One of Tarajia Morrell’s earliest childhood memories is walking through her family’s apartment with a plate of food in one hand and ironed napkins in the other.
“From the moment I could walk in a relatively stable way, I was passing hors d’oeuvres,” she said. “My mother would tell me what I was serving and I would go up to a guest and say, ‘Would you care for an endive leaf with boursin?’ You know, something totally ridiculous.”
That smaller version of her did not know that decades later, Ms. Morrell would fight all the way to New York State’s highest court to stay in the same apartment.
Notwithstanding the sophistication of her parents’ dinner parties, the home is an idiosyncratic one-bedroom. “It’s such a special, quirky-as-can-be, meek, asymmetrical, magnificent place,” Ms. Morrell said. “It’s not huge. It has one bathroom, and to get to the bathroom I had to walk through my parents’ bedroom.”
It was her father who found the place in 1973. It was affordable and would remain so because it came with a rent-stabilized lease, which meant any rent increases would be limited and regulated by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board. The previous tenant, however, hoarded newspapers, leaving hundreds of them stacked everywhere in the apartment. “My dad tells that when he brought Mom to see the apartment, he told her, ‘Ignore the newspapers, focus on the terrace.’”
It was the terrace that made the place so special, and it was the spot where so many dinners took place. “The terrace doubles the size of the apartment,” Ms. Morrell said, “and my mother avidly and garishly planted it. It was my oasis as a child.”
It was, after all, where all the eating took place in the warmer months, under an awning that protected everyone from rain or too much sun. “I was raised in a family that was very much centered on meals. Food and wine were what paid the rent, and they were also an enormous source of familial connection.”
In 1947, Ms. Morrell’s grandparents started Morrell & Company, a wine shop that her parents grew into a New York City fixture. “My parents were able to entertain here and have this wonderful life focused on food and wine.” She grew up around dinner guests like the food critic Gael Greene and Ariane and Michael Battleberry, co-founders of Food & Wine magazine.
“Mom didn’t know how to cook when she married Dad,” she said. “When they would host dinners, he expected her to serve food that would match the wine he was pouring. So, in this very small New York kitchen, my mom taught herself to cook.”
When Ms. Morrell turned 15, she left for boarding school. She went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in art history from Barnard and began a career as a freelance writer. She started writing about the things she grew up around — food, wine — and her work took her to different parts of the world.
When a planned move to Paris fell through in 2016, she decided to move back in with her parents. “Life happened,” she said. “If it had worked out like I thought it would, I would have fallen in love and gotten married and moved some other place, but that’s just not how it worked out.”
$3,559 | Turtle Bay, Manhattan
Tarajia Morrell, 44
Occupation: Writer and communications consultant
On the next book: Ms. Morrell, who co-wrote, with Fatima Ali, “Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More,” is working on a memoir. “It’s about growing up in the food and wine business and in this special apartment,” she said, “and doing everything I could to get away from it — the apartment and industry — but eventually finding myself back where I started, though my life here looks very different.”
On time capsules: While emptying her apartment to prepare for repairs, Ms. Morrell found several things left behind by her father. There was a baseball card signed by Jackie Robinson, along with a stamp collection. She also found a pack of Marlboros and reel-to-reel recordings of conversations with women he dated during the 1960s.
After sharing the apartment for a few years, Ms. Morrell’s parents planned for a move to the Hudson Valley and requested that the lease be put in their daughter’s name. They assumed it would be a rote process because, according to the rent guidelines board, a rent-stabilized leaseholder has the right to pass a lease on to an immediate family member, so long as all parties involved reside in the home for at least two consecutive years.
The landlord, however, responded with an eviction notice. So Ms. Morrell hired a lawyer. “When the process started, I thought, This is what I have — this is my home,” she said. “So, yeah, I fought.”
While her effort to stop the eviction proceedings played out, the building’s management company began much-needed work to repair damage to the brick facade.
Scaffolding went up in early 2019, and Ms. Morrell’s terrace was used as a point of access for much of the required work. It would be two years before she’d step out onto the terrace again.
It was a long two years. First there was a partial collapse of a section of her ceiling. Then the pandemic shut down all the work. “It was a very lonely beginning to Covid,” she recalled. “There were holes in the walls through which I could see sunlight and plastic tarps flying around.”
When work restarted, things turned worse. The ceiling collapse revealed that critical steel beams were rusted through. “They couldn’t replace the beams with anyone living the apartment,” she said. “So I had to go, and I wasn’t allowed to leave as much as a towel rack. All the doors had to come off their hinges.”
For six months, she bounced among friends and family and Airbnbs. “I didn’t know if I’d ever come back. I didn’t know if the legal fight would be resolved, or if I’d win.”
The court case slogged on. “In the beginning, I would go into panic,” she said. “When I got the first eviction letter, I was so upset and freaked out. By the end of it, I’d just add the notices to the pile. My life changed so much over the course of this.”
The change was so substantial that by March 2021, when work was complete on the steel beams and she returned to the apartment, Ms. Morrell was no longer alone. “I moved back in with a baby in my belly.”
It would be more than two years before she had certainty about whether she and her daughter, Viva, could stay in the apartment. Ms. Morrell had already won her fight to stop eviction proceedings by the time her daughter was born, but her landlord appealed the outcome. And appealed again.
“There was never a round I didn’t win,” she said. “They would appeal it each time. I had to win every round. There were so many moments when I said to myself, ‘I wish I hadn’t fought, I wish I had just moved on.’ But it’s hard to stop fighting once you’ve begun because then you lose everything — all that you’ve invested to fight and your home. So I kept fighting. I couldn’t afford to live in the city without rent stabilization, certainly not as a single mother.”
It was September 2023 when the final decision, from the Court of Appeals, was handed down in her favor. “The emotional moment for me was when I mailed in my signed lease. Walking home from the post office, I finally realized, OK, something has changed. I realized it was cause for celebration.”
It wasn’t just her name on the lease, but Viva’s, too.
“My connection to this place is not just how extraordinary it is — which I notice every day and don’t take for granted at all — but it’s the patina it still retains,” Ms. Morrell said.
“There’s nothing bland about it,” she continued. “Everything is textured and nicked and warm and deeply imperfect, and that is the story of my family’s life here.”
There are still children’s stickers inside cupboards where she affixed them decades ago, and now her daughter sleeps in the same room where she slept as a child — a small nook with a bed created by Ms. Morrell’s mother years ago. She hung a curtain so Viva has privacy on the way to the bathroom.
“I am so aware of how privileged I am and how extraordinary this place is,” Ms. Morrell said. “I’m sure one day, if I’m gone, they’ll turn it into a two-bedroom and put in another bathroom and make everything white and gray. So I lean into how colorful and splintery it is and enjoy that so much. I feel so blessed and don’t take it for granted for a single second.”
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