OY + YO = home
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OY + YO = home
by Zachary Thacher
October 2020 -- New York
After seven months of living in rural New England, I’ve now landed in the most inevitable place possible for a guy priced out of Manhattan—and who also became alienated by the “luxury” now dominating a once scrappy and creative island. Inevitably, I’m now living in the borough where OY meets YO. It’s my happy place. If you don’t know where I mean, keep reading…
But hey, why not return to Manhattan? Great question. The 2008 financial meltdown taught New York developers and our ostensibly “liberal" government nothing. Was there soul searching and bold new low cost cooperatives for middle class people? Did the wealthy oligarchs depart for Florida and middle-income people move in?
For the past twelve years we’ve charged ahead, after Wall Street destroyed our economy, with the same fervency to steal wealth upwards. Bush, Obama, Trump, no difference. We’re more and more a city of a few white people clutching onto their wealth while masses of disenfranchised people afford less and less, especially during Covid.
When you have a glut of $2 million one-bedroom apartments, you know something is wrong. (The link goes to a real estate listing that shows 123 Manhattan apartments selling from $2M to $4.5M. For a one bedroom. Think about that.)
For me, Hudson Yards is what sent me teetering in 2019. It’s a housing project for the wealthy few, subsidized by the government via lax zoning and tax breaks, since American socialism is for the rich. Everyone else gets warlordism, I mean, capitalism. Don’t believe me? Try getting lower cost internet for your home. Try getting a home.
Hudson Yards is a symbol of a greater trend, and a physical manifestation of it. Its aggression cloaked in sub zero banality. If this is what Manhattan prioritizes: ultra-expensive, architecturally-vapid towers surrounding a mall of high-end chain stores, fenced off by a wall lording over 10th Avenue, and the invisible wall of wealth you have to scale to live or eat or shop there, then that’s it. Game over, dude. There’s no future for Manhattan except as a playground for the 1%. Add as many decimals as you need.
For the record, this is also happening in Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. There’s a giant rusting toilet bowl that is Barclay’s Center, a venue named after a bank that rigged interest rates for years which ended in long prison terms for the firm’s entire c-suite. Oh wait. They’re living large in Marylebone.
Thankfully, Brooklyn is vast enough to absorb the Atlantic Yards mega project that is moving as slowly as Jeff Bezos’ charitable donations, but Hudson Yards has dented Manhattan irreparably. It’s nearly 30 acres of glass towers built on a giant pedestal — metaphors abound — that I would say reminds me of Dubai, except Dubai is far more bold, and also, far more expected from a fossil-fuel autocracy. Hudson Yards’ stalagmites of glass rectangles are world-class middle fingers to the rest of us. Maybe the Trump-supporting developer, Stephen Ross, has a wicked sense of humor. Certainly he has the adjective.
Manhattan’s older neighborhoods are still gorgeous gems of 19th Century pre-car living, I lived in the West Village for nearly 20 years, but they’ve become as precious and darling as a museum funded by rich people. What happened to the hole in the wall Italian restaurant on Hudson Street with Chicken Milanese on arugula for under $10 and served red wine in plastic? The Czech café on Perry Street with writers and loungers who chatted with you instead of staring at phones? The antique shop on Bleecker run by a woman who looked just like David Bowie’s sister, down to the blonde hair and heroin ballet figure? First they were replaced by anti-fashion Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers boutiques, then they were replaced by… empty space. Storefronts shuttered. Years before Covid. Where will those owners of $2 million plus one-bedroom shop for hundred dollar t-shirts? (Cf. Jeff Bezos.)
Hudson Yards pitched me off balance as a guy who loved downtown living after having spent an incredible day as a teenager in Soho in the mid 80s. Seeing my uncle’s girlfriend’s loft, meeting her skateboarding son with floppy dyed hair, gawking at fresh art by Keith Haring on city walls — that experience forever inspired me.
Manhattan became a lifelong lover I once had deep feelings for and now no longer recognized. What happened? It used to be so good. Now I don’t know, you’ve changed.
I could have done the off-balance shimmy for years longer, housing was expensive everywhere so why move? Then Covid pushed me. Hard. Fell right off the edge. And by fell I mean I fled — for friends in New England. They gave me seven blissful months of fresh air with wonderful company and outdoor meals and organic farming and camaraderie and safety and understanding when I was frightened. I am forever grateful.
During these long months of temporary staycation, I searched for a new longterm home, first by my friend’s farm outside Concord MA.
Then the Pioneer Valley around Northampton.
I visited a co-housing project in Moretown, VT. I moved in with friends in Charlotte, VT.
I Airbnb’ed in apartments by truck routes in the Hudson River Valley:
Hudson
Tarrytown
Beacon
I considered Rhinebeck and Hastings and New Paltz and other places, but everywhere I went, I knew no one. Most are great towns, housing is more affordable than Stephen Ross would have you believe, but what about winter and the isolation it will bring?
I pushed south, down to the mouth of the Hudson and then east, over the Atlantic inlet that forms the East River. I headed to the city for Rosh Hashanah, for dating, for family and for old friends.
So now you know, if you don’t know. (Cf. Biggie Smalls.) Oy, I’m in Brooklyn, Yo. Where Jewish and Black culture sparkle and reflect against each other and everyone else from all over the world so beautifully — as expressed by Deborah Kass’s 2015 sculpture.
Deborah Kass sculpture. Credit: brooklynjewish.org, because of course.
Brooklyn feels like home. Only took me twenty years of saying I’d move here to finally make it so, as Star Trek’s Captain Picard says. Patrick Stewart also lives in Brooklyn.
A single creative professional’s relatively privileged adventure for shelter while trying to stay connected to other humans during a pandemic may not be as important to you as it is to me, but we’ve all been through this, right? It's a time of solidarity.
Now it’s fall. Outside of Republican super-spreading malevolence, we are in… The Plateau. Not the cool Montreal neighborhood, that’s for next month if Republican super-spreading malevolence steals the election. Again. And again, if you count Bush. Which you should.
There’s no real plateau right now. Infection rates are climbing and some days over 1,000 people die of Covid. It’s horrific and makes me envy each one of the stars on the EU flag. Despite the heroic efforts of a team of doctors and early access to experimental drugs to save an obese 74-year-old with a personality disorder, you don’t want this disease.
What has plateaued is fear. We’re used to this. It’s been seven months. Our neural pathways are cruelly carved. We got this. It’s not strange. It’s, hey: obviously mask up when you’re outdoors. Obviously only socialize outside. For entertainment you can take a walk to a park and field and pasture.
And… that’s it folks! This is your life until Labor Day.
Just don’t ask which year.
The plateau means, to me at least, that we have a perch that gives us perspective. We’re on a mesa overlooking the past and future. We’re not running scared, we’re gathering our resources.
So I moved from Vermont to Beacon to Brooklyn, first to a friend’s empty apartment in tree-lined Ditmas Park for two weeks, then to a short-term furnished rental in tree-lined Boerum Hill. I’m hunting now for longer term housing I can afford that works for me. Wish me luck.
Why Brooklyn? It’s vastly overpriced compared with anywhere else. We’re talking more than $1,000 per square foot, which is great if a) you have rich parents or b) your job at Private Equity LTD is to impoverish Americans or c) you have more clients than I do. Otherwise… not such a great deal.
The bad Brooklyn list keeps going. First — expensive housing…
Second — There are subways here that mostly point to Manhattan, but you don’t want to use them or go there.
Third — You can’t drive easily to get groceries. Driving for groceries was a revelation for me in March when I lived in regular America.
The first few times I shopped at an enormous grocery store in suburban Massachusetts, I abandoned my shopping cart by the cashier, grabbed the full bags with super human effort and then waddled under their weight to my car. People looked at me like I had farted, loudly.
For over twenty years of Manhattan living I had carried my food by hand from the grocery store to my apartment, which was a four floor walkup. This is normal.
One day at a Whole Foods because obviously I shopped there, while wearing a mask that fogged over my glasses and with rubber gloves I had to carefully take off and replace each time I used my phone, I finished paying for my food. No I don’t have an Amazon Prime Membership, monopolies are bad, don’t you read my sensitive blog? Once again I tried to stash my shopping cart by the cashier. There was nowhere to leave it that didn’t block people. Why wasn’t there a place to leave your cart by the register?
Oh.
Keep your cart after paying. Then wheel the full cart outside, right to your car! Which has a trunk! Amazing!
The heavens opened and angels chorused — right there in the strip mall.
But now in Brooklyn, that ain’t happening. Because…
Fourth — You can’t park. If you go somewhere and need to stop, you must start the parking process, which is as fickle and random as a five-year-old at dinner. Driving a car in New York is vastly different than walking out of the subway or docking a Citibike or you know, just walking to where you want to go. There will be no open spots where you need them. You have to put the car in second gear and watch your rearview mirror for cars behind you while looking both right and left for a legal parking spot and since you’re driving 3,500 pounds of metal, please look forward. All at the same time. While listening to WNYC. This requires slightly more coordination, grit and optimism than conducting brain surgery after a few cocktails. (Which also cost a fortune in Brooklyn.)
Food, shelter and transportation are the basics, and they are way harder here than in Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, Oklahoma, anywhere. But it’s worth it, right? There are people I know here and can meet. There are quiet tree-lined streets where leafy boughs reach over the rooftops, everywhere, for miles. Restaurants have turned parking spots into oases for outdoor socializing. It’s a residential borough. People say hi.
Is there crime here? At my current temporary rental in a fancy brownstone neighborhood that hopefully won’t someday be a museum, we don’t lock the inside doors in the building, just the two outer doors to the stoop. But the family upstairs keep forgetting to close the inner vestibule door. The security perimeter on Dean Street is awfully thin. Don’t tell anyone.
A few weeks ago, in my first Brooklyn neighborhood, I parked my car relatively close to where I needed to be.
(The most gorgeous person you’ve ever seen walks up to you with a big smile and says you are beautiful. Then they hand you a $100 bill. This is what good parking feels like.)
As I walked home, I felt like something was off with my car, but by then I was over a block away so I was like, nah, it’s cool.
The next day I returned. Sat in my car. I could hear a lot of street sounds. That’s weird. Why is everything so loud when I’m inside my car? Looked over. The passenger window was down. In Brooklyn. For 24 hours. Nothing was missing.
Update: Yesterday I got in my car parked perilously close to a fire hydrant. It had a $115 parking ticket. Then I noticed both front windows were down. All night. In a busier neighborhood.
Brooklyn giveth and Brooklyn taketh.
For now, it’s taken me. And I’m grateful.
I’m staying until Labor Day. Just don’t ask which year.
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Thanks for reading!