Building Walls

A friend of mine finally found a Manhattan apartment that is, of course, unaffordable and tiny, and shared with two other people. They had to put down enough cash to cover three months deposit and a brokers' fee, but if that isn't enough she has to build a wall to make her bedroom. Not that this is an uncommon practice in Manhattan but it amazes me tha tsince she was the one who found the apartment and had a co-signer, she still got left out of the loop of claiming a bedroom upfront and is now expected to shell out a couple thousand more dollars to make herself a space.

I'm impressed that she's chosen the roommates she has. She has selected two girls that while sweet and fun to hang out with have been nothing short of impossible when it came to finding a place to live. One already had a studio in Manhattan and wasn't in much of a hurry to find something else, wanted to move but didn't care when and the other was staying with said studio girl. All in all, it's a situation I wouldn't want to be in but apparently you pick your space and then you build a wall.

I love how mobile the Manhattan real esate arena is. If you're shown a studio and point out that you don't understand why two people would want to share you'll get a look and a "Why don't you just put up a wall?" As if it's incredibly simple to bring in construction workers and some sheetrock and just- boom!- make it happen. I know lots of people who have divided their apartments that way, laying down between 800 and 2200 dollars to give themselves a space all their own. Here you are lucky if you have a a wall to call your own, and I've seen ads placed for rooms that weren't actually rooms but sleeping lofts in apartments being put out as rooms. It's nothing short of miraculous that no one here complains about living space all the time. I still haven't gotten used to it, seeing friends back in North Carolina buy three bedroom two bath "starter" homes or two bedroom condos. It's incredibly impressive to think about it and wonder if we are really meant to be boxed up that way, meant to be squeezed in on top of each other and secretly hate it. I'm reminded of "Crocidile Dundee II" (NO JUDGEMENT), when the main character says, "Eight million people are crammed in here? This must be the friendliest place in the world!" We laughed because of the irony of such a statement. It's well known that noone here is friendly, that you are just as likely to be mugged on Park Avenue as the Bronx.

Why is that? Why do people choose to live in a place where people are literally stacked up in little boxes and not make an effort to like them? I've been living in my current apartment since August 1st and know literally two of my neighbors- a young woman across the hall, and the infamous 4B person who I picked up a Fedex package for. It's strange how these things work, how we allow ourselves to close off the rest of the ten million people squished on this island, all choosing to love New York, but not each other. I've never really thought about it before, but it's true that I rarely speak to people here. I've become like so many of the others, listening to my Ipod and reading on the trains, ignoring the cab drivers, dodging people who are old and slow on the walk to work. I've almost become blind to the homeless people who curl up on stoops and at corners, begging for change with cynical eyes. I don't even really speak to the people who help me out, like the man at the corner store who always gives me quarters even though he tells me all the time I need to find someone else to provide change, and the Palm reading woman who works in a tiny glass booth with a tv going day and night.

So why isn't this the friendliest place in the world? It's certainly not hostile, or anything close to it, but there isn't the sense of companionship that there is in other places. Many of my friends, including myself, have begun turning to Craigs List to find new friends and things to do in the city. We impatiently click away at various ads for everything from Museum trips to time shares in cabins upstate. What this tells me is that there are a lot of other lonely people in the city, people who want to find something to make their life more meaningful.

If this is true, that we are all searching for meaning in this great city, why are we putting up walls against that?