Places I’ve lived, part 2
20 Fifth Avenue, 2004-2010
Typically, when I drive or walk past a place in this city where I used to reside, I get a sweet little twang of nostalgia for the person I was when I lived there. It’s often a bittersweet feeling, because any place on my rather long list of New York City apartments contains both bad and good memories. But that never happens when I see 20 Fifth Avenue. It’s strange that I spent more time at this address than any other place I’ve lived in New York, around six years, because it wasn’t my favorite home, not by a long shot.
It was where I moved as my divorce was playing out. When my ex-husband and first I separated, we decided he would stay in our brownstone in Carroll Gardens, and I would move into a hotel for the summer (which is definitely a story for another time). Then, in the fall, after moving back into the place in order to sell it (my ex was out by then) I started looking for somewhere new to live. I knew I wanted to be back in Manhattan, and downtown—I was desperate to get back there—but wasn’t quite sure where. I was running out of work one weekday afternoon to pop downtown and look at a few places when I ran into my boss James, who was coming back into the building after lunch. He asked me where I was off to.
“To look at apartments,” I replied. “Wanna come?”
James did. James could be fun. He was the editorial director of Conde Nast, which meant that most of the editors-in-chief reported directly to him, and he was known to be widely feared. But he had mellowed a bit by the time I made his acquaintance, and though he had made me cry, once, early on, mostly we got along. Lucky was his idea, and a big success for the company, and I suppose that in some ways, because of that, I was kind of his pet.
Downtown, we looked at a $7500-a-month one-bedroom on Hudson Street that didn’t have any natural light or a bathtub, and a couple of other places that were similarly pricey and unsuitable. Then James asked the realtor if he knew of anything available at 20 Fifth Avenue. The realtor said he didn’t, but would keep his eye out. This was back when real estate listings could still be found in the newspaper, and a few days later, the eagle-eyed realtor called me—he’d found a brief and cryptic listing in the Times, and called the number, on a hunch. Indeed, it was for a place at 20 Fifth Avenue.
The building was notoriously hard to get into, I later learned, not that it was fancier than most of the buildings on Lower Fifth—it was significantly less so than many—but it was one of the only rental buildings on that stretch of the avenue, which made it desirable. 20 Fifth was the kind of building that social girls moved into while their 5,000 square foot Tribeca lofts were being renovated. The elevator was lousy with fashion people. One of the Bush daughters lived in a townhouse across the street, and Secret Service was always parked outside in a black SUV.
