East Village Slum Life
I will never understand the allure of sliding glass shower doors. They’re ugly and hard to clean. This apartment has them, as well as a thick black layer of grime all around their bottom track. To make matters worse, they don’t fit well in my cramped bathroom, so they overhang in the inside rim of the tub by about a centimeter, making a nice little niche for more mold to grow. This is like, twenty years’ worth of grime; surely dating back to when this neighborhood was a slum and this building, probably a crackhouse squat.
As embarassing as it may be, I have been happily ignoring this grime in the 1 1/2 years I’ve lived here. I don’t take baths, and I avoid looking down too much. But yesterday I sat down on the floor of my tub during a long shower and saw that the mold had gotten even worse, so today I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I can’t bring myself to describe what I found, but suffice it to say that it’s now mostly gone– I’m taking a fume break, since my bathroom doesn’t even have an electric fan– just a passive air shaft with a vent that’s permanently rusted only 1/4 way open (even a few blows with a hammer couldn’t get it to open more. Because of this vent, I’m also treated to the mundane conversations of everyone else in the building as I sit on the can each morning.)
This apartment came with so much filth in so many places– from the mouse-turd infested stove (thoroughly Clorox’d my first couple days here, I’m happy to say) to the 1/8″ thick layer of dust on top of the medicine chest (too high for me to see and only discovered when a 6′4″ former boyfriend causticly remarked that I had a “very clean” bathroom) down to the mysterious layer of mud that I scraped from underneath the fridge on the day my kitchen drainpipe broke– that I can hardly believe some days that I live here. Why didn’t I notice the listing floors, the kitchen cabinets hung askew, the 4″ gap stuffed with steel wool between the bedroom floor and the interior closet floor before I agreed to take this place? Why didn’t I run screaming like the other guy the real estate agent took up with me? And let’s not even think about the broken cold water faucet in the bathroom or the perpetually running toilet, a 60’s-era powder blue contraption so old that they don’t even make replacement valves for it anymore.
The answer is that this is the East Village, and it’s trendy, and people want to live here. There are great bars and restaurants. Who cares if the rent is actually higher than most of the Upper East Side, the buildings infested with vermin, or that many people have bathtubs next to their stoves? You can go out with your friends on a weeknight and stumble home without the expense of taking a cab. Plus, this is still something of a gay neighborhood (although the boys are slowly being pushed out by the NYU kids who like to puke on my sidewalk and have loud cellphone conversations at 3am in my hallway.) And, like it or not, I’m not really interested in hanging out at the sports bars and chain restaurants that litter the UES. I guess there’s always Chelsea, but I’d feel like I’d have to start waxing my shoulders and getting my eyebrows threaded to live there.
Well, I suppose this has been a growing up experience for me. This is the first time I’ve had an apartment all to myself, and I naively thought that I preferred an old building with “character” to the microscopic, marble countertop’d gut renos I looked at below Houston St, which all seemed too fancy and too impractical for my tastes. Now I know better– next time I will happily trade a marble countertop for a couple uneven square feet of floorspace. I’m looking forward to my lease expiring at the end of August.
