From 2006: Shortly after her marriage ended, Nora Ephron came across an apartment in the Apthorp, a celebrated Beaux-Arts building on the Upper West Side, and fell in love (again).
In February, 1980, two months after the birth of my second child and the simultaneous end of my marriage, I fell madly in love. I was looking for a place to live, and one afternoon I walked just ten steps into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and my heart stood still. This was it. At first sight. Eureka. Ten steps in and I said, “I’ll take it.”
But my true religious zeal focussed on the Apthorp itself. I honestly believed that at the lowest moment in my adult life I’d been rescued by a building. All right, I’m being melodramatic, but that’s what I believed. I’d left New York City a year earlier to move to Washington, D.C., for what I sincerely thought would be the rest of my life. I’d tried to be cheerful about it. But the horrible reality kept crashing in on me.
Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified, because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names.
I lived in the Apthorp in a state of giddy delirium for about ten years. The water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. Also, there were mice. Who cared? My rent slowly inched up—the Rent Guidelines Board allowed increases of around eight per cent every two years—but the apartment was still a bargain.
Eventually, I began to have a recurring dream about the Apthorp—or, to be accurate, a recurring nightmare. I dreamed I had accidentally moved out of the building, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back. I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that, when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment.
And so I went to see Miss Ross. As I recall, I gave a tender speech about my love for the building. It was fantastically moving, if not to her. She informed me that my rent was going to be tripled. We negotiated. She dropped the price. She dropped it just enough for me to believe that I had managed a small victory. How much did she drop it to? I can’t possibly tell you. I’m too embarrassed to type the number.
But, as I said, this isn’t a story about money. This is a story about love. I signed the lease because I wasn’t ready to get a divorce from my building. And then truly shocking things began to happen. The landlords cleaned the building! The landlords, who had basically done nothing to the building since we moved in, sandblasted the soot from the exterior, replaced pipes, redid the elevators, and painted the elevator and lobby ceilings gold. They dressed the building employees in braid-trimmed uniforms with epaulets; the staff began to look like a Hispanic version of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
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