Habitats
Private Lives in the Big City
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
There may be eight million stories in the Naked City, but there are also nearly three million dwelling places, ranging from Park Avenue palaces to Dickensian garrets and encompassing much in between. The doorways to these residences are tantalizing portals opening onto largely invisible lives. Habitats offers 40 vivid and intimate stories about how New Yorkers really live in their brownstones, their apartments, their mansions, their lofts, and as a whole presents a rich, multi-textured portrait of what it means to make a home in the world’s most varied and powerful city. These essays, expanded versions of a selection of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, take readers to both familiar and remote sections of the city—to history-rich townhouses, to low-income housing projects, to out-of-the-way places far from the beaten track, to every corner of the five boroughs—and introduce them to a wide variety of families and individuals who call New York home. These pieces reveal a great deal about the city’s past and its rich store of historic dwellings. Along with exploring the deep and even mystical connections people feel to the place where they live, these pieces, taken as a whole, offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the world’s most fascinating cities and a vivid portrait of the true meaning of home in the 21st-century metropolis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of snappy columns originally printed in the Real Estate section of the New York Times, Rosenblum (Boulevard of Dreams) gives an intimate look at 40 unique New York City spaces and the people who inhabit them. From the decrepit Bushwick mansion turned music collective, to the cozy, customized studio in Lennox Hill, to the family-heirloom rowhouse in Long Island City, to the classic eight on the Upper East Side, to affordable housing in the Bronx, to the custodial apartment in a Staten Island museum, Rosenblum's elegantly compressed portraits offer charming "biography through real estate"; together, they represent a tiny sample of the infinite possibilities of life in New York City. The stories describe the metropolis as a palimpsest, one that maintains traces of its past despite inevitable change. The tales of luck or hard work that resulted in the securing of perfect tiny shoebox apartments, rehabbed brownstones, and converted industrial spaces provide a frisson of envy that keeps us reading; it's the same urge that has us gaze up at lighted windows from the sidewalk below and wonder if someone else's house, and thus, their very existence, is better than our own. Rosenblum's profiles are a celebration of New York, and of what E.B. White called "the gift of privacy, the jewel of loneliness" the difficulties and pleasures of finding a place and making it a home.
