New York Travel Diary 9th May 2010

Sunday 9th May 2010

Sunday was mainly spent house hunting. Apartment hunting more really than anything else. Fang needs to find new lodgings by May 31st and move out, otherwise she is moving home to Brooklyn until accommodations can be found, and thus commute the time sucking distance every day to do her work as a resident at NYU hospitals’ pathology department on the 4th floor of Bellvue hospital.

There were some leads and she had arranged to go see some, all mainly found through Craigslist. The first one was undoubtedly the median of NYC type of apartment, with better, and worse. The guy who showed us was Keith Knight, from Citi-Habitats, a realtor firm. The apartment asking price was I think from memory $1300 a month, a studio apartment in Midtown area. The floors were black linoleum or vinyl by appearance, dirty. One wall was exposed brick, the bathroom dingey, the real only redeeming feature was a gas stove and stainless fridge. Heat and hot water included as standard. Apparently they wanted to fill it soon and quickly since there was meant to be a tenant but they had pulled out at the last minute. Personally, I thought it was reasonable for the area, but would have definitely preferred better. Size wise, it was reason really for two people to live in, it just prevents hoarding.

The second property was shown to us by a guy called Carlos, who was the superintendent for the building. There was in fact two properties in the same building on the Upper East Side. First floor, apartment 1 was a studio apartment. It was clean, polished light wooden floors, gas stove, dishwasher, bathroom. Asking price was $1250ish as Carlos wasn’t sure since he was only the super and not the realtor. While it was slightly smaller in feel to the first place, it was nicer, and probably similar sized but just arranged different with how the kitchen and bathroom space was orientated. Carlos then took us up to the 5th floor (10 flights of stairs lol, no elevator) to apartment 15, a one bedroom apartment going for an undisclosed amount. Well, lets say, it was beautiful. The bedroom was all the way through to the back of the apartment with a door separating it from the living space. In size, it’s quite similar to my room back at home in Sydney, so I knew I would definitely be able to live in there. Its big enough to fit a double bed for sure plus a closet, and from memory I’m pretty sure it has a small closet inside I think. The living space was similar sized to the bedroom but I think a little thinner in width, but I think you’d be able to fit in a two seater sofa plus a single and perhaps a small tv cabinet if you wanted, or a desk for a computer, while there was still kitchen/dining space that would be able to fit in a small four person table and chairs. The kitchen was very small however, with a gas stove and supposedly a dishwasher also that I didn’t notice. The fridge was present as an older white enamel thing. The bathroom wasn’t too bad either, small, but usable. No laundry but a Laundromat was available just down the street with brand new machines and at $2.50 a wash or dry (so pretty much $5 a load since the apartment has not much space for hanging dry space outside) was reasonable. At the dorm at the moment, it’s $1.75 a wash or dry.

We then traversed back down to the Village area, a more trendy place, kind of the “hip” part of young people’s hangout areas. A Russian lady showed us two places, and man, were they shitholes. Unbelievable prices also required for them at $1400 and $1300 for two studios. The first one, similar size to the first place with Keith, but a wooden floor, and the rest was comparably bad, though Keiths apartment was worse as there was an exterminators sign saying to leave your doors open for extermination of rats whenever the exterminator came. But, the Village apartment downstairs smelt like urine. Not sure which one was particularly worse. The second studio that the Russian showed us was.... so incredibly bad that I was amazed that anyone would really even want to consider it, though I guess if you were desperate and had the money too burn, you’d take it. To get to it, you had to pass through a front building, cross a courtyard and enter the building behind. The building door in the second one was busted so you had to have pretty strong fingers to pull the stub of a door knob to open it too or be stuck inside. The apartment was... abysmal. Enter the door, immediately in-front is a door and to the right is the kitchen, and the studio space. Well, let’s say that if you put a single bed in it, you’d have filled half of the space. Virtually no space for a table or anything else let alone where you’d put your clothing... Then of course comes the question of amenities. I suspected the door was the bathroom and I was right, but even then I got a second shock. Opening the door, left was the toilet, direct forward was the sink, no shower?.... wait for it, turning right progressively is a wall, wall, wall, gap. Wait, what? The gap was about maybe 50cm/20 inches wide, I could just squeeze in, where a plastic shower base could be seen. O_O; I stuck my head into the space, and yeap, that was the shower. It was a virtual deathtrap, though if you wanted to defend yourself against medieval attackers who had no explosives, it would be perfect since you could just stab whoever tried to come into the space as they passed into the gap. If they threw in a grenade or bomb, you’d be screwed, though they could smoke you out if you had no water running to knock out the smoke. Un-fricken-believable. So then, we wandered around more calling numbers on signs that said apartments for rent, talking to people who picked up, to find that they pretty much didn’t have anything in the price range that we were looking for. One place, Stuyvesant Town, had no studios, but one bedroom places starting at $2500 a month.... yikes.....

So in conclusion, the further you live from downtown, and trendy places, the better and cheaper if you’re willing to commute. The requirements we were working with pretty much covered a 30min travel time by subway or bus, and was around the $1200 +/- a little bit a month. So, at the moment, the one bedroom place was the fore runner and an application has been placed with the realtor. The original price was $1400, but after some haggling, we hope to get it for $1250 but they told us that they had some more interest in the apartment, so we might lose out should there be people willing to pay the $1400 price tag. Just have to wait and see.

Later that day after the walking around and movements looking at apartments, we headed back down to the Village area, and met up with some friends to have dinner on Bleaker St. We ended up going to a Italian place called Tattiora I think, I’ll have to check. Hand-made pasta supposedly, very fresh ingredients, very classic Italian. Prices were reasonable for such a place and the dishes ordered by the others included gnocchi, ravioli, fettuccine and a vegetarian penne of sorts. For me however, I ordered a spinach and cheese, wrapped in chicken, with portabella mushroom sauce, that also came with a side dish of spaghetti with a simple tomato and basil sauce. It was really good, and very filling. The atmosphere of this place was cosy and dimly lit, but it felt good and it was quite full when we arrived after 9pm. By the time we left, close to 11pm, there were still people there eating.

For dessert, we went to a place called Rocco’s, a patisserie place. There were lots of cookies, biscuits, biscotti, cakes, tarts, sweets and dessert goodies. Being so full from dinner, I pretty much only had a hazelnut steamed milk while the others had drinks and also some food, including a chocolate mousse cup, a fruit tart and a raspberry chocolate pie (pretty much raspberry chocolate cake with cream on top, cake with a pastry base/wrap around the edges of a pan is called pie I think). After dinner, two of them came back with us to the apartment and crashed over for the night chatting away before going to sleep.