David Hedges and Joel Auville recently considered moving. There’s a lot of large-scale, long-term construction right outside their windows. “With this new building,” Mr. Auville said, “we were depressed, thinking we were going to lose light.”
There was another factor: They’ve been living in the same apartment for 42 years.
“I thought, gee, if we spend $5,000 a month, we could find a really wonderful place,” Mr. Hedges said. “And after about two weeks of living in it, we’d probably look at each other and say, ‘Can we go home now?’”
Just the thought of moving led the couple to realize how much of their shared life is defined by the building in Midwood, Brooklyn, that they’ve called home since 1982. The apartment is rent stabilized, and the city’s Rent Guidelines Board sets annual increases for rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments, mostly protecting those residents from the harsh market forces that have typified the post-pandemic rental market.
“There’s an organic quality to rent stabilization,” Mr. Hedges said. “I always thought about it as stabilizing rent, money, but it’s really about stabilizing community in a person’s life, stabilizing a real relationship with the neighborhood.”
The couple met in Paris in 1978. Mr. Hedges, who is from Stony Brook, N.Y., was studying music abroad; Mr. Auville, who grew up in public housing outside of Paris, had a steady career as a leather craftsman. They first saw each other at a bar called Club 18, a small gay disco on the Rue de Beaujolais. “It was more working class than fashionable,” Mr. Hedges recalled. “In those days, the ‘gay scene’ was still mostly underground, unless you were rich and famous.”
But after they started a life together, Mr. Auville’s father died. “Joel was ready to move,” Mr. Hedges recalled, “so we decided we’d come here.”
They could see a life for themselves in New York. Mr. Hedges wanted to attend Brooklyn College to finish his master’s degree in music, while Mr. Auville was ready to apply for permanent residency and carve out the next chapter of his life in a new country.
They spoke French to each other, so Mr. Auville didn’t speak English when they arrived. Hitting the streets of Brooklyn to find a place to live forced him to learn fast. “The tradition was to go walking around, asking supers, ‘Do you have anyplace?’” he recalled. “We did that in August, so it was about 100 degrees.”
When they found the one-bedroom apartment, Mr. Hedges loved it immediately. “It was large, I liked the kitchen, and it was close to the school. I just had a good feeling about it,” he said.
Mr. Auville was another story. “Joel hated it because the floors hadn’t been redone,” Mr. Hedges said. The people who lived here before us had two Doberman pinschers and there were still lots of traces of that.”
It was affordable, just $325 a month with gas included. “And I still said to the guy, ‘Do you have something cheaper?’” Mr. Hedges recalled, laughing. “The guy looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I got something cheaper where you’ll go home at night and they’ll hit you over the head — is that what you want?’ Something about his bad salesmanship sold me immediately. I felt like, my God, I’m home.”
The owners of the building confirmed they’d do repairs before handing over keys, which relieved Mr. Auville, so the couple signed a lease.
$1,222 | Midwood, Brooklyn
David Hedges, 70; Joel Auville, 69
Occupation: Mr. Hedges is a retired high school teacher; Mr. Auville is a retired leather craftsman and home cleaner.
On living with a piano: Mr. Hedges went 20 years without playing his piano and eventually sold it. “Whatever success I had was too much, too fast,” he said. “My playing became very willful and forced.” Eventually he realized he couldn’t stay away forever and started playing again. He bought a second piano with savings and still remembers watching the movers struggle to get it into the apartment. “I have never seen giant men sweat like that.”
On neighborhood safety: Midwood has had ups and downs over the years — Mr. Hedges was mugged at one point — but both men said the neighborhood has not felt dangerous to them. “At times, people became scared the value of their home would go down,” Mr. Auville noted, “but the neighborhood has never felt unsafe.”
There were several families in the building, some with multiple generations in multiple apartments. “It’s a building that when people find it,” Mr. Hedges said, “they tend to stay in it.”
The first neighbors he and Mr. Auville met had moved into the building as newlyweds in 1932. “When we moved in,” Mr. Auville recalled, “most of the people living here were Jewish people. Many had survived the Holocaust.”
The neighborhood had just enough amenities — a supermarket and hardware store, inexpensive restaurants and an Irish bar that still served 25-cent beers — and there was a familiarity among the people who shared the building. Neighbors could tell when families were in a fight or when someone wasn’t feeling well. People put used items out in the lobby and told others to feel free to take them.
Mr. Hedges recalls feeling comfortable from the beginning. “Certainly, we were the only gay people around and I don’t remember feeling threatened in any way.”
He routinely practiced at the piano and his neighbors not only tolerated it but welcomed it. On weekend afternoons, some of them would sit in his apartment and would listen to him play. “The assumption in this neighborhood has always been if you’re here, you’re one of us,” he said. “We want to support you to do whatever it takes for you to be able to stay here. We want to support you to meet your goals, work hard, make a good living and stay. Because this is how a community functions. You don’t have to conform, you just have to participate. For many, hearing the piano was a part of continuity and community in the building.”
In the early days, Mr. Hedges and Mr. Auville commuted to Manhattan for work, cleaning luxury apartments for a company that catered to wealthy New Yorkers. They developed several friendly relationships with clients and furnished much of their apartment with items given to them by the people for whom they cleaned — a bedroom set from Irma Jaffe, the art historian; works from artists like Beth Neville and Florence Siegal.
Mr. Auville continued cleaning apartments while Mr. Hedges ultimately decided on a teaching career. He landed at an alternative high school not far from their apartment. They kept at their lives for decades and, somewhere along the line, Mr. Hedges and Mr. Auville unwittingly became the fixtures in the neighborhood.
The couple, both retired now, have been walking the neighborhood together nearly every day for several years; when they miss a day, their absence is noted. “After years of observing us,” Mr. Hedges said, “people in the neighborhood know us and feel a bond that they have to express.”
“People come up to us on the street, people we’ve never met,” Mr. Hedges said, “who see us and say, ‘Oh, I’m glad to see you’re OK, I’ve seen you in this neighborhood for years.’ Even when you don’t realize it, people are looking after you.”
Mr. Hedges laughed remembering that for a year or so after moving in, they still had a few packed boxes because they were unsure if they would last in the apartment. Now they have no regrets about staying for nearly half a century. “With rent stabilization, you get to be free from the distractions and challenges of ownership, and you get to like your life,” he said. “When things need repair, we let them do it. But also, we want to participate in making it livable and being happy in our lives, and we’ve made a lot of improvements over the years at our own expense.”
They renovated the kitchen and the bathroom; they’ve refreshed the paint over the years. “People who own their homes ask us, Why would you waste money like that?” Mr. Hedges said. “But it’s not wasted money because someone else, whom we will never meet, will enjoy the improvements when we leave, so how can that be wasted money?”
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