Where Did June Go?

I admit, there's an apology in order. Unfortunately, when I started this little blog, I forgot a fun fact about myself: When I don't have any reason to go home (be it a significant other or a pet) I work 10-hour days, and the last thing I want to do when I get home is curl up in front of a laptop and talk about the high-stress world of apartment hunting in New York.

Here's my update, nearly a month in the making. Hopefully, this will help explain why it's taken me a month to get back here.

Very early in the month - just after my 100th street escapades, I found an ad on Craigslist advertising a two bedroom apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Williamsburg is in the northern part of Brooklyn, nestled between Greenpoint (a very good area), Bed-Stuy (used to be horrendous, now just not so good) and Bushwick (not great, but it's the next stop on the gentrification wagon), between one and five train stops to Manhattan. It used to be an artist mecca; now, a couple decades later, it's a mecca for people who want to be artists but have good enough jobs that they don't need to flee deeper into the urban jungle. It's also hipster central, but anyone who knows me knows I wasn't built for skinny jeans and annoying T-shirts. I imagine this will grow into a dissociative problem, but I keep telling myself that if he were to exist now, Patrick Bateman would be wearing APC jeans and prowling Bedford avenue, Williamsburg's main drag.

Anyway, the apartment itself is in one of Williamsburg's less hipster-riddled areas, closer to Bushwick than to Manhattan or Greenpoint, and there's about as many families as there are young people. It's about perfect for me, since when someone dressed like Rod Stewart, complete with the hair, white '80s suit and snakeskin shoes, walks down the street as seriously ironic as a heart attack, I have someone to laugh with. Yes, that actually happened.

I spent a Saturday morning checking out the place. What was really great is it's a new building, which means new appliances, floors and, most importantly, central air conditioning. I grew up in a place where you walked from your central-AC house to your overcharged AC car to your central AC work. I'm not sure I could function at peak efficiency in a house with rooms of varied temperature. I immediately fell in love with the building, if not the place's layout. It was a duplex with about 800 square feet - huge for NYC - but none of the rooms were really big enough to make anything work. Luckily, the couple showing the place showed me their one bedroom apartments, which were laid out a lot more to my liking: Three rooms, all big, without a lot of wasted space in the kitchen or bathroom. Before I left the place I'd pretty much made a decision to move in, but I still wanted to keep my options open and give my girlfriend a chance to look at the place before making a decision.

A week later, my girlfriend came up to visit, and she and I played tourist for a week, mostly eating tons and tons of food in a number of boroughs, both to check out the neighborhoods and expand our waistlines. She cruised around on the back of a broker's Vespa in Manhattan, looking at places on the West side. Most of what she found in our price range was about half the size of the place in Williamsburg, and when I took her out to look at the one bedroom, she liked it quite a bit, too. So down went the deposit along with my stress level.

The next week, my parents came into town and I entered week two playing tourist and eating too much. I actually saw a one-man show and caught a Yankee game, two things I haven't done in a couple years, and pretty much unwound, assured that at the end of the month, I'd have a roof over my head. Unfortunately, nothing in real estate is never sure.

It all starts with a crane falling on the Upper East Side. At the end of May, some weird act of God, uh, acted, and one of those 30-story cranes fell in Manhattan, killing the operator and injuring a number of pedestrians. Now, this alone is bad enough, but another crane fell not too long before this most recent one, which has the city in a tizzy and demanding more oversight from the Department of Buildings, which governs crane inspections. They, as all great bureaucracies do, have opted to respond to the problem by adding new layers of bureaucracy to all building inspections in the five boroughs. Including my apartment building. Go figure.

And so, July 1 has come and gone, and they've yet to perform the final inspection on my building, which means I can't sleep there yet. Luckily, my landlady, who, unlike the numerous management companies I've dealt with before moving to NYC, actually gives a damn about her tenants, has graciously put those of us who'd otherwise be homeless up in her other buildings for the cost of utilities until all this blows over.

Which brings me to now. I've got one bedroom in a three bedroom apartment so close to the new place I can hear the work crew taking down the scaffolding for the pending inspection for the time being. The talk is the DOB will inspect the new place tomorrow, but the super thinks it won't be until next week that we'll be able to move in. The moral of the story here: Don't bet on a new building, unless you've got a cool landlord or don't mind the Y.