That time I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village
I tried something different on a recent pizza run to New York. I didn’t get a hotel room for the weekend like I usually do.
Hotels in NYC are ridiculously expensive. Even when you find a bargain in Times Square or on the East Side, by the time you add in tips and taxes, you’re lucky to have enough money to buy a street hot dog that’s been sitting in lukewarm water since 10 a.m.
I went online, one of those short-term rental websites like airbnb.com, and reserved someone’s apartment in Greenwich Village. That’s the neighborhood on “Friends.” During the ’60s, it was hippie headquarters, the East Coast answer to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It’s where John Lennon and Yoko Ono got their first apartment, 105 Bank St., when they moved to New York in 1971. In a song about his new hometown, “New York City,” Lennon sang, “Tried to shake our image just a-cycling through the Village.”
You know what they say about real estate, the three most important words are “location, location, location.” So I rented a one-bedroom apartment on Mercer Street, a couple of blocks from John’s Pizza, one of the legendary coal-oven pizza joints in New York. So close that, despite temperatures in the teens, I didn’t put on my winter coat when I sprinted there to pick up my mushroom and sausage pie — both times.
The apartment I rented, I discovered, was in an old creaky building, built in the early 1900s. My apartment was on the fifth floor, no elevator, 80 steps up. I counted them.
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in the Times Square Hilton anymore.
The hardwoods in my rental apartment were bowed from decades of pacing the floor. It had a sunken living room but not on purpose.
The refrigerator had hamburger buns and a half-eaten pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. That was the big difference between staying in a hotel room and someone’s apartment. A woman lives in this apartment. She rents it out on weekends while she stays with her daughter somewhere else in New York.
The apartment had a lived-in feel; it wasn’t sterile and tidy like a hotel room. The tube of toothpaste in the bathroom was three-fourths rolled up. The bottle of shampoo had about two showers left in it. The toilet paper didn’t have an elegant triangle folded on the first sheet.
New York is the No. 1 market for airbnb.com and other short-rental websites. Uh-oh, the New York State Multiple Dwelling Law makes it illegal to rent out an apartment for shorter than 30 days. Still, if you click on these websites, there is no shortage of available apartments for rent. In the meantime, airbnb.com is suing New York in federal court, claiming the city’s law prohibiting shortterm apartment rentals causes “irreparable harm” to airbnb. com.
Considering that short-term apartment rental is a billiondollar, off-the-books business, I would say so.
It’s legal to rent out your apartment, or room in your private house, in Houston. Some people made a killing turning over their homes to tourists during Super Bowl week.
When I arrived at the apartment, the owner showed me around and said, “If anybody stops you in the hallway, just say you’re visiting me. But nobody will stop you, so don’t worry about it.”
Here’s something I had never seen, anywhere, and I’ve stayed in some pretty funky hotels. There was no sink in the bathroom — just a bath tub and a toilet. The bathroom was very small, too. There was barely room to turn around to use the toilet.
It was weird to use someone else’s toiletries, although I am now hooked on Trader Joe’s peppermint shampoo. I smell like a York Peppermint Patty after a shower. I miss the unattended maid’s cart in a hotel, where you can “borrow” a handful of one-time bottles of shampoo and mouthwash.
Because there was no sink in the bathroom, I brushed my teeth in the kitchen sink. To mitigate the disgust factor, I had no plans of cooking in the apartment. I was in New York, John’s Pizza was around the corner, Little Italy a 10-minute walk away. I could wait until I got home for a home-cooked meal, and I don’t even do that when I’m home.
My apartment didn’t have cable TV, which put me on the brink. One night, I watched a “Sgt. Bilko” marathon on New York’s version of our Channel 57 “The Kube.” Funny show.
The thing I took from my weekend in somebody’s apartment in Greenwich Village — where I could “experience a city like a local” (airbnb’s slogan) — is that I like hotels. I like being a tourist. I like somebody making my bed and bringing clean towels every day.
I don’t enjoy staying in somebody else’s home, especially a friend’s home. I feel like I’m being judged. I don’t like other people staying in my house either. If you met my friends back in New Jersey, you’d understand. They’re animals.
There are good reasons to stay in a short-rental apartment, though. The price you see on the website is the total price. There’s no tipping everybody with a hand out, and you don’t get charged insane New York hotel taxes and service fees that turn $250 a night into $300 and higher.