For nine years, I lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Greenpoint with a Polish bakery on the ground floor. The apartment is still there. Almost nothing else is.
The walk up three flights of stairs
I moved into 218 Franklin Street in the spring of 2010, the week after I started my first job at a magazine. The lease was $1,650 a month. I split it with a friend who, like me, had spent her twenties in apartments she could not afford and had finally — mistakenly — concluded that she had aged out of that. The bakery downstairs was Karol's. It opened at 5 a.m. and the smell of yeast came up through the radiator pipes for the first hour of every day.
I left in the spring of 2019, when the lease tripled and the building was sold to a man who later became the subject of a Times investigation. The bakery closed in late 2021. The new tenant is a vape shop that, by my count, has had three names in three years and currently sells a kind of cannabis-adjacent gummy I cannot legally describe.
What's still the same
I went back in March, on a Saturday morning when I knew the new tenant would let me upstairs. The mailbox in the foyer is the same one, with the same brass plate and the same crooked numbers. The first half-flight of stairs squeaks in the same place. The window on the second-floor landing has the same chip in the lower left corner of the glass.
MARENI am standing in the kitchen of the apartment I lived in for nine years. They have re-tiled the floor. The cabinets are different. There is a dishwasher now, which I want to be petty about. But I'll tell you the thing I noticed first: the radiator is still leaking in exactly the same spot.
MARENIt is the kind of detail that, if you'd asked me to recall it on a quiz, I could not have. But standing here, looking at the small rust ring around the valve at the bottom of the radiator, it is as if no time has passed at all.
Read the full transcript →What's gone
Karol himself died in 2022. His daughter sent me an email about it the following spring, which I read on a train and then did not respond to for eleven weeks. The bakery's old proofing rack is in the basement of a different bakery in Ridgewood now. I tracked it down and went to see it. I will tell you about that, too, but you will have to listen for that part.
This episode is for everyone who has ever moved out of an apartment they thought they would never leave, and then driven past it five years later and felt the strange combination of relief and grief that the building has gone on without you. Mostly relief. But also, a little bit, the other thing.
