NEW YORK
FIRSTS
THE DAY I SMELLED
DEAD GUY! First apartment. First mugging. First time in drag. First celebrity sighting ... this is the New York experience in all its wild glory!
O
ur first apartment in New York was not chosen hastily. My husband and I moved here from San Francisco and, being the prudent adults we claim to be, took our time finding a place. To get a real sense of the city, we Airbnb-hopped for three months, living out of duffel bags. Neighborhoods included Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Harlem, the Upper West Side, and Lower East Side – all while co-working in SoHo. So when we finally signed a
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lease, we felt really good about it. “A few months in – just as we were putting art on the walls – a foul odor had us turning our apartment upside down. First, we tossed the flowers that had sat in water too long, flushed the kitchen drain, and then swept the premises for a dead rat, even though that would NEVER happen in OUR apartment. We thought: ‘Hey, it’s New York, home of Pizza Rat!’ Finally, we convinced ourselves it was a broken sewage pipe somewhere doomed to fall from the ceiling at any moment.
DIGITAL EDITION
Above: Rae Lambert had a grim welcome to Hell’s Kitchen.
“The super came to investigate. My husband opened the door. The super took one bracing look at him and then left. Didn’t say a single word. The husband was eager to explain all the things the smell wasn’t but he never got the chance. “It turns out our very elderly neighbor just below us had passed away unnoticed until we reported the smell, which was stronger when the heat came on. The police removed the body and said he’d been there for weeks. OK, we thought, it’s horribly