Chelsea sixth-floor walk up

Today is the start of something big! Very big. Gaby has a new apartment in NYC.

I remember my first apartment. It was 32 Schiller Street, Binghamton, New York. Shared a simple two-bedroom unit with Gary Levine in a six-unit building near the Johnson City line. We took possession in June 1974 and, shortly thereafter, I went home and then flew to Birmingham, England for an eight-week summer job with Foseco. I earned just enough to take a cheap room in a cheap workingman's bed & breakfast, to eat KFC and fish and chips most days, and to have a few, cheap pints in the local or on a week end getaway. In England, I made good use of a company car for week end travel, from the balmy southwest, to Wales, Yorkshire and more. All the time I feared that Gary had left our apartment unlocked and open to vandalism -- that never occurred.

The apartment cost $120 a month, plus utilities. Internet did not exist and cable was not in the budget, nor was an air conditioner. Hot in the summer and cold in the winter, it was my home for my final nine months in Binghamton. I lived on a $2,400 annual stipend, so my $60 share of the rent was manageable. Full tuition scholarship made grad school 'free'. I also had my job in the campus pub maybe two nights a week.

Gaby is in another world. While I moved a few miles, from campus to my apartment, Gaby is changing from her Los Angeles apartment to her new place in New York. Unlike her two years in Strathmore at UCLA, she will have her own room, a bit larger than the original dorm room she shared with the two Emmas, starting in September 2017. My Schiller Street dive had a balcony facing the street and was a second-floor walk-up unit; Gaby's place is on the sixth floor, a walkup as well. She and Emma will have about the same space we had in Binghamton, albeit a much nicer kitchen, yet at a cost more than twenty times what Gary and I paid in Binghamton in 1974. Then again, she is earning more than twenty times what I earned in 1974, it is 2021 and Chelsea a nice neighborhood in New York, with better transportation options and certainly more options outside her apartment.