Saturday afternoon; Now and Then. I feel compelled to write. Compelled to justify myself doing “nothing.” Writing is my business but also my Self unadorned, which is necessary for my state of mind. Writing was like a therapy when I undertook it as a kid to protect myself. It began in adolescence when we all undergo maturity whether we like it or not.
I was a ten year old at Christmastime when I asked my mother aka Santa Claus for a portable Smith-Corona typewriter. I’d seen it advertised in LIFE Magazine. Their original price was around $40. My mother didn’t earn that in a week back then.
I had no sense of prices at that age but I knew it was way too much to ask. I was living in a household always steeped in money problems which were upshot of “other” problems. My father was a “secret” gambler — the horses, the card games — and apparently never won. And even at that age, I was well aware.
I knew the typewriter was a lot to ask my mother for. And as much as I wanted it, I knew it was a lot, and shouldn’t get my hopes up.
My mother was the only bank, thanks to my father’s distractions. She left the house at 8:30 five mornings a week to go to work behind a steam table in a restaurant over in Springfield in order to be that bank. She never complained about her job or about having to work (to keep the roof over our heads).
This was mid-20th century when the prices for everything, including rents and a cup of coffee were much much lower in every way. We’ve been living in a state of ongoing inflation ever since. We’ve also been living in a state of aggression/war in other countries, all post-WW2, and now have a military budget larger than all the military budgets in the world combined.
Considering those circumstances in my childhood, I see how fortunate I was despite what looked like deprivation. The typewriter was Christmas wrapped and under the tree Christmas morning. I didn’t know then, but with that gift from my personal Santa Claus, I had begun my life to this day.
It soon became my diary. I didn’t think of it as a diary per se. I thought of it as my secret safe. It was where I could write down facts and thoughts that were deeply personal, known only to me. My secrets. My secret longings (I didn’t think of them as that). But it was where I was free to express anything that was in my mind, unseen and unheard by all others outside myself.
New York’s my home. I live in a very nice doorman building on the Upper East Side. It was built in the early 1950s by the Rudin brothers, Jack and Lew, whose father and mother had emigrated from Russia at the end of the 19th century. Their father and mother worked and saved and bought their first rental building which in those days was small and modest. That building was still in the family portfolio decades later when I knew them.
Lew and his first wife Gladyce brought up their family — son and daughter — in this building for their first ten or fifteen years. Daughter Beth, now an old friend of mine, grew up to be an important patron and collector in the contemporary art world as well as director of her family’s foundation. Billy, the son, now wears his late father’s mantle in the family firm.
The family sold the building several years ago for, I’ve been told, estate reasons, after Lew died. Because of the date of its building, it falls into the “rent-stabilized” category. This seems to be anathema to those who invest in real estate although it also makes it possible for people to live and work in New York — and New York without those people would NOT be New York. Real estate, obviously does not make New York, but vice versa. This is a simple notion although, unbelievably it sits far far outside the ken of many a real estate investor, not to mention the brokers and bankers who get in on the act.
The new owners of the building remained faceless and nameless, aside from the return address on the envelopes and stationery that come our way, evidently a raft of plans to re-form, break up, turn over the property. In other words it was purchased as an investment. Fair enough. Except investments that involve the home and hearth of the citizens is not exactly the same as a stock or a bond or a car or a horse or a picture in a frame. This too seems to be outside the ken of many an “investor.” Lip service is paid but not much more.
This is the way of the world, the lay of the land in real estate in New York today. It’s not something you can “blame” on someone because it’s policy and the kind of policy that was in place long before the actual “investor” got into the picture.
The Rudin family, for example, one of the great real estate families of New York, were famous — and rightfully — for looking after the welfare of their tenants. Patriarchal, I guess you could call it. The result is they ran a good business, more than adequately maintained their property, served their tenants with courtesy, respect, sometimes patience. In fact it was well known in the community for the past few decades that getting an apartment in a Rudin building the best thing that could happen to a renter, and for very good reasons.
I mention the Rudins because they were my landlords. There are other real estate owners here in New York who also manage their properties with the same policies and behavior toward their tenants. “Investors,” however, money men and contributors are out to maximize their profits and produce those annual percentage increases. This is, or was anyway, the American way. And everyone else’s too.
“Investors,” nameless, faceless by the nature of the beast, invest. Since my building was purchased, the new owners have been developing several avenues to maximize and perhaps even sell out at a nice tidy profit and be done with it. This too is the new business policy that has grown increasingly popular with investment banks and their clientele over the past two decades.
What made me think of all this, is in my building, in order to maximize and increase the rents to replace the “stabilized” prices that threaten to de-maximize profits, the post-Rudin owners were renovating, refurbishing, enlarging, marbleizing this counter top and that bath and changing the “value” and therefore the “price.” This is called, in the business, “luxury” apartments.
Luxury in its present state in our consumer world, may as well be Swiss cheese. Marketers, brokers, investors call these buildings “luxury.” Why? Because they said so, that’s why.
Uh-uh. 740 Park Avenue, 834 Fifth Avenue, 820, 1 Sutton Place South and their cousins and sisters are actual luxury buildings. And you have to be very rich (a real estate investor, for example) to afford to live there.
You have to be very rich even to move in. No question. And the luxury is: spacious rooms, high ceilings, top of the line utilities, services. All of this is apparent the moment you walk through the doors of these buildings. You can smell the money, or something which someone once told me is called the “smell of the money.”
