Paris has its garrets; London, its bedsits. In New York, it’s the studio apartment — and its grittier cousin, the tenement railroad flat — that has sheltered generations of strivers and makers.
Now that New Yorkers are sheltering in place, studio dwellers would seem to be particularly challenged. But many say the years in their smaller nests have made them more resilient, primed for self-isolation. (Quentin Crisp, the author and dandy who proudly lived in pinched squalor in an East Village S.R.O., liked to point out that one can only be in one room at a time.)
If the bedsit seemed fashioned for a Barbara Pym character to nurse her hot-plate supper, and the garret to succor a starving painter or poet, the New York studio apartment, from its beginnings, promised grander things.
Once a feature of the apartment-hotels built in the late 19th century, some were designed as housing for middle-class, even affluent, single men. These bachelor flats anticipated a gentleman tenant lunching at his club, dining in restaurants or ordering from the residential hotel’s kitchen, and so these early versions lacked a kitchen.
By the 1920s, studio apartments had been rebranded as efficiency units, said Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the author of “Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street.”
Studios became a common urban type, kitted out with neat galley kitchens and even “disappearing beds” that folded down from a wall, a.k.a the Murphy, named after a man who patented them. Such apartments were fine launching pads for young professionals or childless couples, because so much of urban life happened outside the home.
But what happens when urban life effectively stops? There are 3,000 apartments that measure under 400 square feet in Manhattan, according to Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a longtime appraiser of the city’s real estate, and an untold number in the other boroughs. Here, half a dozen people who live in them tell their stories of quarantine.
‘Focus on the Energy’
Everything is within arm’s reach in Gerald Busby’s bright, spare room, which is less than 200 square feet. His computer where he composes. His bed, where he may serve a visitor tea. The upright piano he no longer uses but is a touchstone, he said, “to what really matters.”
Mr. Busby, 84, is a composer who has written scores for Robert Altman and Paul Taylor. Over 40 years ago, his mentor, Virgil Thompson, wrangled him a place at the Chelsea Hotel, the formerly bohemian boardinghouse.
He moved to his current room in the late 1990s, in the aftermath of the death of his partner, Sam Byers, from AIDS. Mr. Busby was struggling with addiction and the rent, and Stanley Bard, the hotel’s longtime manager and eccentric gatekeeper, gave him an ultimatum.
“‘If you pay your rent and behave yourself, I’ll move you to a place where you can spend the rest of your life,’” Mr. Busby recalled Mr. Bard saying, before offering him a studio on the same floor as his old apartment. The room’s former occupant had been a heroin-addicted heiress, one of a category of Chelsea tenants Mr. Busby described as “rich, black sheep children. I never knew her name.”
The rent was originally $720, he said, “but it’s been lowered to $600-something” since the Chelsea’s owners have been rehabbing the place and scrubbing it of its artsy patina, an arduous and complicated process, during which it was discovered that Mr. Busby was paying too much rent. (His apartment falls under the city’s rent guidelines.) Post-renovation, a few original tenants remain, as Mr. Busby said, “old gargoyles like me hanging around in the corners.”
Nearly a year ago, he fell and fractured a hip. Other medical horrors ensued. As his injuries have curtailed his movements and sheltering from the spread of the novel coronavirus has shut out nearly everything else, he finds himself recalling a lesson learned from Robert Altman, the director, who cast him as a preacher in the 1978 film, “A Wedding.”
“I was so scared, I could hardly breathe,” Mr. Busby remembered. “Altman said, ‘Be grateful for anyone or any thing that makes you this nervous. Don’t focus on the fear, focus on the energy, and use that as your raw material.’”
Mr. Busby is drawing on that lesson more and more lately, he said. But the sun still pours through his stained glass windows, and neighbors and friends drop off food, and if he can’t walk, he can still write, and so his world is as big as it needs to be.
“I’m the most fortunate man,” he said. “My whole life has been that when I really need something, it just materializes. A neighbor just made a wonderful soup, and I’m luxuriating with that. It’s one of the pleasures of isolation, finding something that tastes extremely good.”
‘Clear Boundaries are Key’
On a chalkboard-painted closet door, Jillian White, a director of a mortgage company, has copied what has become a contemporary homage to Rosa Parks, surely one of the best boundary setters of the last century. It’s a line now printed on T-shirts and hoodies; Ms. White found it on a poster on Etsy.
“Nah,” it reads. “R. Parks, 1955.” You can see it from every corner of Ms. White’s 355-square-foot apartment on the Upper West Side.
Ms. White, 38, has been working from home for the last month, as her industry scrambles to adjust to a new world. She has been setting boundaries for herself to expand her experience and relieve her psyche even though she is now alone, all day, in a small space.
At 8:45 a.m., she turns on her laptop; at 6 p.m. sharp, she shuts it down, puts it in its case, puts the case in her hallway, and then takes a walk through Central Park, enacting a reverse “commute.” Once home, she takes a bath to separate the evening from the day, puts on a podcast, lights a candle. Even closing the bathroom door, she said, makes her feel refreshed when she re-enters the living space.
Then she calls her parents, another cue that distances “home” life from work life. The strict routine sustains and buoys her. “Our lives in the offices have clear edges,” she said. “When you work from home, everything begins to blend together and that takes a toll. Clear boundaries are key.”’
‘Thinning the Herd’
It was just before the blackout of 1977 that John Holmstrom, the indie cartoonist, co-founder of Punk Magazine and former High Times editor and publisher, moved into his railroad flat on East 10th Street — three “rooms,” 350 square feet, no doors.
He had been couch surfing, and living in Punk’s early offices on Tenth Avenue, among other berths, before inheriting the lease on this apartment from two friends: Robin Rothman, who was a girlfriend of Joey Ramone’s, and a singer who worked the door at CBGBs who went by the name deerfrance.
The rent at the time was $120, and Mr. Holmstrom could barely scratch it together. (It is currently $622.30.) Someone had painted the walls with what Mr. Holmstrom described as “hippie graffiti, those dopey fluorescent swirls,” and it took him years to get it off. Otherwise the place was just right for a 24-year-old cartoonist, just a mattress on the floor and not much else.
The place is standard tenement issue: 12 feet wide, bathtub in the kitchen, a water closet and no room for a proper stove or fridge. Mr. Holmstrom, now 66, cooks with a hot plate and toaster oven, and he has graduated to a bunk bed, sleeping on the bottom and using the top for storage.
His collections (comic books, DVDs and CDs) spill out of the shelves along the walls. Five years ago, Mr. Holmstrom donated his own work to the Beinecke Library at Yale, and gained a bit of floor space, he said.
The place’s lack of doors have inhibited cohabitation, Mr. Holmstrom said. No matter. Cartoonists, he pointed out, are solitary creatures.
“Even before this thing,” he said. “I would go weeks seeing only grocery clerks because I was drawing. I’ve always worked out of my apartment. Though I loved walking around. Now I’m being good, I’m old. My sister sent me a mask, but I’m not going out much. A few trips to the Food Emporium on 14th Street.” The delis that line First and Second Avenue are closed up, he said, with chains on their doors, an eerie sight.
“Now,” he added, “I’m cleaning my apartment, thinning the herd.”
“There’s a saying: You learn the most from either traveling the world and living in different places, or staying put and watching the river go by,” he said. “I’ve been watching the river go by.”
Bathroom as Office
The good part of the 237-square foot studio rented by Morgan Avery and Andrew Sispoidis for $2,300 is everything is a few feet away. The bad part? Everything is a few feet away.
Social distancing has always been a part of the couple’s dynamic, if not their lexicon. Together 25 years, Ms. Avery, 51, manager of the editorial department of an advertising agency, and Mr. Sispoidis, 54, an executive coach and artist, have spent the last six years in this nest-like apartment on Gay Street.
“You have to be supernaturally quiet,” said Ms. Avery, to give each other space or if someone is sleeping. They share a twin bed that doubles as a sofa (she is 5-foot-2 and he is 5-foot-8). They can hear each other chewing from across the room, a particular irritant for Ms. Avery. She will shoot her husband a baleful glance, and he’ll say, “I know, I know. I’ll try to stop breathing now.”
Mr. Sispoidis has always worked from home; Ms. Avery has only recently been doing so. More compromises, more social distancing. Mr. Sispoidis uses the tiny bathroom as his office when he has calls, many of which can last for hours. Ms. Avery retreats there at night, for Zoom parties with friends from college.
And they have developed a signaling system to create a zone of silence for the long stretches when Ms. Avery is at the kitchen counter with her laptop, and Mr. Sispoidis is not cloistered in the bathroom but sitting three feet away from her on the sofa.
While the apartment is largely tchotchke-free, Ms. Avery and Mr. Sispoidis have a few Peanuts figurines on display — a three-inch Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown, Christmas ornaments they keep out year round as good luck charms. Lately, they have taken on new roles.
Ms. Avery said: “After many days of one or the other of us half-listening, and the other one saying things like ‘Not now!,’ Andrew brought Lucy over into my area and he kept Charlie Brown. When they face each other, we can talk. When one of them turns around, silence must reign. Sadly, Charlie is just about always ready to talk to Lucy, who usually has her back to him.”
‘It’s My Foxhole’
Before the virus, Jodie Wasserman’s 350-square-foot apartment in the Midwood section of Brooklyn was just a pit stop. A $1,000 a month pit stop. A stand-up comedian, Ms. Wasserman, 48, might have performed three nights a week at a comedy club, or be booked out of town on a weekend. These days, since she has been laid off from the insurance investigation company that was her day job until the virus hit, the two rooms feel like a bunker.
“It’s my foxhole,” she said. “I have my TV, my cats, my food. It’s a safe place. It’s OK. There are people right now who don’t have homes.”
Her routine, she said, is like this: lie around with the cats, watch television late into the night and early morning, talk on the phone, sometimes all night. Wake up late. Repeat. She said she feels like a teenager.
“You don’t have a job,” she said. “You’re in your room. You’re watching TV and calling your friends at crazy hours. You can’t go outside, and you do the same thing over and over. But you’re not a kid, you know what’s going on in the world, and you know that very soon you’re going to run out of money.”
Two-Legged Problems
“Having the energy to get upset is a luxury,” Lauren Pine was saying the other day. “It’s what I think of now as a two-legged problem.”
In November 2017, Ms. Pine, a clinical nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was riding her bike on the Lower East Side when a garbage truck knocked her down and dragged her 20 feet. She lost her leg, her hip and her job, which she adored. Now 52, Ms. Pine has found within herself reserves of patience, and these have been serving her well since the virus closed the city.
“Sitting in an Access-A-Ride for two hours was not unheard-of and as much as I hated it, it has tempered me to tolerate a lot, and not be a narcissistic freak,” she said of life pre-coronavirus.
Now, it may take her two hours to provision from C Town, the grocery store a block away from the rent-stabilized railroad flat near Tompkins Square Park where she has lived for the last 23 years, for which she pays $1,270. Armed with a backpack and crutches, it’s a ballet that begins inside the 400-square-foot apartment: on goes the prosthetic leg, then the gloves and a mask.
Back home with her groceries, the dance is reversed and amplified: The gloves come off and are discarded; on go new gloves, and out come the wipes to unpack the groceries. “I think of the virus as glitter in a nightclub,” Ms. Pine said. “You might not have worn it going in, but it’s everywhere when you come out.”
Until her accident, her apartment was a “storage unit,” Ms. Pine said. “I slept here. I hardly ever cooked. I was scared to entertain because it was too messy. I’m not a great homemaker.”
Her gas bill was so low that Con Edison once called to make sure everything was working.
“People who say they’re bored, in my world that’s an immediate shunning offense,” Ms Pine said. “Do something. Volunteer. Take an online course,” as she is doing. Ms. Pine was particularly amused by the toilet-paper panic. Another two-legged problem. “You don’t have to go to Whole Foods. You can find toilet paper at every bodega. People don’t seem to know how New York works.”
