Long Island Living

It's official. I am a Brooklynite now. I live at the edge of America's first suburb, Brooklyn Heights - my favorite area of Brooklyn. I would have loved to be closer to the promenade and it's fantastic Manhattan views, or on one of the "fruit" streets, but that's such a popular area that it can take a year to find housing there.

Baby and I made the move from downtown Manhattan across the river the weekend of February 16, and I took vacation the following week to get moved in. Two weekends later, I was all done getting the last of the art and shelving hung and everything in its place. This required several trips to storage (about 12 blocks away), two trips to Good Will (5 blocks), multiple excursions to Home Depot, Target, the UPS Store, and the Container Store. . . and quite a bit of organizing, un-organizing, and re-organizing--just to get all my stuff to fit into the ~800 square-foot one-bedroom apartment. I honestly thought that another move might kill me, but it's done and hopefully I won't have to do it for a while.

Although smaller, the new place is nice--it has three very rare features for New York - a washer/dryer, jetted tub with separate shower, and an ice-maker. It also has 16-foot ceilings and a small walk-in closet. The gym is just down the hall. Hence, I'm paying almost as much as I would in Manhattan for a luxury 1-bedroom. The building I'm in was built in 1925 to house the Elks Club and subsequently was taken over by the NY Board of Education until it was converted to condos over the past couple of years.

My apartment is unique in that it has this huge arch window that takes up one entire wall in my living room. Like my last apartment, I'm only a couple floors above street level, but this place is much brighter because it's not squashed between towering high-rise financial buildings. I actually get sunlight here. Baby appreciates that.

I admit I miss living in Manhattan, but I couldn't be much closer. I'm one subway stop from my job in lower Manhattan, but that very well could change in light of the massive lay-offs happening this year in financial services. My firm has already gone through two rounds of lay-offs this year, with another likely to happen this spring. Being so new to the firm, it's quite possible that I won't survive the cut. We'll see.

The cool thing is that I'm only a couple blocks from Starbucks and a drug store, three blocks from Barnes & Noble, right around the corner from the hardware store, walking distance to Macy's, two subway stops to a Target, and walking distance to the famous, quaint Montague Street with all of its neat shops and restaurants.

Anything I need, I can walk to. On my way to the subway in the morning I pass at least six street vendors offering up bagels, coffee, muffins, fruit, the daily edition of the Post - whatever I might need on my way to the office.