rebecca LANDO

I was walking the dogs up State Street against a pounding headwind. It made me worry, like I always do, about the buildings of New York. I saw cracks forming in the upper stories of overly-rigid buildings; sheet windows punching out of steel-framed high rises. No matter how sure the engineering, how steadfast the construction crew, how solid the building materials, gravity will always win. What goes up must come down.

Buildings didn’t always scare me. Buildings - and gravity’s power over them - have only been a concern for me for 9 years. The first time I realized it, I was standing in Cooper Square with my best friend and the subway was vibrating underneath our feet. I looked at the buildings around us and saw the subway rattling the bolts from the I-beams, the stone and brick facades crumbling, floors caving in and crashing down. My friend scoffed and put her faith in anchored sub-basements. 

To me, anchors pulling the buildings down onto the subway tubes made it worse.

We were freshmen at NYU in September of 2001. A month later, another friend moved into a half-price studio in a luxury building on Rector Street and invited us over. She had a two year lease at half the price; the landlord, like many in the Financial District, was desperate to fill recently-empty apartments. Her first week in the new studio was spent scrubbing dust from the windows and walls, but she insisted she was happy there. If the guy who’s supposed to live here comes back, she told us, she’d have to move out right away - but otherwise, the place was all hers. And at a bargain.

I couldn’t get my head around it. Wasn’t it uncomfortable, I asked, to live in an apartment so recently inhabited by a dead person? Okay, in New York, chances are you live in a dead person’s apartment. But rarely do you know it. More rarely do you have a solid idea of where, when, and how the previous occupant died. My Rector Street friend insisted it didn’t bother her, but 2 weeks after moving in she’d adopted two kittens. She named them Nick and Nora and said she just attributed any strange noises in the night to them. I think it was a joke, but I didn’t like it.

What about the guy’s stuff? I asked. He can come back for the apartment, but where’d his stuff go? There was the slightest hesitation before my Rector Street friend responded: she had rented the apartment fully-furnished. The rest of his stuff - his clothes, his cds and dvds, his frying pan and chef’s knife and bathroom towels and photos of his family were catalogued in garbage bags in the building’s basement. In case he came back or some loved one came for them. The luxury building had 32 apartments; 14 of them had been emptied into garbage bags, their contents in mock-storage in the basement.

One day, we were supposed to go to the Rector Street apartment for a photoshoot. As we were stepping down into the 8th Street subway station, my Rector Street friend realized that we couldn’t go that way; her stop was shut down because inspectors had found a crack that ran from the sub-basement to the 7th floor of the building next to hers. The crack was from the aftershock of the Towers crumbling. The building was being knocked down. My Rector Street friend shrugged it off. We could still come over, she said. We’d just have to walk.

I refused. If they’d found a 9-story crack in the building next to hers, how could I trust her building was any safer? What if knocking down the cracked building somehow widened an overlooked, hairline fracture in her building? My Rector Street friend laughed at me, at my silly, irrational fear.

At the time, I thought she was the real New Yorker. We were all trying to become New Yorkers, but it seemed that she, out of all of us, had succeeded. Like New York, she had no qualms about paving over history, resettling and reshaping things as her own. She lived in that guy’s furniture for the full two years of her half-price lease. I never set foot in her apartment again. I couldn’t; there were too many ghosts and too much gravity.

After college, she moved to China, then to California. I moved from Washington Square Park to Union Square, Broome Street, Park Slope, The Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, and Fort Greene. I don’t know what those two years on Rector Street did to her; probably nothing at all.

Geography would say that I am the New Yorker and she isn’t; I am here and she is not. Since September 11th, my idea - probably all of our ideas - of what ‘being a New Yorker’ means has changed. For me, before, it was vague but privileged (I was 18 - everything was vague and everything was privileged). Now it means, among other things, walking through Brooklyn and worrying that the wind will bring the world crashing down.