Tales From The Apartment Hunt: The Worst

Alternate Post Title: I Like Trains But Hate Railroads

I had this idea that I would end up writing about most of the apartments I saw, but now I’m having second thoughts. As I’ve been taking a stab at it, I think many of them really aren’t that interesting or funny in written form. One filled me with an unshakable sense of grimness. Another seemed mostly ok except that the whole place reeked of cat pee. I saw huge rooms in sketchy parts of Brooklyn, and unbelievably cramped quarters in awesome parts of Manhattan. I had to ask myself questions like, “could I survive with just a mini-fridge?”, “will buying a new mattress pad make me feel ok about sleeping on an old mattress?”, and “can I automatically veto a roommate whose e-mail address is ‘paininlove@hotmail.com’?” Some of it is certainly worthy of mockery, but I don’t think it will really be that fascinating for me to go through each place in detail. So let’s just cut to the chase: what was the worst place that I saw?

I could use a lot of criteria to define the worst, but for me the one that stood out was the one that was the most depressingly/hilariously overpriced. This winner was about $920 a month, and was a railroad apartment. It was located in a surprisingly dull part of Williamsburg (Brooklyn), above a store that appeared to sell mostly Hello Kitty products and bongs. For those of you who don’t know (I didn’t until I moved here), a railroad is one where all the rooms are laid out in one long line. There aren’t hallways or central areas--each room just connects to the next. The room that the woman was renting was in the middle, and windowless. While my prospective roommate did have a door in her bedroom that allowed her to go around (via the exterior hallway), the offered room was basically a passageway between her room and the rest of the apartment. She promised that I would have privacy. “I’ll only come through your room if I really need to pee or something,” she said. She eagerly pointed out that the room had a closet—admittedly not standard issue in New York. The “closet” however turned out to be only around 6 inches deep, and had four metal hooks sticking out rather than a bar for hangers. I think in the real world we call that a coat rack.

As I was sitting in the kitchen chatting with the woman, I noticed a tube of toothpaste near the kitchen sink. Suspicious, I asked to see the bathroom. Sure enough, the bathroom was so small (a half-sized tub crammed up against a toilet) that there was no sink. The kitchen sink was also the bathroom sink.

I think the woman could sense my dismay, and she tried to turn the tide in her favor by talking about how “this is New York” and as shocking as it may be this is just what the apartment market is like. She started to press me about whether or not I wanted to take it. I said I had to think about it, and confessed my doubts about the middle-room situation. “It is really not that bad,” she said, “go in and close the doors, and you’ll see how nice it is.” With a growing feeling of hopelessness, I agreed. I went into the room, closed the doors on either end, and sat down on the bed. A strange feeling of calm came over me. I wondered how long I could sit in there before it got weird and she came to check on me. I had seen enough places by this time to know that for $920 I could do better. But the search was exhausting and I was desperate for it to be over. I knew that as soon as I got up and left, it would mean that I was checking off one more place and continuing the process. The space was quiet and I was alone, and for a few moments it was my much longed for personal piece of New York. But I knew that eventually I would have to get up, get back on craigslist, and make more appointments.

I think it was after visiting that place that I thought of writing posts about the apartment search. It was grim at the time, but I could see that once I was finally settled, some of it would be funny. $920 for a windowless hallway room in a place with no bathroom sink? I mean, really.