Joshua Bryce Newman

For the past four years we’ve been living together, Jess and I have been in the apartment she rightly calls my former bachelor pad. So we’ve been looking, for a while, for a next place to live.

As of now, we don’t have kids. But, in the next few years, we’re likely to pop out a first. Which adds a whole new level of complication to the search. Ideally, we’d find a two bedroom. But if we’re looking to buy, rather than rent, here in Manhattan, nice two bedroom / two baths easily creep up to the $2m mark. Which is, obviously, ridiculous. And while Brooklyn is cheaper, it isn’t hugely so.

Plus, of course, there’s the issue of schools – New York being a place where parents unblinkingly spend $30k a year to send their child to pre-school, though only after having pulled strings and competed for slots in the “right” ones.

In the rest of the country, this is the prime argument for the suburbs. And, indeed, 25 years ago, someone with kids in Manhattan (aside from multi-generationally wealthy New York families who send their kids as legacies to Chapin) would have already moved out. Staying in the city meant having essentially failed; the nice house in the suburbs was the overt goal.

Amongst my peers, however, the equation has flipped. We apparently all want to stay. Moving to the suburbs is, it seems, an admission of defeat, a sign you couldn’t make it in the city.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work in this new world order. While more and more of us want in rather than out, the number of two and three bedroom apartments, and the number of slots in good schools, has remained largely the same.

But the suburbs of New York are equally problematic. Most, for example, are a surprisingly long commute away. Unlike other US metros, that are now populating their first wave of suburbs, New York is working on it’s second or third. It could be argued that New York, in fact, largely invented the suburb, with families initially moving on up to outer Queens and Brooklyn, upper Bronx, or Staten Island.

By now, however, Sunnyside or Yonkers have long since reached their peak, and starkly declined. So the real estate that would elsewhere hold prime post-city living has instead become no-mans-land, thirty minutes of commute to be passed through. (Though perhaps this isn’t entirely new, but simply enlarged, since Fitzgerald trained past the ‘valley of ashes’, en route to the ‘East Egg’ of Great Neck eighty years back.)

As a result, even New York hedge fund partners pay good money to commute to lower Connecticut, as much as an hour and a half each way.

And with most of those suburbs, there’s the issue of what you find when you get there. I grew up in Palo Alto, CA; Jess in Newton, MA. While both are ostensibly suburbs, they’re more accurately small cities that just happen to be near larger cities (San Francisco and Boston, respectively). Whereas many suburbs of New York are really suburbs. The two restaurants they have close at 9:00. On the plus side, they don’t have a Starbucks; and, on the downside, they don’t have a Starbucks.

All of which leaves Jess and me without much of a clue what to do next. We’re busy looking, weighing the advantages of a grocery store down the block against not finding somebody else’s underwear somehow mixed in with your laundry after a trip to the building’s ill-maintained laundry facility. Fortunately, as demand and property taxes are working against us no matter what we choose, at least we’ll find a way to pay more than it’s worth for a solution that’s less optimal than it would be anywhere else. God bless New York.

Last night, I attended my friend Nic Rad’s gallery opening for his awesome PeopleMatter series of blogger and media personality portraits.

Then, once the gallery kicked us out, a slew of us headed down to The Half King for drinks.

We started out with a dozen people at the table, and as folks bid the crowd adieu, they left cash on the table to cover their drinks and tips.

Eventually, the bill came, and everyone tossed dollars into the pile. And I said to Nic, “I bet we have $90 of cash here.”

I was close. We had $92. Which, including tip, was slightly less than half of the $190 bill.

My guess wasn’t based on eyeballing the money pile. It was, instead, based on the First Law of Large Groups going Dutch: even when all the people there believe they’ve put in more than their share of the bill, the total falls $100 short.

And, of course, the corollary: the person who counts the money somehow gets stuck covering the shortfall.

In this case, Nic and I split it. But, really, I’m not entirely sure why this always happens. Do people not factor in tax and tip? Do they just suck at math?

Or, perhaps, have they caught on to a cheap living secret I never did? That if you stiff the group a bit, and then pretend you can’t count well enough to collect the dollars, some sucker like me will essentially pick up your first round.

As a San Francisco kid, borne of moderate temperatures and low humidity, I spend New York winters shivering violently, wishing for summer to arrive, and New York summers sweating through the sweltering heat, wishing for the return of winter cold.

But, for about a month of spring, and a month of fall, the weather is perfect, absolutely beautiful. During that month of fall I think, there’s no better place in the world to live than right here. And then during that month of spring I think, holy shit my eyes and ears and nose are itching so much that I should probably just shoot myself in the head.

I’m not sure what personally hugely allergenic tree, grass, or shrub it is that exists here on the East Coast yet remains blissfully absent on the West. But, whatever it is, I grew up without it, and therefore without any real seasonal allergies.

So, each year, at the start of April, as the pollen count climbs, hay fever catches me completely and totally off guard. Even this year, when I bought NasalCrom months in advance, and swore to start actually taking it a few weeks in advance of allergy season as the box presribes, I wasn’t ready. Because, this weekend, as my eyes started to redden, my nose began to itch and run, it still took me a few days to realize that, wait, I’ve seen these symptoms before!

So, NasalCrom it is. Plus whatever left-over allergy pills I can dig up from the back of our medicine cabinet. And maybe some of those anti-histamine eye-drops because, let’s face it, I’m a total pansy about all of this, and will drive everyone nuts with the complaining otherwise.

Wish me luck. And, if you have any drug recommendations, lifestyle tips, or other thoughts for a still relative allergy retard, certainly send them my way.

Took this photo out our window, about an hour back. Since then, police presence has doubled (to about 120 on that corner alone), barricades have gone up at the end of our block, and buckets of snow have started falling.

Next year, anywhere but Midtown.

As I’ve mentioned before, Jess and I are looking to move. Over the course of the last couple of years, Times Square has grown and grown, increasingly eating our neighborhood, and – most recently – entirely taking over our corner. This time of year, I can barely push my way through the lines of tourists waiting for uptown double-decker sightseeing buses as I head to work. And, to add insult to injury, in a climate of downward spiraling real estate cost, our landlord is trying to raise our rent.

So, we’re leaving.

Jess, however, already has. At least mentally. While we’re still just knee-deep in the apartment search process, she’s nearly finished decorating our notional apartment.

She has colors picked out for various rooms, magazine and blog photos clipped for layout inspiration, and a growing wish-list of replacement furniture and art, as much of what I own is old, well loved, and certainly ready to retire.

The problem is, Jess can’t resist the siren song of an excellent deal. And, worse, she’s a consummate deal-finder. So, though the apartment is still imagined, the furniture we’ve begun to accumulate for it is real. Real, and very large.

This past week, for example, she found a high-end, multi-thousand dollar armchair, at 90% off. Not long before that, she found a giant Ming lamp, similar to one they sell at William Sonoma Home for about $800, at an antiques warehouse for $10.

Fortunately, it all barely fits. At least until the new sleeper couch and recliner – both significantly discounted, and both delayed by custom upholstery – arrive.

The countdown is on.

Early 20′s babysitter, to the two little kids with whom she was holding hands:

“You know what this is? This is Time Square. It’s a place that people who don’t live in New York like to visit.”

When I moved into my apartment, some three years ago and change, I really liked Hell’s Kitchen. I had already lived in the neighborhood for several years, and was moving just two blocks down and a half block to the east.

But that small distance was a big change. It put me on the corner of 8th Ave, less than ten blocks up from the heart of darkness: Times Square.

Which was bad. And with each passing year, got worse. The area gentrified. More and more tourists poured down my block.

By now, on my way to work, I have to elbow through crowds of gawkers from fly-over states. (A family of ten standing motionless in the middle of the sidewalk as the father points: “look, Martha, it’s a tall buildin’!”)

During ‘christmas season’ (September through February), I have to divert my commute entirely – five blocks up, five blocks back down – just to avoid the enthralled-to-standstill Rockefeller Center crowds. (“Look, Martha, it’s a tall tree!”)

Jess arrived long after the neighborhood’s grit had been largely polished away, never lived closer to 9th Ave to see that there really are (or, at least, were) restaurants and shops nearby aside from the Olive Garden and the Phantom of Broadway Gift Shop (“We have good price I [HEART] NY shirt!”).

So, not surprisingly, she hated it from the get-go. Not our apartment itself, which we both really like. But, in short, pretty much everything within a ten block radius of our front door.

And, increasingly, so do I. So, post-wedding, we’ll be kicking off an apartment search.

It’s a terrible, terrible time to do so. Sales prices are on the verge of ‘readjustment’, yet rental prices are fast on the climb.

Still, for the sake of our sanity, we’re not sure we really have a choice.

As for specifics – like neighborhood – we’re not yet entirely sure. Maybe downtown. Or uptown. In short, pretty much anywhere but where we are right now.

They say Time Square’s the core of the Big Apple; by now, we’re both pretty sure it’s the pits.

You’re trying way too hard.

Sincerely,

joshua

It’s 101 degrees here in Union Square, the humidity is off the charts, and, of course, the air conditioner in the Cyan office decided today would be a great time to take the afternoon off.

It’s time for a drink.

New Yorkers generally maintain that our reputation for standoffishness is unfounded, that we’re actually a rather friendly group.

And, by and large, I’d agree.

Except for in my apartment building, where none of the tenants talk to any of the other tenants. Ever.

I’d noticed this when I first moved into the building three or four years back, but hadn’t thought of it again since, until Jess observed the same thing a month or so back.

In her prior Murray Hill digs, she pointed out, neighbors would say hello waiting for the elevator, chat idly on their way to and from their front doors. But, in our current building, a veil of silence descends at the lobby, and doesn’t let up until people slam their apartment doors behind them.

We’ve tried to bend that unwritten rule – a simple ‘have a good day’ on the way out of the elevator, a ‘how are you?’ on the way in – with zero results. The tenants stare at us blankly, or continue to intently examine the walls.

At this point, I’m considering options for upping the ante – breaking into song and dance in the lobby, doing elevator handstands – but I’m a bit worried even that might not yield a response. Stepford, indeed.