Quick update: A co-worker of mine is leaving the country for three weeks due to a family emergency, so I’ll be subletting her studio apartment in Harlem through the end of the month. It’s not a permanent solution, but it gives me three weeks to find something slightly less transient.
Special thanks to my friend Karl for letting me crash in his kick-ass Chinatown loft for a few nights, and thanks to my friend Alfredo for offering his sofa in Brooklyn.
4:00 AM: Wake up, feed the cat, check email for messages about possible housing situations, check craigslist for any new listings.
5:00 AM: Wake up, check email, check craigslist.
6:00 AM: Wake up, check email, check craigslist.
9:00 AM: Wake up, check email, check craigslist, take a shower, check email, check craigslist.
10:00 AM: Leave dorm room, stop at Starbucks to grab some coffee and a bite to eat.
11:00 AM: Pick up Zipcar from garage on 122nd Street.
11:15 AM: Begin moving stuff out of the dorm room and into the car.
12:15 AM: Finish moving out of dorm room, submit check-out form. I’m now officially homeless.
12:35 PM: Arrive at address where I had an appointment to look at a room for rent. No answer when I ring the doorbell.
12:40 – 1:30 PM: Drive around for a bit, with my cat and my belongings in the Zipcar, for about an hour.
1:35 PM: Arrive at next appointment, find a nice parking space across the street from the building.
1:35 – 1:50 PM: Meet with prospective roommate, express interest in renting the room ASAP. Offer cash on the spot. She asks for an hour to think about it. Agree to call her back at 3:00.
1:55 – 2:59 PM: Grab a sandwich and soda from a nearby deli, sit in car with A/C on in order to keep the cat cool and to to not lose the parking spot.
3:00 PM: Call prospective roommate’s phone number. No answer. Leave a message.
3:01 – 3:10 PM: Wait for callback.
3:11 PM: Call friend in Chinatown to arrange to crash at his place for a few nights. Leave parking spot, begin driving downtown.
3:20 PM: Receive callback from prospective roommate. She’s decided to rent the room to somebody else.
3:30 PM: Call Zipcar, let them know I’ll be an hour late returning the car, fully aware that I’ll be incurring massive late fees and causing great inconvenience to the next person who has the car reserved.
3:35 PM: Receive call from Zipcar giving me the option to extend my reservation by one hour with no late fees. Accept offer.
3:45 PM: Arrive at friend’s loft in Chinatown, begin unloading stuff from car up three flights of stairs into his place. Nobody can find the key to the freight elevator.
4:20 PM: Finish unloading car. I have exactly 40 minutes to get the car from Chinatown to the garage on 122nd Street.
4:25 PM: Find previously-unkown shortcut tunnel under Battery Park to West Side Highway, hit the gas.
4:25 – 4:50 PM: Continue driving at a very high rate of speed up the West Side Highway, while glancing at my watch and receiving multiple text messages from Zipcar informing me of dire consequences if I’m late returning the car.
4:55 PM: Exit Henry Hudson Parkway at 125th Street. Look at watch and panic.
4:57 PM: Arrive at garage on 122nd Street, return car to attendant. Look at watch and grin.
5:10 – 6:30 PM: Embark on subway ride back down to Chinatown.
6:40 PM: Exit subway on East Broadway, stop in Pathmark to grab some cat food.
6:45 PM: Arrive back at friend’s loft, open a beer and watch the last two innings of a baseball game, while wondering where the fuck I’ll be living this time next week.
Well, I looked at a moderately shitty place in Brooklyn this evening, and told the guy I’d get back to him tonight one way or the other about the room he had for rent, because I still had to check out another place in Harlem.
I went to Harlem and checked out the room, and although it was far from perfect, it was actually halfway decent. I told the girl I was interested in the room and offered to sign a sublease and give her money on the spot. She said she had to decide between me and one other person, but would give me a call with her decision no later than 10:30 tonight.
Meanwhile, there’s a place I looked at in Inwood last Wednesday night that was by far the nicest place so far, and I expressed interest in taking the room. However, the people there are taking forever to make a decision, although I’m apparently their “top candidate” so far. Unfortunately, they’re going out of town this weekend, and still want to meet a couple more people. (They’re a lesbian couple and would prefer to have another female in the apartment, but seemed to like me.)
So I get back from the place in Harlem this evening and wait by the phone… and wait and wait. 10:30 comes and goes. At 10:50 I call, but nobody picks up. I leave a message. Still nothing.
So, at 11:00 I called the guy in Brooklyn to let him know I was interested in taking the room he had for rent. Unfortunately for me, the guy who showed up after I did put down a deposit on the room.
So I called my friend in Chinatown who had earlier offered me a place to crash in his loft and took him up on his gracious offer, as it looks like I’ll be crashing at his place tomorrow night.
Where I go from there is anybody’s guess….
Checking in… Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a while.
I have to be out of my dorm room at Columbia by noon tomorrow, and I still haven’t lined up a new place to live… Starting to panic now.
I’m looking at a couple places up in Harlem this evening… Here’s hoping they aren’t too shitty (I’ve seen some incredible rat holes over the past week), although at this point I’m not in a position to be very picky.
In other news, our grades from the Columbia summer studio have been posted… Yours truly is the proud recipient of an “A”.
Well, it’s over. Our critic took us out for food and drinks in the neighborhood, and we had our big final party and exhibition over in Avery Hall afterwards. There’s a lot I could write about these past five weeks, but I’m not sure where to begin… I can’t help but think of the objectives I had in mind when I first decided to enroll in this program back in March:
Objective: Escape the daily grind of professional practice and immerse myself in a studio environment for a few weeks.
Check.
Objective: Earn transfer credit that can be applied toward my undergrad BA degree.
Check.
Objective: Do some cool projects that can be added to my portfolio the next time I apply to grad schools.
Check.
Objective: Do some networking to meet people in the NYC architecture community, and maybe even get a letter of recommendation from my studio critic.
Check. Our critic has taught at many top-tier architecture schools in NYC and beyond, and has offered to write letters for anybody in the section who asks. Besides that, he seems like a guy I want to stay in touch with anyway.
Objective: To develop a more theoretical sensibility, a more rigorous process, and apply it to my design projects.
In progress. That’s not something that can happen in five weeks, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface in that regard. I can design some very cool stuff, but I need to work on the “why” questions.
And with that, the Columbia summer studio is over just as abruptly as it started… On Monday, it’s back to the working world full-time.
Now I have exactly one week to find a new place to live in NYC, before I’m kicked out of the Columbia dorms. Time to start checking craigslist on an hourly basis.
Well, it’s almost over… We had our final pin-up and review today, and tomorrow we have a party, exhibition of student work, and photo sessions for our models. I’ll be sure to post pics when I get them. My review went pretty well… Most of the critiques of my project were about things I’ve already identified as my weaknesses. Looks like I’ll have my work cut out for me whenever I start grad school.
With that, my five weeks at Columbia will be over, and I’ll once again be a full-time working stiff. The paycheck will certainly be nice, and my new job is going well so far, but part of me will miss the creativity and the whole studio culture.
In other news, Chase Bank has apparently found my missing $2000 and credited my account. Now they just need to refund all the overdraft fees they charged while that deposit was in limbo.
I’ll post more later, but for now I just need some sleep.
Okay, so last Thursday I took the money I got from selling my car and deposited it into my checking account via an ATM machine. Smart thing to do, right? Now it’s five days later and Chase Bank has no record of the transaction… It’s as if the money disappeared into thin air.
Meanwhile, I have a huge final model to buy supplies for, and I’m flat-broke. If I don’t buy these supplies today, there’s no way in hell this model will be done by the end of the week.
I’m pretty fucking pissed right now….
Sorry I’ve been neglecting this lately. Columbia is keeping me busy as hell, and we’re now in full-on crush mode as we finish up our final projects over the next few days. From now through Thursday I’ll pretty much be coming out of Avery Hall only for occasional food and air. It’s been a great few weeks, but I’ll be happy when I have the time to sleep and enjoy the city again. (And getting a full-time paycheck again won’t suck, either.)
New job is going well… Nothing major to report there, except that there’s word about moving the office into new digs at some point in the future. During my interview they seemed particularly interested in the fact that I designed the new space for my old firm in Chicago, and now I’m apparently one of only two people at the new firm that has substantial experience in corporate interiors… This could get interesting.
I finally sold my car on Thursday… Not nearly for as much as I was originally hoping to get for it, but hopefully enough to arrange some sort of post-Columbia housing situation until I can get myself a real apartment. Stay tuned.
Okay, back over to Avery….
Well, I just got back from an exciting road trip to New Haven, where I was hoping to sell my car at the CarMax store up there (which, it turns out, is the closest one to NYC). Their offer for my car: $750. This is a car that is worth over $5000 according to NADA and Kelly Blue Book, and CarMax told me with a straight face that it’s worth $750. I not-so-politely declined their offer and walked out.
In an effort to ensure that my 120-mile round trip wasn’t a complete waste of time and gas money, I decided to head over to Yale and check out the area. I had never been anywhere near the Yale campus before, and it’s one of the schools I’ll most likely be re-applying to for my M.Arch. at some point.
I parked near the architecture building (which is currently ripped to shreds as it undergoes a gut renovation), and poked around a bit at Louis Kahn’s building nearby. Very cool building, but unfortunately it was closed when I was there, so I was limited to looking around the exterior. I have no idea where Yale’s architecture studios are being held in the interim, or else I would have checked them out. I’m sure I’ll be back up there at some point in the fall, though.
I had a burger at Loui’s Lunch Spot, which claims to be the place that invented the hamburger. Tiny restaurant, and decent burger cooked in a weird cast iron contraption and served on toast, but hardly the best burger I’ve ever had. I guess it’s one of those places you go once just for the novelty of it.
After that, I did some walking around the Yale campus, which is very large and very beautiful. Lots of old gothic buildings, traditional campus quads, big trees, etc… It actually reminded me a bit of the University of Chicago campus. The surrounding streets have your typical college business district array of pizza places, bars, head shops, etc. Pretty cool overall… I could certainly think of worse places to spend three years of my life. New Haven has somewhat of a reputation for being a crime-ridden hellhole, but the area immediately near the campus seems pretty nice.
So my car is parked back in Newark, and I’m in a bit of a dilemma as how to pay the first month’s rent and security deposit for a slightly more permanent housing situation next month. I’ve already given up on the idea of getting my own apartment right away (that idea will most likely have to wait a few months), so I’ll be looking to move in with roommates for a while. True, my new job is paying me good money, but it will be a while until I’m working full-time and the paychecks start rolling in.
Time flies when you’re having fun…. We’ve just been assigned our final project in the Columbia summer studio, which is due in two weeks. Up until now we’ve been doing a lot of visual exercises and modeling of abstract concepts; now we get to design a building for a real site.
The project, in a nutshell: Some 850,000 artifacts were apparently dug up during construction of NYC’s Foley Courthouse complex, most of which dated back to the area’s past as the notorious “Five Points” Irish ghetto during the 1800’s (think Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York). These artifacts were meticulously cataloged and then stored away in what was thought to be a safe place: The basement of 6 World Trade Center.
On 9/11, eighteen of the artifacts were on loan to the Archdiocese of New York and were being stored off-site. The rest of the artifacts were destroyed when the north tower collapsed.
We’ve been assigned a site in Chinatown not far from the original “Five Points”, and our task is to design a building that functions both as a museum for the 18 surviving artifacts, and as a memorial to the approximately 849,982 other artifacts that were lost once in the gradually-shifting sands of time, rediscovered, and then lost again in one catastrophic morning. We also need to incorporate some of the ideas we’ve been exploring in the prior class assignments.
Interesting project, to be sure… Certainly beats designing “a house for a schizophrenic baker” or something like that. I have some vague ideas for how to proceed, but I still have a lot of thinking and researching to do.
Work is going pretty well… Nothing major to report, except that it’s a bit weird working at a place where most everybody seems relatively sane and well-adjusted. In some ways it’s not nearly as entertaining as working with a bunch of dysfunctional nutcases, but hopefully it will mean I won’t be spending nearly as much time pounding my head against a brick wall.