It was in 1958 I went to live under a tenement in the area of New York City
then known as the Upper Lower East Side, and later as the East Village.
I do not believe my moving there had any part
in this change of identity.
(illo: Lee Hoffman: Cowgirl Hoffman digging outside house)
In a time when one could hardly expect to
rent even a studio apartment in NYC for less
than three figures a month, I enjoyed rubbing
it in with the statement that "I have a four
room pad. I pay $35 a month, but of course
that includes gas and electricity."
Though there really were four rooms, they
were somewhat undersize rooms. I came to think
of it as three very small rooms and a dandy
closet. The living room and kitchen weren't too bad. Each was about
10'x10'. The other two rooms were about 7'x9' and 7x7', but a three foot
swath through each was taken up by walking space. It was a railroad (or shotgun) apartment, each room opening into the next.
When I moved in, I knew the place was too small. It continued to be too small the entire thirteen years I lived there. Aside from that, from the john being in the hall, and from the only heat being provided by the kitchen stove and a small radiator hanging from the living room ceiling, it was a great place to live.
The main reason this delightful abode was so inexpensive was that it was illegal for anyone to live in it. That was the fault of the city of New York, not the apartment. Although it did have an exterior window in each room, the city didn't approve of the front one not reaching above street level. Nor did they approve of the oil tank for the building's heat being under the living room floor.
The living room and kitchen each had to do multi-duty. The couch in the living room became my bed at night and served as my typing chair by day. This was quite convenient. My typewriter lived on a low table with wheels that I pulled up to couchside. I could sit crossed-legged on the couch while I typed, and spread papers and reference books out to either side. The radio and hi fi were within reach on the foot-deep window sill immediately behind the couch and the front half of the TV was in the bookcase across the room. These rooms had windows in the walls between
them. Since the TV was twice as deep as the bookcase, its hind half hung through the window into the second room. That room was the one where the mimeo resided and sundry stuff got stowed for the time being when there was no place else to put it. Lisa Johnson christened it, aptly, "The Bone Room."
The smallest room was closet and storage space for things demoted from the bone room. I covered each end wall with an industrial-strength steel bookcase, and put a clothes rod between them. Then came the kitchen/ bathroom/ workshop. It had a dandy primitive version of a double sink. Half was a bathtub. The tub was a long-legged model with a step-ladder for access. It was a delight. Unlike the bathtubs I've had since, it was deep enough and long enough for
me to submerge my entire body up
to the shoulders. And some
previous tenant had added the
convenience of a shower ring above
it. Because there was a window
directly behind it, bathing could
be a mite chilly in the winter,
but one could get a little heat
in the kitchen from the oven of
the gas stove (which lacked an
oven door).
(illo: Hoffman: Standing in the bathtub)
The other half of this double-sink
was a standard turn-of-the century porcelain-on-cast iron model, with a large chunk of the porcelain missing from the high backsplash. The doors through the apartment were in a line with the sink, and a former tenant had used this long clear area for a shooting gallery. He missed his target once. Fortunately he was only shooting .22 shorts.
I'd been living the apartment for several years before I discovered that while the kitchen did have wall-to-wall linoleum, it did not have wall-to-wall floors.
I had noticed that the footing was a bit bouncy in front of the sink. I figured over the decades a few floorboards had suffered enough dampness to make them a little soft, so one day when I happened onto some aircraft-grade
aluminum panels in a Canal Street surplus store, I bought a couple. I planned to take up the linoleum and put the aluminum over the weak spots in the floor.
When I lifted the linoleum I discovered there wasn't any floor under it. Those decades of dampness had softened it to the point of total disintegration. Removing more linoleum, I found that the de-floored portion extended over under the bathtub. One of its long legs dangled high and dry.
Fortunately my friend, Aaron Rennert, had come over to participate in my home improvement project. He suggested we get some lumber to go between the beams and the tub. We had plans to get together with Don & Jo Meisner later, and all go out to dinner together, but obviously my floor job was going to take longer than just tacking down some metal sheets would have. I called Don & Jo to tell them we wouldn't be able to make it, we had to go find a lumberyard and buy a floor.
How much floor did we need, Don asked. I told him what we'd measured the hole at. He said to hang on, he thought he had a piece of plywood in his closet that might yield what we needed.
The piece of plywood Don brought over turned out to need only one small corner sawn off to make it fit the hole in the floor with remarkable precision. I jacked the tub up on my knee while the men maneuvered the
plywood into place. They made quick work of finishing the job, and we all went to Chinatown for dinner after all.
As I said, it was a great place to live. Remind me some time and I'll tell you about the mouse, and the rat, and the time it rained in my kitchen, and the time the overhead radiator in the living room filled up with hot water and blew its valve.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
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