But then you read the obituary of a playwright who just passed away, Robert Heide, 91, Whose Stories Shone Onstage and Off, who lived in a rent-control West Village, Christopher Street apartment for over 60 years and you know he had no problem making the rent.
The pictured building is not his apartment house, but rather where my grandmother, her brother-in-law, and I lived in the 1960s when I went to high school in Manhattan: 310 East 19th Street, a few feet east of 2nd Avenue, on the south side of the street, across the street from a public school and playground. Still a desirable location these days. Prices reflect.
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| Edwin Booth |
Yes, Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth's older brother, part of a dynastic Shakespearean acting family in the mid 1800s. Edwin founded The Players Club, a distinguished brownstone on the south side of Gramercy Park that appeared in some scenes of the series Billions near the end of its run.
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| John Wilkes Booth |
In what I think is a wonderful example of how everything gets connected, Ms. Willis outlines a narrative of John Wilkes Booth's peripatetic life as an actor.
He is set to play at a playhouse that has a new manager, Louisa Lane Drew, "a woman who would become the grandmother of Lionel, Ethel and John Barrymore (and the great granddaughter of Drew Barrymore)." Wow. Drew Barrymore's great-grandmother gave John Wilkes Booth a booking.
The apartment I lived in at 310 East 19th Street is visible from the street. It is the three windows on the second floor, right, in a six-story building built in 1920 with no elevator. That I remember, there were four apartments to each floor; two in the front and two in the back.
The rent in the mid-1960s was $64 for what would be called a "railroad flat." The rooms were in a single file. You entered and the bathroom was straight ahead. To the left was kitchen of a decent size, with a small bedroom off to the side. That bedroom is where my great-uncle Peter slept, my grandmother's brother-in law, my deceased grandfather's younger brother.
It was a narrow room just big enough for the bed, but that had its own door to the hallway. We never used the door, but the room could be entered without coming into the apartment proper, almost like a maid's entrance. Maybe it was indented for that.
After entering, there were two room, on the right, of a decent size. The larger of the two and the first one you walked through, could be a dining room. Then there was the front room that had the three windows that looked out onto 19th Street. The window to extreme right was to the fire escape. One of the adjacent apartment's front windows opened onto the same fire escape. Very symmetrical.
To the left of this front room was what was a small bedroom, and was where my grandmother slept. I slept on a very padded cot in this front room.
It was decent place to live and the rent was initially $68 a month in the early 60s. At some point the Department of Buildings reviewed the premises and lowered the rent to $64 a month. I never forgot that.
Perhaps it was sometime after my grandmother died in 1964 that I remember the owner of the building and his adult son coming to the flower shop for I think something for my uncle Pete to sign. It was perhaps a new lease. I don't know. But I remember the owner's name was Reich, with a Pennsylvania address.
I remember looking at these two people and realizing how they looked liked their horse and buggy should be outside. They were what typical Pennsylvania Dutch people looked liked. Whether they were Amish I do not know.
New York of course was first settled by the Dutch. If I was adventurous enough I'd love to track the ownership of that building. As to what it is today there is really no surprise. An apartment in the place goes for $5,500 a month.
A website details the building's current history. There are 26 units. We were in No. 7. It is owned by Haki Bakoli and has a history of some complaints, but is free of rodents and bed bugs. This is good to know if you've got the $5,500 a month to shell out. It is classified as a "New Law Tenement."
Haki Bakoil is an Armenian name. associated with property ownership and management, principally in the Bronx. For some reason, there is a lot of Armenian association with buildings in the Bronx.
Four units to each floor, six stories makes 24 units. The additional two units of the 26 must be on the ground floor under the stoop. There are many such older apartment buildings like 310 East 19th street.
If you ever look at real estate ads for apartment buildings in New York, listed will be how many apartments in the building are at "market rate," and how many others are at "rent control" or "market stabilized." Thus the prospective buyer is informed at how many apartments they can count on to go for current rates. The others are occupied by longstanding tenants who are protected by rent control laws. They've got to die or move out to allow the vacant apartment to pass onto market rates.
This posting is indicative to my reaction to something I've read. Something always reminds me of something else. The connective tissue of the Möbius strip.
The obituary for Robert Hilde is more than interesting in many ways. He and his husband John Gilman, who moved in with Mr. Heide years ago, recounts how their rent-controlled space in the very desirable West Village "was not much more than the cost of a single [my emphasis] expensive dinner in today's West Village."
And there was have it: Affordability.
Do you know how many people in New York City are living in sweetheart rent-controlled units that allow them to enjoy more of the city because the rent makes the rest of the city affordable? The mind boggles.
The recent obituary for the architect Robert A, M. Stern quotes him as saying that growing up he always looked up at the buildings. When in Manhattan, I do the same thing. I wonder who are all the people inside those buildings living off hallways that elevators (most of the time) take them to?
Mr. Heide was certainly not a well known person. You almost might say someone at the Times thought his tribute, obit, 6-columns, 15-gun salute was deserved because of the people he knew, rather than any great accomplishment of his own. An out quote from the obit goes: "An Off Off Broadway pioneer with endless tales of bohemian life."
He was a playwright whose best work was staging two good-looking lads in "The Bed" in white boxer shorts sitting on a bed discussing their feelings of aimlessness. The script was "15 pages and lasted half an hour because of extended pauses. The same rock song, Dave Clark Five's 'Anyway You Want It,' played twice all the way through it with the actors on the stage incongruously silent."
And lest you think something like that went unnoticed, read what Stephen Bottoms wrote of the play in "Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement" (2004): "The Bed" provides the missing link between the Beckettain absurdism (two men filling in empty time) and the New York avant-garde's fascination with the detailed observation of banality." Well, if you say so.
There's more like that in the obit. Mr. Heide worked with Andy Warhol and wrote a script for one of his films, "Lupe." Mr. Heide knew all the bold face names of the artists and playwrights of the 60s': H.M. Koutoukas, Edward Albee, Terrance McNally, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard.
And if you think that Mr. Heide's best known play, "The Bed" is a disappearing example of a one-off Off Off Broadway production in the heady 60s, consider a teaser on the front page of Thursday's New York Times January 8, print edition, that leads into a story on Page C3 in the Arts section:
Dispensing With Dialogue
The dreamlike play "Mami" from the Albanian Greek director Mario Banushi has no talking for a reason. "Words can limit things," he says. The show leads the Under the Radar Festival. [As it should.]
There's one more link to my memory emitting diodes (MEDs) that was set off by the story of rent-control: Andy Warhol.
We've established that I lived for a time in a rent-controlled apartment on East 19th Street. But what is also true is that the apartment was just half a block east of Columbus Hospital, a hospital that probably went back to the turn of 19th-century that I delivered flowers to often. It must have been run by Catholic Charities because it was populated by nuns in full black habits, the penguins, I had to sneak past them to get into the hospital to make my bedside deliveries, taking cranky, balky elevators that sounded like every lift was going to be its last. I can still hear the sounds of the machinery in my head.
Columbus Hospital became Cabrini Medical Center, which then became condos. But in the 60s Columbus hospital was where one afternoon they dumped Andy Warhol out of a cab onto the sidewalk with a gunshot wound to his stomach. He was shot multiple times by a pissed off feminist writer at his film studio, The Factory, at 33 Union Square West by Valerie Solanas, who thought he lost one of her scripts. It was June 3, 1968 and was of course front page news the next day.
Official news accounts say police and an ambulance were called. In June 1968 there was no 911 emergency number to call for an ambulance. It's not knows if an ambulance, if called, actually got there. The cab story is what I heard, and I'm sticking to it. The doctors only gave Warhol a 50-50 chance to recover. He was forever disabled by his wounds.
It was the 60s.
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