I know I said that I was planning on blogging about writing, and about my own peculiar process – and I will be doing that! But as I was rummaging through one of my kitchen cabinets this morning, looking for a particular kind of tea that I knew I had in there "somewhere",  I was reminded of one of the most frustrating things about having an apartment in Manhattan. 

This was back in the last 70s and 80s, of course, when I couldn't afford much and, with one notable exception, all the places I lived had VERY small kitchens and virtually no storage space. You crammed things in wherever you had room for them, and you scrounged the curbs the night before garbage pick-up to find old cabinets, shelves, or chests to put things in. 

I could never find ANYTHING in the West 44th street walk-up. Fortunately, the three kitchen cabinets we had were shallow, so you could empty them completely if you thought what you were looking for might be in the back. The canned and boxed goods were piled onto shelves that someone had put up back in the 1940s, and the dishes were stored --along with our clothes-- in one of the many plastic milk crates we lined up along the wall. We paid $410/month for that apartment. To give you an idea of proportion – three years later, when I was in law school, I rented a fairly large 2 bedroom, one bath apartment just outside of Philadelphia for about $225 a month. 

The notable exception, of course, was when I moved into a converted hotel on West 72nd Street. It was one of those grand old places, with two room service kitchens – one in the basement to serve the lower floors, and one midway up the building so that food could be delivered to the upper stories while it was still hot. My apartment was in the old service kitchen on the 18th floor – and when I say it was “in” the kitchen, that’s exactly what I mean.

The front door opened onto a large room with stainless steel-topped food preparation counters running down the center. The ovens and grills – several of each – were to the right, and several deep, industrial-sized sinks were to the left. The commercial refrigerators and freezers were long gone, but the building management had thoughtfully provided a mini-fridge instead. There was a short hall, only a few feet long, that led to an odd little room, barely six by six, that I suspect may have originally been a pantry, or more probably a mop closet.  To make myself a bed, I spread a bedroll-style twin mattress on top of the center prep tables, and when I needed to bathe, I sat in one of the sinks, and used the sprayer hose from the adjacent sink as a shower wand. The shared toilet was in a tiny cubicle almost directly across from my front door, but since all of the other apartments on the floor had their own bathrooms, I had the hall toilet to myself. The rent, by the way, was just shy of $700/ month. 

The most expensive place I rented during those years – as you may have noted, I moved frequently – was a two bedroom, one bath, sub-ground floor flat on University Place, very close to Union Square. The $1100/month rent included exclusive access to a small “backyard” – a small patch of dirt at the bottom of an air shaft between buildings, complete with a tiny patio large enough to fit two directors’ chairs and a café table – which received a few rays of natural light for perhaps 10 minutes a day when the sun could penetrate. This was also the apartment with the “Alien Bathroom” – a 4'x4' space that somehow managed to fit a toilet, a shower stall, and a sink – with an open air-shaft directly above the toilet that extended up 18 floors to the roof of the building. It got its unfortunate nickname because of the air shaft’s uncanny resemblance to the ducts where the creature from the Alien movies liked to lurk just before she attacked. 

The most bizarre apartment I ever rented in Manhattan was quite large – the entire top floor of a former industrial building located in a not-very-nice area near Wall Street, and close enough to the East River to smell it and gag in the summer. The bare bones of the place were gorgeous – unfinished brick walls; 16-foot ceilings pierced with 1930s era, exposed steel trusses; wooden plank floors aged to a color somewhere between bitter chocolate and black, and an entire wall of windows that extended from about waist-height to the ceiling. They were the multi-pane, factory-style windows, set into heavy metal frames that required an iron hook to tilt them open or closed.. 

In one corner, there was closet-sized room that contained a toilet and a spray wand attached to a wall faucet, but no sink or shower enclosure. To bathe, I stood against the wall opposite the toilet and aimed the wand as carefully as I could. When I was finished, I had to use a squeegee to push the excess water toward the small drain in the center of the tiled floor. The “kitchen” was a long, unfinished brick counter that reminded me of a rustic campground barbecue. It had a steel sink with a faucet and a cubbyhole where the landlord had installed one of the ubiquitous mini-fridges. Fortunately, it had been wired for electricity, so I was able to plug in a small hot plate and a second-hand Mr. Coffee. 

The truly remarkable thing about the place, though, was the bedroom.  There was a free-standing, steel spiral staircase installed in the very center of the space, not too far from the kitchen area. The upper “landing” was an immense construct made from several wooden shipping pallets that had been somehow fixed together, and then topped with plywood. A hole was cut in one side so that you could climb onto the platform from the stairs, and the entire thing was literally hung by chains from the steel trusses. The links were almost comically thick, and I later learned they were the kind used to anchor cargo ships! While the contraption was sturdy enough to support my weight, I didn’t dare risk a mattress for fear the pallets might buckle. So I relied on my trusty bedroll, and found some scrapes of baseboard that tacked to the edges of the platform so I wouldn’t accidentally roll off in the middle of the night. 

I never did manage to find in a “normal” apartment when I was living in New York. However, my experiences were great lessons for me when I moved to Los Angeles in the late 80s. Believe it or not, some of the rental units I saw when I first arrived made the hotel kitchen apartment seem luxurious and palatial in comparison. I suspect that “roughing it” in Manhattan also helped me when I bought my first home in LA – a 1909 Craftsman mini-mansion that had been condemned, and which I moved into when it had only three exterior walls.

But the details of that adventure will have to be the subject of another blog!