden railings so you can imagine it was rather like living in a fishbowl but it was okay most of the time. You got used to people stomping by on the walkway.

I lived there the whole six months it took them to build the elevator. That was not entirely pleasant. The idiots would show up every day at 6:00 and start throwing cinder blocks around, swearing at each other at the top of their lungs. It was hellish for the whole building of course, since most of the tenants worked in the local restaurants and slept in the mornings. I thought they would never finish but once it was done, it was a magnificent toy. It was done in polished steel and was huge inside. We often talked about having a building wide elevator party where everyone would bring food and ride it from floor to floor to pass it out. We never got it together.

I always hated the way it looked, but it surely came in handy when you were schlepping your laundry to the basement or your purchases upstairs. And there a high turnover so someone was always moving. The building offered the world's best dumpster jumping. At the first of the month, you could furnish a whole house with what people threw out. Heck, I did furnish half of my new apartment once I finally went off on my own again with stuff I got there.