My grandparents live at 19 Clinton Avenue in upstate New York. My Grandmother also has an apartment in New York City, where I now live, whose number happens to be 19W. I’ve always felt that my grandmother’s two homes, each numbered 19, were somehow serendipitous, though to what end I’m not sure. Adding to this coincidental conundrum, I work in an office on the 19th floor of a tall building on Rector Street.
Life is different on 19. At one hundred-fifty to two hundred feet in the air, the rain for instance, is practically invisible. On the 19th floor, the sky seems merely overcast, but if you’ve left the apartment without your raincoat, you’ll have to turn around when you reach the lobby and are greeted by a serious downpour with the intent to soak.
No more than fifty horizontal feet away but across the chasm that separates this building from the next, one floor up, I can see my neighbors on their balcony. They pad about in matching green valor bathrobes and then sit down to an early breakfast. Two floors below them, a woman walks onto her balcony dressed in Saturday morning clothes, cuts a few flowers from planter boxes, and walks back inside. Bicycles, barbeques, wicker chairs, and even a six foot wide piece of a fence that would not be out of place in any suburban yard, inhabit the seemingly precarious real estate, the vertical suburbia studding Manhattan’s airspace.
I live mostly on this physically elevated plane. I return to the street for brief bursts of walking and then go below ground to plunge through the darkness of the subway. At Rector Street I come to the surface and then up 19 floors to the office. The views are stunning.
