I lived in a great building. Well, great is relative. At 22, newly married, relatively poor and open to new ideas, living in a old tenement on the lower east side seemed exciting. Of course, the roaches, mice and various other vermin [two legged and otherwise] were hazards, it was true. But there were ways of getting around the hazards.
252 was one of the many buildings built as tenements in Manhattan. If you seen any of the old pictures of tenements in Manhattan where the Italians, Jewish, Irish, whatever first got here, then you've seen our first apartment. It was on the first floor in the back. You came into the kitchen. Behind the front door [trebled locked by the way because this was wayyyy before the Lower East Side got stylish], was a large metal box in which was the shower. Next to that was the kitchen sink. On the opposite wall, facing you as you entered was the stove and next to that, the refrigerator. On the wall between the stove and the refrigerator was a window that looked out on a another wall. A very boring brick wall. Light you got, sun, you didn't.
Just to the right of the door was another very small room - supposedly a bedroom but you couldn't put a bed and a dresser in the room because it was just too small. So most people had some carpenter build a loft bed = such a grand name for a mattress set on a wooden platform that was about five feet high. You climbed into bed every night and climbed down every morning. There was also a very small window in the that room that looked out over the shaft that ran between the two buildings.
On the other side of the kitchen was the living room which held a water closet. Yes, a toilet.There was no bathroom, just a toilet and you washed your hands in the kitchen sink. The living room held a couch, a table, the tv and maybe some bookcases. The whole apartment couldn't have been more than 500 square feet and cost $115 a month. [Which is what I now pay for my phone bill..]
Okay, now you have the lay of the land so to speak.
There were five floors at 252 - four apartments to a floor and essentially the same layout for each apartment. But that's not what made it special.
Long ago, in the not to distant past, when the Lower East Side was a dump, the city tried to stablilize the neighborhood by offering old tenements to residents for almost free. If you paid the back taxes on the buildings and jumped through a few more hoops, you could essentially "buy" the building with a little money down and a whole lot of sweat equity. You worked on the building with the assumption that the value of the buidling would eventually go up and you have this wonderful profit when you sold. A group of people bought 252 and rented some of the apartments.
We rented our apartment from Charles who lived upstairs with Joe. Charles was one of the original "investors" in 252 and since part of the deal was that you have to live in the building for a time, Charles had the two apartments on 2nd flloor directly above us and the two apartments on the first floor. He rented the downstairs apartments and lived in the 2nd floor apartments.
Charles was white, dapper, neat and gay. He was unfailingly polite even when the rent was a little late and dressed sort of like a poor slightly dilapidated Noel Coward. But Charles had a secret which became readily apparent when Joe moved in about a year after we moved it. Charles evidently liked to get beat up and Joe enjoyed beating him up. Periodically, we'd here the screaming and yelling and crashing of furniture and glass breaking. And tears and recriminations...then silence. More than once, we were sure that Joe had finally gone too far and finally killed Charles. But no, two or three days later, Charles would appear on the stoop, slightly bruised, slightly limping, wearing dark sun glasses and maybe a couple of new band aids, but still smiling and talking about buying Joe a new jacket or slacks or cufflinks ..."to make up, you know"". Ahh, the course of true love.
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