LasagnaFarm's NYC Real Estate Showcase: For One Man, a Bargain Helps Cool an Overheated Market
NEW YORK, NY, June 16 -- With the average price of a Manhattan apartment nearing seven figures, bargain hunters, unsurprisingly, have had little to celebrate lately. To find good deals in this market, budget-minded New Yorkers require persistence and providence in equal measure. Still, as one long-time resident recently discovered, it is possible to beat the odds.
“I was shocked to come upon a place I could afford that was actually livable,” the man, who gave his name as Fitz, told a reporter recently. “I looked all over, really hunted, for about a year before I found this place, but it is really perfect. It's well worth whatever aggravation I endured in finding it.”
Fitz, a former piano teacher who was evicted from his studio apartment in Washington Heights in 2003 after several years of rent underpayment -- in protest, he said, of “a slew of violations against humanity” -- needed to find a new home for himself and the calico cat he adopted a year ago. To be viable, Fitz noted, such a place would have to be within commuting distance to his job as a broker of aluminum and glass containers, and large enough to store his vast collection of dirty magazines.
“It’s not so much that the magazines are pornographic in nature,” Fitz said. “It’s that they’re kind of filthy. I mostly pick them up from different places and save them. And I don’t like anyone touching them, if you don’t mind.”
After nearly 18 months of pounding the pavement in search of a suitable residence he could afford, Fitz finally received a tip on a large, open studio that had lately been vacated.
“The timing could not have been better,” Fitz said, “The former tenant had just packed up and was hauling off his stuff. We moved right in, no questions asked.”
Lifting a swath of chain-link fence to allow a reporter to pass through on the way to visit his new home, Fitz pointed to his playful calico, named Bleeech, which had pounced on the back of a rodent and was shaking it from side to side. He noted that a happy feline was but one of the many benefits of his new place.
“It’s got a winter view of the river, there’s lots of room for magazines and my collection of found objects, and, as you can see Bleeech really loves playing with the neighbors’ kids.”
The studio lay just over a rise, shielded by a row of honeysuckle and flanked by six or seven bald Uniroyals, which had been strewn about strategically for visitors to lounge on. The walls, a giddy patchwork of composite materials, including plywood and pasteboard, tilted dramatically in a manner eerily reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s prototype Peter Lewis Residence.
"I just put those u... ARRRRRHG! Excuse me. I put those up because the wind was blowing out my [expletive] candles."
Inside, the multiform personality of the homeowner informed the decor, which was at once both stuffy and free-spirited. The sleeping area, attached to the living room via a wooden pallet, was decorated with a particularly whimsical hand. Tucked into a nook along the east wall was a bed draped in a banner of orange plastic, which, somewhat fittingly, read, “Will Not Be Undersold.” The bathroom, a lesson in minimalism, employed a combination of standard and purpose-built fittings, with several discarded paint cans pressed into duty.
Fitz and Bleeech relax
on their patio.
Fitz couldn’t be happier with his good fortune.
“I think this is a place where Bleeech and I can hang for quite a while.” Fitz said. “At least until the cops find out about it. Then, who knows?”
For now, Fitz and Bleeech the cat can share reheated beans in contentment, knowing that they, as true neighborhood pioneers, were there before the crowds showed up looking for that once-great real estate deal -- and priced them out of the market.
