Christian Alexander’s first apartment in New York City was in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and his roommate was filthy. The man’s space was littered with chewed gum, dirty laundry, food, loose tobacco and weed, spare change and dog treats. But none of that compared to what Mr. Alexander — perhaps inevitably — found one day.
His roommate had been housing “an army of maggots,” Mr. Alexander said. “And he didn’t have a clue.”
Roommates can be a great solution to high New York City rents but also a never-ending source of frustration. Borrowing clothes without permission. Eating food without paying for it. Stealing!
Nearly everyone who has started a new life in the city has suffered through a wild roommate situation or two. Now, with limited space, and rents incredibly high and rising, newcomers and people who have been here for years are urgently on the hunt for affordable options. That often involves a roommate. Or two. Or more.
The situation will become more acute in coming weeks, as young people with summer jobs, internships and dreams of exciting new lives arrive in large numbers.
We asked New Yorkers to share their most unforgettable roommate experiences and found that they came in all flavors: horrifying, heartwarming, weird and curious. One person had a fashion-student roommate he described as “a practicing witch.” A woman in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, recalled a roommate with perpetually lost keys who climbed in and out through the fire escape — setting off alarms day and night.
Sometimes roommate drama takes over your entire life. Just ask James Tanford, a 29-year-old comedian living in Bed-Stuy, who posted a hilarious 13-part video series on Instagram detailing his nightmarish experience. Mr. Tanford plays all the characters in the drama as he explains how one roommate threatened to stab another and the police were called several times. “We got kicked out after two arrests, three lawsuits and $10,000 in rent owed,” he said.
What makes New York living so different from other American cities is that it’s full of extremely small apartments. It’s not unusual to see bathtubs in kitchens or closets that double as bedrooms, and, in general, very, very tight quarters.
In an apartment on West 103rd Street in Manhattan Valley, Bob Stachel had the only bedroom, and his 6-foot-4 roommate stationed a small bed behind the kitchen stove.
When the roommate’s girlfriend stayed overnight, he would “open the bathroom door to block the hallway that led to the doorless kitchen,” Mr. Stachel said. “I couldn’t get a snack or take a poop!”
In Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Paul Ratnofsky’s roommate built a loft bed extremely close to the ceiling’s single exposed lightbulb. “He was forced to unscrew the bulb every night,” he recalled.
Jean Middlekauff moved to New York City from Cincinnati in 1956 with a “glamorous college pal” as a roommate. Ms. Middlekauff, now 90, described the apartment as having “one minuscule kitchen, one closet, a living room, one window and a bathroom with sink, toilet and tub.” It was small for two people — but what about when there were three?
“Little did I realize that Sally, my roommate, would have so many gentlemen callers,” Ms. Middlekauff said. “When she entertained them where was I to go?” She needed her beauty sleep, after all.
“I soon came up with a solution — why not sleep in the bathtub?”
In a recent survey of 3,000 New Yorkers, published by the 5BORO Institute, an urban policy think tank, 42 percent of respondents said that housing costs were their biggest financial burden. And 48 percent said they had considered leaving the city, citing affordability as the top reason.
Roommates are hard to avoid.
Just finding any roommate — let alone an ideal companion — can cause high anxiety. People try Craigslist, Facebook, Roomies.com, Reddit and more.
On LinkedIn, a group called NYC Housing allows only verified users to join. It was started by Eric Li, who works for a cloud computing platform and realized that unlike other nooks and crannies of the internet, LinkedIn was mainly used for business networking, so users’ profiles include professional portraits and educational backgrounds, giving you a clear sense of who they are. It’s where, he said, “people put their best foot forward.”
If there ever were an expert in roommates, it would have to be Maria Petschnig, who moved to New York from Austria 22 years ago and has had more than 60 roommates. (Ask her for details, and she will gladly explain the complicated arrangements that involved a dizzying cast of people coming and going.)
At first, Ms. Petschnig was bouncing around, sharing curtained-off spaces and rooms in other people’s apartments. Eleven years ago, she became a leaseholder in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Sharing her apartment has been, she said, “a way to survive as an artist in New York City.” But it has also been an inspiration: Ms. Petschnig wrote and directed a film, “Beautiful and Neat Room,” based on her roommate experiences.
Her advice for new-to-New Yorkers? “I think one should be more aware in New York of not taking up too much space,” she said. “To not be at home 24-7, or have your partner or friends over all the time.”
She also advises making sure that everyone understands the rules, as early as possible: “I don’t want to be too friendly with the roommate,” she said. “I have to make sure the boundaries and the roles are clear.”
But even when there are clear guidelines and your shared space is not a shared life, a small human connection can suddenly spark.
In 2005, Rachana Pathak lived in Queens with a roommate she had found on Craigslist. She didn’t know much about him except that he was from Turkey.
One evening, Ms. Pathak gathered the mail and dropped it in her room, where it sat for about a week. When she finally sorted through it, she found a thick envelope addressed to her roommate. It was marked “Immigration.”
“My stomach knotted,” she said. She knocked on his door and gave it to him, then went back to her room. “Not long after, I heard the front door open. He’d left. The guilt came fast. What if I’d cost him something?”
An hour later, he returned with a bottle of wine. “Will you have a glass with me?” he asked. “I got my green card.”
And you never know when a roommate situation will turn into a lifelong friendship.
When she was in her 20s, Sara Zur rented a tiny two-bedroom apartment on West 109th Street in Manhattan. “It was so small that I had to turn sideways to enter the bathroom,” she said.
Ms. Zur was in search of a roommate, and, via Craigslist, she found a woman in Los Angeles hoping to move to New York and be a writer. They spoke by phone. “My last roommate had been a total slob so when she said, ‘I keep really clean and I have a large collection of colorful scarves,’ I knew we’d be a good fit,” Ms. Zur, now 49, said. She was right.
“We were too cheap to get cable TV, so we would look out our window at the neighbor’s TV across the alley and try to follow whatever show was on,” she recalled. “If they walked by, we would duck so they wouldn’t see us. There was so much laughter!” Twenty-five years later, they are still fast friends.
And then there’s Terry Baker Mulligan, who, in 1966, moved into an apartment a few blocks north, on West 112th Street, with a roommate named Carol Silverstein. They were new graduates who had met while training to be caseworkers with the city’s Department of Welfare. They split the rent, which was $135 a month.
Ms. Baker Mulligan is Black and grew up in Harlem. Ms. Silverstein was from an observant Jewish family in Jersey City, N.J. “But right away, we hit it off,” Ms. Baker Mulligan said. “I taught Carol how to fry chicken and make gravy, which she does to this day. I learned about New York bagels, borscht and kugel.”
Ms. Baker Mulligan was tall and thin, while her roommate was short, “and always worrying about her extra pound or two.” Once, Ms. Baker Mulligan found cute mini dresses on sale, and bought two, in different colors; one for herself and one for Ms. Silverstein.
“In five years, we never had one disagreement,” said Ms. Baker Mulligan, who is now 81. “It was a volatile time in the world, and in our neighborhood, but our place became a refuge for friends caught up in a whirlwind of trying to find themselves.”
In 1971, they both got married: Ms. Baker Mulligan to “one of those Columbia University boys,” Ms. Silverstein to one from New York University. Ms. Baker Mulligan now lives in St. Louis; Ms. Silverstein and her husband moved to Jerusalem.
“But,” Ms. Baker Mulligan said, “she and I still love each other like sisters.”
Dodai Stewart is a Times reporter who writes about living in New York City, with a focus on how, and where, we gather.
The post A Slob, a Witch, a Lifelong Friend: New Yorkers’ Best Roommate Stories appeared first on New York Times.
