The End of the Line: A New York Diary

Abstract

The End of the Line: A New York Diary Katherine Sharpe (bio) When I graduated from college, I knew what I wanted so clearly that I even had a word for it, “community.” Though I couldn’t define the term precisely, I knew how it would feel: like a version of that warm and nebulous thing that had embraced us during college itself. After graduation, my best friend Anna and I began meeting after work in a dark bar and grill off Pioneer Square in Portland, Oregon. Our jobs—hers at a toy store; mine at the local paper, unpaid—struck us as all right, but limited. When we gathered in our sticky booth, what we talked about most often was a big move to a big city, someplace we could find people and activities as promising as we felt ourselves to be. A few months later, I went home to Virginia to take an internship at a nonprofit organization’s member magazine. The job paid, and rent at my parents’ place was free, though I missed having people my own age to hang out with. Still, when Anna called to suggest, then demand, that we move to New York, what I felt at first was terror. The kind of community I yearned for was slow and warm, more small-town than metropolitan. But hadn’t we sat for hours at the bar, nursing drinks and saying things like “I think New York is the only place in the country where people go if they’re serious”? We had, and because I could not forget this, because I couldn’t not be serious, and because I found it difficult to impossible, at that time in my life, to say no to anyone, I agreed. [End Page 651] ________ Anna was still on the West Coast, so finding an apartment fell to me. On a cold and blindingly sunny December morning, my mother drove me from our home in suburban Washington, DC, dropping me off in front of a small storefront bus station in DC’s Chinatown, where I bought a 12-dollar ticket and sailed into the unknown. On the bus I met a group of people a little older than me that included a speaker of fluent Chinese. At the other end, he led us to a tiny restaurant under the Manhattan Bridge and ordered wonton noodle soup for everyone. He showed me how to season the broth with plum vinegar and chili oil, how to ask for greens on top, how to make a cheap meal. A friend from high school who had just started at NYU Law let me sleep on his tiny patch of dorm-room floor. In the morning, I rode the subway to Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood so many people had asked Anna and me if we were moving to we’d decided we might as well. The area struck me as confusing and ugly. Rows of attached houses with vinyl siding terminated in Italian bakeries filled with dry cookies in sickly hues. There was no skyline, and I couldn’t get my bearings. I started to walk anyway, and as I did the surroundings began to change, turning more industrial, more like the urban landscape I’d imagined and hoped for. Near Metropolitan Avenue, I noticed scruffy people only slightly older than I was trickling out of a scarred brick building the size of a city block. They were all heading the same direction, so I did too, until I popped out on Bedford Avenue and recognized I was home. Over the next days, I met with a few real estate brokers. To hire a broker to rent an apartment seemed insane, but we’d been told it was what people did. I almost welcomed it—as a sign that New York was different from other places, that life here would be a life apart. The broker I ended up renting with wore a yarmulke, a full beard, and a black suit over a white shirt. He drove too fast, was nice to me in a brusque way, and refused to shake my hand. “It’s against my religion,” he explained. I...