I find myself drawn to nyc on holiday weekends. The city empties out, I can walk into any restaurant without restraint, and my schedule opens up as everyone else escapes. The weekend of July 4th is especially desirable to me, as it’s the weekend of my anniversary of moving to this city, and I’ve kept myself here 5 out of the 6 summers that I’ve lived here as my own way of celebrating. I try to do something special each time I have the entire holiday weekend to myself, and last year I decided to take a day to visit all 4 of my previous apartments (yes, I had moved every single year) and commemorate each neighborhood with a special treat and moment of reflection (more on this later).
My journey actually begins where it ends, in the Upper West Side. I had a sublease at the brink of UWS & Harlem for a boiling July on a 5th floor walk-up. It’s funny, I remember being so ready for the month to be over, to be able to finally move downtown and begin my nyc adventure, and leave the quiet tree-lined streets of uptown. Little did I know that I’d be craving the pace of UWS just a few years later. Anyways, I strolled past my first apartment, smiled at that naive, terrified, and also wide-eyed version of Bailey, and sat down at the Hungarian Pastry Shop for decadent baklava and frothy cappuccino.
My next stop is literally on the opposite of Manhattan, and also feels like another world that’s somehow still on the same island: East Village. I bravely decided to bike from UWS to East Village down and around the Hudson and back up the East River (it was either that or 3 trains on a holiday weekend - absolutely not). About an hour later, I stood in front of my second apartment, my first lease, a 4-bedroom duplex on East 7th Street, and chuckled at my first few months living in a literal basement of a building. No windows except a hole onto the street for an AC unit (pictured below), a door to the trash courtyard outside my room, and yet younger Bailey saw no issue with it. A blessing and a curse, covid came only 8 months into my living underground, ending that “adventure” early.
My next apartment was only 4 blocks north, though more “alphabet city” than east village, which one friend liked to remind me and my roommate constantly (to which we reminded him that he was in Chelsea and not West Village in his West 14th St apt). Anyways, a sweet and strange year this one was, as we all grappled to know how to exist in a post-covid world in a reeling city with no indoor seating. We took to spending more time in our tiny apartments with fewer friends, yet that’s how these friendships became so strong and so much deeper as all we had to face was each other. Funny enough, as I was leaving, I ran into our old super, and even 2 years later he still remembered my roommate and I. He was like an uncle that we could call on at any moment, like when I left my keys in the apartment and locked myself out, and he biked from Queens to let me back in on a Saturday morning. LOL.
I walked 2 avenues to what I claim to be the best bagels in the city, Tompkins Square Bagels, and will still only go to the Avenue A location because it’s the OG and I swear the bagels taste the best there. My favorite bagel is the Leo, eggs & lox on everything, and my secret is that I also add scallion cream cheese. But on this hot and sticky date, I ended up getting the Kaitlyn, egg whites and scallion cream cheese and avocado. I then made my way to my third apartment, the pinnacle, the peak, West Village.
After 2 years of living in the East Village, I woke up one day, walked past a gaggle of NYU students, and thought “I think I’m too old to live here”. So then began my yearning to move across town to the West Village, where I found myself most weekends anyways, and where I thought the best of the best lived. But saying you want to live in West Village, and then actually doing it, are two very different things. I was speaking of this dream to 2 girls one night at a birthday party, telling them of my trials of wanting a 3 bedroom past 6th avenue, to which they told me, “we live in a 3 bedroom in WV and are moving out in July, would you be interested?” Ah, the magic of New York.
It was as tiny as it gets, squishing 3 girls into an apartment probably made for 1, but it was the best of times. We lived across the street from Village Tavern, a place you’ll never find me in again, but was a perfect third place for us and our friends. I grabbed a lavender matcha latte with oat milk from Merriweather on Hudson (yes, it was $8 but oh, so worth it), and reminisced on a year of falling in and out of love with downtown Manhattan.
I then began my journey back to the Upper West, eyes heavy and heart full, realizing how much I had lived in these past 4 years. Was it exhausting moving every year? Absolutely. Would I have it any other way? Absolutely not. And now, as promised, the words that came to me, about actually living in a city that people are so quick to want to escape:
“You actually live here,” my friend, who also lives in New York, stated to me.
You can have an apartment here, you can grow up here, you can work here, but what does it take to “actually live here”? It takes staying on the weekends when no one else chooses to. Do you really know New York unless you’ve seen it in its most undesired state? Like a friend, you have to choose to see it through all times, to truly know it. Of course everyone wants to be here on a crisp autumn weekend, a holiday evening with twinkling lights, the first spring day where the sun beats the cold. But a hot day in July where your AC can’t cover the steam that erupts from the streets? It takes a different kind of love to stay for that. And trust me, it’s not desirable to be here on those weekends. Most times I wonder why I didn’t leave myself! But I stay, not as a martyr or to be recognized, but because it's mine. Like a mysterious lover you ache to have to yourself, you can grasp the city in your own hands for a weekend. And you may never leave your apartment, you may regret it, but at least you know it’s all yours.