Everyone should move now and then.

June 24, 2009 by

Moving is a good thing. It’s like a re-boot, an opportunity to wipe off the slate and start from scratch. The best part was cleaning out what we called our “utility drawers,” which really were just places to stash random crap that we didn’t have an immediate use for. Found lots of interesting stuff there:

  • Many, many types of tapes, including the “original lost roll of tape” and many “replacement rolls of tape when the original roll of tape got lost.”
  • Same for batteries, lots of batteries.
  • Enough spare change to probably buy a couple of sandwiches from Lenny’s.
  • Menus from closed restaurants.
  • Proof of car insurance, something that was supposed to be in my car when I got pulled over by suburban cops a few months ago, and would have saved me about $100 of tickets and a few hours of my life.
  • Ipod headsets.
  • Phone charger cords, many many cords.

You get the point.  Moving gives you a chance — an expensive, time-consuming, debilitating chance — to clear out the detritius of your life and start from scratch. I don’t recommend it unless you’re actually going to a new home, though.

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Filed Under: Humor, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With:

My first suburban accomplishments

June 24, 2009 by

So how is the adjustment to SUMA going? So far, I have eaten Chinese takeout from a storefront restaurant, shot a 87 (my best round ever) at my local country club, watched a Yankee win from a big overstuffed chair, drove to two different quickie marts to find a copy of the New York Times. More importantly, I’ve eaten three meals so far with my parents, hung out with my youngest brother, reprogrammed my mother’s car so she can get country music on her satellite radio, and slept 9 hours at one time. So far so good.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Good Night, 82d Street

June 23, 2009 by

I remember the first time I saw this apartment. August 1994. I had been looking for about six months, and actually had seen an apartment in the building the first time I went out with a broker.  But Iwasn’t ready to pull the trigger the first time out, and someone else got it.

Then it happened that another apartment in the building came up for sale, which is a little funny considering that there were only four units in the building — a four story townhouse on 82d between Columbus and Central Park West.  This apartment was on the fourth floor, with a roof deck.  Owned by a nice couple, Ben and Susan, with their young child. (As I wrote this, I looked Ben up, he’s still a doctor in Manhattan, actually wrote a book — the scary part is when I think about the young child who was playing when I saw the apartment the first time, who’s probably close to college by now).

One bedroom. One bath. Nice kitchen. Brick walls, wood floors, fireplace.  That’s what I wanted.  The bonus was a spiral staircase from the bedroom going up to a private wood deck that I could already see filled with various friends and potential female acquaintances.  Perfect bachelor pad, I thought. Had an accepted offer three days later, no second thoughts.

But the “bachelor pad” thing didn’t really work out. I met the woman who would later (much later) become my wife four days after I first saw the apartment, spent an hour at dinner sketching out the layout on napkins at a restaurant in Little Italy.  By the time I actually moved into the place in December, we were serious and she was helping me shop for furniture.

Ten years later, as we were thinking about getting a larger place, the joys of 600 square feet in a fourth-floor walkup having slightly faded, we found out that the couple who lived below us were thinking of selling.  We bought their place, combined it with ours, built a proper room on the roof.  Actually created something. An apartment we helped design, one that was unequivocally and indisputably ours. Until now.

So I’ve been in the building since 1994, except for two years in California for school, and six months in the renovation exile in Suma.  A little math — 15 years, minus 2.5 years. That’s almost 5,000 days, over 700 weeks, 162 months.  One and a half Clinton administrations, two Bushes, and a small piece of Obama. Three mayors, four governors, the invention of the internet, the rise of hip-hop, 9/11, a blackout, and a bunch of other stuff. I met my wife the week I saw it, fell in love with her living here, married her 20 blocks away.

The building was very good to me. I will miss her.

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Filed Under: Advice, Living in Manhattan, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

So this is it.

June 22, 2009 by

So this is it.

It wasn’t “real” until now. It hadn’t really hit home. I’ve been writing about it, and talking about it, and explaining why we’re leaving, and making lists of all the things I wanted to do before we left (and doing some of them), and savoring all the “lasts” we were doing (the last party, the last trip to the park, the last Sunday dinner, etc.), and looking at new homes, and doing all the stuff you need to do to move.
 
But it still wasn’t real until I saw the empty room today.  The movers came over today to pack up, with the actual move tomorrow. But they moved a lot of stuff around, leaving one of our rooms completely empty. I hadn’t seen it like that since we moved into the apartment (after our renovation) four years ago. I hadn’t seen my apartment empty.
 
It looked wierd.

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Filed Under: Living in Manhattan, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With:

Why Movers Hate Me

June 22, 2009 by
You know who hates my stairs, the three flights leading up to my apartment?
Everyone.
Like, for example, every guest I’ve ever had. People show up here for parties, and as they reach the main level landing they invariably say something clever along the lines of “Whew.” Usually, it’s a call for a drink, very quickly, since the apparently Everest-like climb has made them extremely thirsty.
Then they realize that if they want to go to the roofdeck, it’s another two flights. Usually they sit down after that.
Another example: delivery guys. They trudge heavily up the stairs holding a rapidly cooling bag of food, and then shoot me a look that says, in Mandarin, “if I had known you wanted me to climb three flights of stairs, I would have opened up your moo shu and spit right into it.”  So I overtip them.
But no one hates my stairs as much as movers.  From the time that I moved in, I never ever had a mover who did not remark upon the heinousness of the task with which I have charged them — to carry heavy pieces of furniture and boxes up and down three or four flights of stairs.  They stop now and then, breathe out heavily, and say, always, the same thing. “Man, that’s a lot of stairs.”
I understand their feelings (both legitimate and an unsubtle attempt to wheedle a larger gratuity at the end of the day), but it always bothers me a little.  If it weren’t for the stairs, I wouldn’t need so many movers.  The very fact that there are so many stairs is what has created the need for the employment.
It’s as if I was at the dentist, and he looked at me and said, “man, teeth. I am sooo sick of effing teeth.”

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Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Moving Day

June 22, 2009 by
Today is moving day.
 
It kind of came up on us.  We pushed our buyer to stay this last week because we really weren’t ready to leave, so we got one final weekend in the city.  That was great, because we had people over during the weekend and got to spend some extra quality time in the apartment.
 
The funny thing was that they were all looking at us like, “you’re really moving on Tuesday?”  They couldn’t understand how we could be moving Tuesday and having parties on Friday with the place looking like it always has.
 
Here’s the secret — movers who do the packing for you.  They literally come in, and do all the worst part of the moving process.  Okay, not the “worst” part.  The worst part is lifting heavy furniture and climbing my stairs.  But the other really crappy part is taking every single dish, glass, platter, and other knick knacks and wrapping them in newspaper, then placing them in boxes, all of that stuff.  And they do that.
 
I’m not sure when this magnificent service started, or who invented it, but to me it’s up there with the wheel, vanilla ice cream, The Housewives of New York City, pad thai, the orgasm, and fire as the great inventions of humankind.
 
Ask me how much they’re charging for it?  I have no idea.  Once I heard that they do this, I honestly didn’t care how much it cost.  I would have paid anything.  I would have named children after them. That’s how much I love this.
 
It reminds me of my adventures in juicing.  The best way to appreciate the joy of juice purchased in a store is to buy yourself a juicer and try to make some orange juice.  After 35 minutes of hideous labor, with the promise of another 15 fun minutes of cleaning a sharp screen filled with orange bits, all of which culminates in about a thimble of warm juice, you’re willing to go to Jamba Juice and perform sexual favors for the guy behind the counter to get something to drink.

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Filed Under: Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

The Last Poker Night

June 20, 2009 by
The Last Poker NightLast night was poker night.
 
For the past two years or so, I’ve been part of a very fun group of people who play an irregularly scheduled cheap-money poker tournament at various homes in Manhattan.  Mostly Fordham Law grads who went to school with my friend Jack (odd coincidence is I used to teach there, but that’s not how I know any of them). I’ve hosted a bunch of times.
 
So this was my last time hosting, and to make it extra-super-duper-special, we also hosted an extraordinarily unsettlingly competitive game of Cranium run by the wife.  People don’t realize what a terror she is at games, to the point that I like playing a completely different game in a totally different part of the apartment when she’s playing Cranium.  So she inflicted her competitive zeal on her group, and my group played a nice laid-back game of poker. 
 
So that’s what it’s come to.  I guess once you turn 40, and are getting ready to move to Suma, the fun night out really does become poker and Cranium.  And, to be honest, I had a lot more fun just hanging out, eating pizza, playing poker, and listen to my wife yell at our friends, than I’ve had at any club or bar or lounge or restaurant I went to all year. Guess I’m getting old.
Filed Under: Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Lessons for Exiles: How do you get city people to the suburbs?

June 1, 2009 by

So my wife and I are looking for a new place in SUMA, and we’re telling our friends about it. Trying to get them excited, because we’d like to, you know, stay friends with them, and it would help if they were willing to, you know, visit us now and then.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re never going to see them again.

And I really don’t blame them, because I never visited my friends who left the city.  Once they left, it was like the Morlocks got them. We cast them from our minds. Chris and Kate have left 83rd and Third and they’re now in Rye, and let us not speak of them again….

So I was just as bad when I was on the cool, Manhattan side of that equation. I was never taking a weekend night to schlep out to Scarsdale or Montclair or God-Forbid-Long-Island to go visit someone who had the effrontery to leave this great city. Almost as if their choice to leave, by itself, rendered them somewhat less interesting.

I guess I deserve nothing better. I’m sure I’ll find nice, umm, replacement friends.

Anyway, I do have one idea.  When I’ve discussed the houses we’ve been looking out, I’ve detected a common thread in the questions I get.  No one seems interested in bedrooms or bathrooms or location or square footage or the type of oven we’ll have, but they seem very interested in one feature of some of the homes we’ve seen.

Whether it has a pool.

The pool is the equalizer, maybe the one thing that elevates a suburban household in the eyes of the sneering Manhattanariat.  A pool for those hot days in the summer when your Hamptons share is in an off-week, or you’re afraid to go back and face the friend-of-a-friend that you woke up next to LAST weekend.  A pool to escape Manhattan’s summer heat, a place to eat barbecue.

After all, the Hamptons are really just a suburb. I hate to tell that to all of you who just plunked down a month’s salary for four weekends in a five bedroom house on a one-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, but doesn’t that description sound kinda like a typical suburban house? So you’re spending all that income to drive out 4 or 5 hours on a Friday night to sleep in a bunk bed like a 12 year old, in a house that has as much relationship to the beach as Woody Allen, and you’re too good to come visit me a half hour north?   Did I, ummm, mention that we have a pool?

Great, see you then.

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Filed Under: Advice, Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

How to Sell Your Home in 30 days

May 17, 2009 by

People have been writing to ask me how we sold so quick in a market like this. Okay, we didn’t actually sell our home in 30 days. We put it on the market for a few weeks in November, and quickly realized that it’s not a great time to sell when the market is falling 300 points every day and people are talking about the next Great Depression. We took the holidays off, and went back on the market in February. Things had calmed down a little by that point.

Obviously, though, that was not the best time to sell an apartment in Manhattan, not in a market that’s probably going to show a significant transactional and pricing decline in the second quarter. But once we put it back on the market, we had an acceptable offer in about a month, in contract a few weeks after that.

How did we do it? Well, we had some advantages that maybe you don’t have. Like, my wife is a real estate agent here in the city. And I own a real estate company out in the suburbs. Chances are your wife probably isn’t a real estate agent, and you’re not a real estate professional.

But don’t worry. That’s now why we sold quickly. The only reason those “advantages” actually helped us is that we actually listened to our own advice. What for years she’s been telling her sellers, and I’ve been telling my agents, we actually did.

As in:

1. If you’re moving, start now.
We started the moving process about a month before we actually put the apartment on the market. As in, we actually started moving. We spent about three weekends clearing out the apartment, taking out about boxes and boxes of assorted stuff we had filling the place. Some of it we kept and stored upstate, some it we threw away, some of it we gave away. But we took out about fifteen boxes of stuff: books we don’t read, clothes we don’t wear (or no longer fit into), food we don’t, furniture we don’t need to sit on. Emptied the place out, made it look a lot bigger, nicer, cleaner. And we were planning on moving, which is why we were selling the apartment in the first place, so it helped us get a head start and make the final move a little less intensive.
We also hired a guy to come in and do all the little things that had degraded in the apartment since we did construction in 2005. Everything from lighting fixtures that never got installed and were sitting in a closet to smudges on walls. $2,000 later, the place looked like it did when we moved in.

2. Be Accessible
We wanted the place shown as much as possible, whenever someone wanted. You want to come over on Sunday morning? Come on down! Wednesday night! What time? We did open houses almost every weekend it was on the market. Every morning, we’d clean it up, put the dirty clothes in a hamper and hide it away. It was ready for show anytime an agent wanted.

3. Price to Sell
We priced aggressively for the market, underneath other apartments that were for sale in the area. We knew that the market might be tough, so we wanted to strike quickly. If we’d sold a year ago, we probably would have gotten over $1,300 a square foot. We priced at $1,200 a square foot and sold for about $1,100 a square foot. We didn’t get the best price possible, and maybe if we’d waited out the spring market we could have done a little better, but we got good terms and a good, trustworthy buyer and we had our money off the table. Even now, I’m seeing comparable apartments that were for sale when we put our place back on the market in February, and they’re still priced above what we sold for.

Would that work for everyone? I don’t know. But when I was buying I looked at a lot of apartments that had clothes stuffed in the closets, or were dirty, or smelled like cats, or were only available for show on alternate Wednesday afternoons. So I think it helped.

It also helped, of course, that I had a great agent. I highly recommend her.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

Best Celebrity Sightings

May 8, 2009 by

You know what’s really cool about New Yorkers. In the past five years or so, I’ve probably seen 15 or 20 celebrities in my neighborhood, and not once have I seen someone pester them or ask them for their autograph. New Yorkers know what it’s like to be annoyed by people, so I think they don’t generally inflict themselves on celebrities. At least not that I’ve seen.

Lots of celebrities in my nabe on the UWS. I see Jerry Seinfeld, Howard Stern, John McEnroe, Willie the tall guy from Morning Joe, used to see Bobby Canavale when he lived next door, same with one of the Baldwins before he made the move to Suma.

Two good celebrity stories. First, long time ago, before I met my wife, on a first date, going to the arty Lincoln Plaza theaters over on Broadway in the lower sixties. Going to see some Chinese language movie. But got to the theater late and it was crowded. No seats together. So we see that there’s two seats in one row, but on opposite sides of the row. The movie’s about to start, so we don’t bother people to shift over, we just each take a seat apart, but in the same row. But people in the row see what’s happening, and a powerful surge of romanticism takes over — “let’s help the young guy out on his date” — and they all get up and shift over so we can sit together. Only one person protests, fighting it until she gives up, exasperated. Barbra Streisand.

Second, a few years ago, I was walking on 83rd street, going east from Amsterdam toward the Park. Walking towards me is Jerry Seinfeld, who I used to see all the time. He’s carrying a “Banana Republic” bag as he walks west from Columbus. Not a big deal, but here’s why I like this story. He lived on Central Park West, so he’s walking away from home. There’s a Banana Republic at 86th and Broadway, which was probably where he was going. So why was he carrying a bag? Probably because he was returning something that someone got him at Banana Republic. And that’s why I love this story. It’s nice to know a guy like Seinfeld, who is worth a gajillion dollars, still takes the time to schlep back to the store to return a sweater that’s a little too big for him.

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