In the wake of some of the What Do You Miss About New York tweets I’ve been seeing today

Patrick M
Patrick M
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read

I haven’t lived there in >10 years at this point, and the things I miss are mostly intangible things I’ve nevertheless mythologized (also, Do I miss Brooklyn or do I miss being in my 20s/early 30s is a relevant question). Would I find the man treating an F train seat like a urinal while a woman made scoffing “I never!” noises at him so charming today (in my memory, it is literally one of the women in the Weegee photo The Critic)? It seems improbable!

My desire to live in New York, and Brooklyn in particular, was 100% created by the show Sesame Street and the Fisher Price Sesame Street playset, which created a hole in me that I wouldn’t be able to fill until I actually moved there.

My apartment on 7th street

A few details from the latter:

  • Ernie and Bert have towels hanging side by side that match their shirts
  • Bert has a framed (1) illustration of a pigeon; and (2) bottle cap collection
  • Records scattered around, including: C is for Cookie and Grover Sings the Blues
  • Mr. Hooper has an autographed photo from Big Bird that says “To my good friend Mr. Blooper”
  • From E&B’s bedroom you can see into a bathroom where there is a clawfoot tub with Rubber Duckie sitting on it and if you flip the wall around the window from the outside looks into the bathroom with the verso tub/duck seen from the other side
  • Gordon and Susan’s lack of cabinet space leading to pots being hung on the wall
  • Street art: a bluebird painted on top of bricks that need some tuck pointing
  • The cracked plaster, broken window

…these last few in particular connoting Yes it is run down and needs some work but also it is a happy place. A choice was made to make this toy (/borough) a little shabby and a lot inviting.

When I moved to New York and was looking for a place to live, my office was in Midtown so I was mostly looking around there at first and it suuuucked and then I went to Park Slope to meet up with a friend and went Oh.

My body felt like it was clicking into place, and it’s this dumb show’s fault. I lived in a limestone half a block from the park that must have been something in its day but by the time I lived there was so past its prime it kind of looked like the Fight Club house; when my nephew visited and I was carrying him up the stairs, he started muttering, “There are no monsters, there are no ghosts.”

The landlady was named Gloria Tembicky who hugged me when I signed my lease and then never did anything else except take my money each month and do patchwork repairs; she owned two buildings on 7th street that were both so badly kept up she briefly inspired several websites, a blogspot called Gloria, Gloria, a post on another site called Serious Danger where they complained about her and eventually a separate dedicated site called Trembicky dot com for people to voice complaints about bad landlords the world over:

All those sites are abandoned or gone now.

I found a comment I left on one of them on the WaybackMachine:

One night I came home from work, and there was a broken toilet sitting on the landing outside my door. At the time I just thought, “Oh, that’s new,” because all of the alcoves in that building were stuffed with old sofas or halogen lamps or rolled up carpets or wood because, obviously, to waste something like that would be terrible because THERE MIGHT BE ANOTHER WAR. Anyway, when I went into my apartment, it turned out it was my toilet that was out in the hall; I should have recognized it from the seat, which had been painted over several times and was currently a muddy gray color with a chip in it. In its place was a mound of cement. I called Gloria, and she said that there was a leak downstairs from me and to get to the leak they had to remove my toilet and part of the floor and they couldn’t put the toilet back in until the cement dried, but in the meantime if I needed to, I could come over to use hers (I think you will agree with me when I say that that was not a viable option). It took six days for them to reinstall the toilet; they did it the day after I said I was going to withhold $100 from my rent for every day I had had to wait to pee until I got to work. When it was replaced, although the toilet proper was new, Walter screwed back in the original painted-over, chipped seat from the old toilet. I think this was also one of the times that she asked me to split the cost of the repairs. Since I had one major plumbing disaster every eight months, it’s difficult to keep them all straight. It’s true Gloria hugs you when you sign the lease. She’s reaching for your wallet.

“Walter” was a hunchbacked handyman..? lover..? who lived in the basement of the other building and would do repairs for both, often at the top of ladders he should not have been on. One time Meg and I were walking to my place and he opened up the basement door and tossed out the contents of a mason jar which contents almost 100% had to be pee and which pee just barely missed us; then he glared at us as we walked away, Meg trembling with rage the entire way home until we got to my building, went up the stairs, came into my apartment, shut the door only at which point did she say, “Don’t look at me like I’m the one who’s crazy, Old Man.”

The blogspot I mentioned is still up (although its last post was 12 years ago) and has this beautiful story on it:

The place was awful. I married my girlfriend there, I had 67% of my kids there. It was terrible, just terrible.

I miss it very much.

    Written by

    Patrick M

    Rakish Puritan

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