The Rick Steves Guide to Our Apartment

- CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE -

LOCAL CULTURE & CUSTOMS: The locals, Brandon and Stephanie, are delightful and enjoy engaging with tourists. They have even been known to feed tourists and allow them to stay at the apartment free of charge. (See WHEN TO GO)

ORIENTATION: The apartment’s vast open spaces can be daunting at first, but as English is the official apartment language, one should have no problem communicating with the natives. Unless you speak Swahili.














The apartment is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, just off Broadway, an area of town known for being home to New York City's liberal cultural and artistic workers, in contrast to the Upper East Side, which is traditionally home to more conservative commercial and business types.














This is a shot down the apartment’s street, facing Broadway…














...and this is of the Broadway intersection itself.














The apartment is located on the top floor of a pre-war (as in World War I) building, constructed in 1891. While the apartment is technically listed as a studio, it has the distinction of being dubbed a “Studio.5,” which is to say it is a studio with an additional small space not quite accurately described as a "room."



























WALKING TOURS: A favorite tour of visitors to Brandon and Stephanie’s apartment is the "Complete Walking Tour" (Estimated Time: 45 seconds).

Coming through the front door, there is a long, narrow passageway. Immediately to your right is the bathroom.


















HEALTH & HYGIENE: While small, the bathroom feels like something out of a hotel with it’s tiled paneling throughout. The room gets some nice light as the high ceiling opens to a skylight.

Continuing down the hallway, the next opening on the right is the bedroom.



























PLACES TO SLEEP (also see RECREATION): To call this a bedroom mocks both beds and rooms. As you can see, the apartment’s bed (Brandon and Stephanie were forced to downsize to a full-size when they moved) is in contact with three of the room’s four walls! When you drop a dresser opposite it, you quite literally have to squeeze in each night. On the upside, it has a ceiling fan and a skylight and when you live in as urban a jungle as Manhattan, hearing the rain drum on the skylight is actually something to savor.

Leaving the bedroom, you will find yourself opposite the built-in closets, which Brandon and Stephanie augment with a large Ikea wardrobe.

Finally, you open up into The Great Room. Starting from the left and working clockwise…


















LOCAL BUSINESSES: The apartment’s number one business is the space industry followed closely by its burgeoning film industry. From the desk, Stephanie "talks up space," while Brandon gets relegated to the couch or the kitchen table to tackle his NYU homework.














EDUCATION: To the right of the desk is the living room and library with its three huge bookcases. The couch sits a foot or so off, allowing easy access to the books.

(When the cable installer was here last month, he looked at our wall of unpacked boxes labeled "books" and proclaimed, “You guys aren’t from New York. No New Yorker would own that many books.” It’s not that New Yorkers are dumb, mind you. They are just smart enough not to carry fifty heavy boxes of books up several floors in an elevator-less building. A lifelong New Yorker told us that if you live on the Upper West Side you live in a small apartment dominated by books, but have small closets. If you live on the Upper East Side you have closets bursting at the seams with clothes but only a handful of books. So far, so true.)

FOLIAGE & FAUNA: Note the large plant beneath the window. It is, in fact, not a real plant, but a silk plant housed within a large urn. Have you ever sat on an airplane, thumbing through the SkyMall magazine and wondering who the heck buys the stuff in there? Wonder no more. The urn is a cleverly disguised cat litter box!














WILDLIFE: Hiding amongst the fauna is Cleopatra, or "Cleo," a street urchin Brandon rescued from the back-alleys of Sicily. Do not let this picture fool you--when provoked, she can be a tiger.














In the center of the room, hiding behind the chair and between the two windows is the apartment’s only radiator. Apartments in the city, particularly in the older buildings, are heated with steam. When the radiator comes on, it rattles, hisses and belches to let you know you’re about to warm up. However, other than a pressure valve on the unit itself, there is no thermostat. You can only get as warm as the boiler in the basement allows and if it gets too hot, as it sometimes does, your only alternative is to open the windows wide to the frigid air.














ENTERTAINMENT: To the right of the radiator is the apartment's entertainment center where the natives go to relax and indulge in the wall of DVDs, CD's, XM Radio and the newly discovered and immediately beloved DVR.














PLACES TO EAT: Tourists often flock to the area of the apartment known as "the kitchen" to partake of some of finest food in New York, such as Chicken Divan and Better-Than-Sex Brownies. The kitchen is partitioned off from the rest of the Great Room with an island, giving it the feel of its own space. Note the dishwasher, actually something of an luxury here.

WHEN TO GO: For all of Brandon and Stephanie's friends reading this, consider this a standing invitation to visit. The couch is a pull-out bed and they'd love to host your visit to New York City.