The Move In (23 Aug 2024, 26C 79F and sunny)
Seven minutes is all it takes to walk from my apartment to Harlem, waylaid slightly by my confusion over whether the red lights here are actually respected. Or have I always been in Harlem? The morning’s taxi takes me from JFK airport to Morningside Heights, a neighbourhood held together by Columbia, but truthfully the demarcation is a rather artificial delineation, carving the genteel university out from the rowdier blocks surrounding it. A quarter in denial of its position. I am wondering these things dragging two luggage bags behind me, having arrived slightly too early to pick up my keys. New York summer is hot and sticky; my bedroom on the 6th floor, as I will later discover, is even hotter. The layout of the flat is downright bizarre: rooms sprout to the left of a long-corridor: bedroom, bedroom (mine), bathroom, liminal study-storage-ironing-studio, kitchen, bedroom, living room, fire escape.
My own bare room awaits me. The university’s definition of furnished is a loose one (“… ugly + cheap. You’ll be able to identify Columbia housing immediately based on its generic light wood furniture,” counsels a residential veteran online). My housemate is nice enough, and this building – celebrating its 125th birthday this year – bears the good fortune of having a lift. An elevator, roomy enough. In Paris I was well-acquainted enough with tiny metal boxes to prefer climbing the stairs, less hypnotising than exhausting in Euro-American architecture’s tendencies to trap summer heat rather than allow it to flow through. Here I bask in the relative cleanliness of the building, for I am soon to pop into many that are not to pick up various bric-a-brac to kit out my barren chamber. I imagine there are 210 or so such rooms, assuming each apartment holds three like I do.
If there is any real basis to carving Morningside Heights out as a distinct neighbourhood – that is, an argument rooted in history and geography over class and privilege – it is Morningside Park, that great, green, scruffy demarcation, the site of two murders still lurking in the imagination of the student body today. It gently slopes from the South, around 96th Street (I only manage to count this on day 3, schlepping some tableware from a posh charity shop on the Upper West Side); from other angles it rises more dramatically, the park’s pockmarked cliffs or the valley-like descent into Harlem’s 125th Street to the North.
My housemate and I descend into the park, him making his purchase from the halal cart in momentarily-rusty Arabic and me making mine out of the sheer pleasure of something familiar yet different. During my second hour in the city I had not yet learnt to mark locations in my mind through the intersections of gridded streets, nor have I tasted enough of New York to construct a personal hierarchy of spots to eat, perhaps to be strategically deployed at an even newer-comer. But what I do partake in is a little comparative exercise in the genre of halal late-night food, this one open suspiciously open when the good kebab vans of Oxford or kapsalon establishments and döner houses would still be fast asleep. I get lamb over rice, because the deep fryer does not function. Sideways glance to my housemate and guide, Massachusetts transplant to the city. Do I tip on something like this? No, he gestures. I think it is a no. When I finally crack open my aluminium tray on a bench it is still delicious and spicy.
I could regale you with tales about chasing down leads for furniture and appliances, but instead let me share some things in my room
Harlem/Morningside
The Far Side: Governor Island, Rockaway
Music scene: jazz, jazz, drum and bass
The food of the streets
The university
Upstate
Making friends?
Leave a Reply