Farewell Manhattan, its drug dealers and 1am opera singers

My first proper apartment on New York's Upper West Side.

There’s something magical about Manhattan. It probably comes from the movies and TV shows we watched growing up. Friends, Gossip Girl, Spiderman, Sex and the City, are only some that come to mind. It’s quite something walking down the road and looking up to go “oh, that’s the Friend’s apartment” or stopping by Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and realizing you are standing in the middle of what was once an elaborate dance scene in the movie Enchanted. Or you’re crossing an intersection that looked remarkably like the location where they filmed America in the recent movie adaption of West Side Story. That’s because it was where they filmed it.

It’s not just the culture, to use a word that one of my favorite (and now retired) producers hated, it’s simply iconic. The skyline, the buildings. Grand Central Station. Times Square. The Met. It’s like living in a movie set. Because you are. That’s New York. It’s fast, it’s loud, it’s fabulous.

It’s also time to go.

I’ve loved living in Manhattan, first in a tiny shoebox-sized Airbnb in East Village after I first moved in October 2023, and then in a only marginally bigger shoebox in the Upper West Side on the top corner of Central Park. The food, the views, the life, it’s great. But it’s becoming hard. Very hard.

I was sitting in an Uber in traffic recently heading home from Liberty Marina near Jersey City, across the Hudson river. The driver was telling me how he used to live in Manhattan when he first came to the area, but years ago started getting fed up with the soaring cost of living, rising crime rates, and the seeming lack of any ideas by city officials to do anything about it.

I still maintain that I feel safer in Manhattan than I did living in Auckland - despite the large and loud blowback to my article on the topic I wrote last year for 1news.co.nz.

Also, every city has crime, and the bigger the city often the worse the crime.

But given the astronomical cost of living in the most famous part of the most famous city of the world, is it worth it?

I’ve decided hell no.

Just for comparison - when I lived in Auckland my partner and I rented a two bedroom house for just under $600 NZD a week. The cost of our much smaller place in Manhattan is three to four times that. That is considered the “lower end” of the market too. Our building has our resident hallway smokers, drug dealers, a woman who sings opera at ungodly hours of the morning, and students who can’t afford to live elsewhere. The “mail room” is the entrance corridor, where residents often put up notes on the wall asking for stolen goods to be returned. I am very fortunate to have a washer/drier in the unit, but recently learnt that the exhaust tube where all the hot air is pumped out of goes into a gap in the wall…and that’s it. God knows what that’s doing to the 100 year old building, which the apartment is on the fifth floor of (with no lift). The corner of the building is also on so much of a lean my office chair slides down the room when I sit on it if I don’t have my feet firmly planted on the floor. Leaving the building, you often have to step over vomit, spilled rubbish, or poo.

It’s important to note that I’m not complaining. While housing should be a universal right, it is increasingly becoming a privilege that fewer people around the world - and especially in New York - are able to afford. 

So, a lot of people - including the Uber driver I was talking to - are moving out - enough for the NYC population to actually drop last year.

I’m about to be one of them.

So, I’m moving over to Weehawken New Jersey, just on the other side of the Hudson. It’s still close to the city via a short ten minute ferry ride, but so much better bang for buck, with houses and apartments big enough to actually walk around in.

I’m not sure if Logan Church, One News, New Jersey, has the same ring to it, but at least I won’t be woken up by the downstairs drug dealers and opera singers.