Chez Chesler

On my first day at my new job one of my co-workers told me he'd been to see Jerry Seinfeld, who said something that rang particular true. Jerry liked driving, because when you're driving, you're outside, but you're still inside. I think the same is true for living in a wooden house, and I'm not sure that it's all good. I grew up in brick apartments, most importantly the brick and steel high-rise in Co-op City. When I'm in a house, I'm never that far from the outside. Althoug it turns out one of my children didn't grok the orientation of an upstairs room, generally you can look out a window and see exactly where on the outside corresponds, and it is not inconceivable that with an appropriate ladder one could be immediately outside the room one is inside. OK, there are some attic and rafter spaces that aren't quite accessible, but any place in the house is simply the same space as if the house were not there, separated by enough wood and glass to keep the cold, almost all of the rain, and most of the draft out. An apartment in a building isn't like that. To start with, unless it's a penthouse, there are common walls. That means there aren't windows in that direction, and it's the great unknown. The ingress and egress is extremely constrained, typically one door to a common hallway. (We had a balcony; an older low-rise apartment might have a fire escape. My most recurring dreams involve going back to our Co-op City apartment. In one kind, something drastic has changed, like half the building has been demolished, or an adoining building built, or a sideways-moving elevator has been added. And in the other kind, something from the outside is coming in, through the windows, or through some ladder or elevator or aircraft that leads right outside the windows or balcony.) Maybe it's my laissez-faire housekeeping, but a well-maintained apartment is its own world. In Manhattan, due to rent control, apartments are kept for a long time, and due to their cramped size, a lot of artifice goes into making them homes rather than crash pads. People write about visiting the apartments of gurus, legendary authors or editors. Some of the magic may be the question of "where did they keep it?" We're not surprised that a house has a basement, and things go on in basements that we don't see. But behind the door from the corridor might be a supercomputer for studying Pi or a pony.