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Constance Rosenblum

Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City Paperback – March 25, 2013

by Constance Rosenblum (Author)

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There may be eight million stories in the Naked City, but there are also nearly three million dwelling places, ranging from Park Avenue palaces to Dickensian garrets and encompassing much in between. The doorways to these residences are tantalizing portals opening onto largely invisible lives. Habitats offers 40 vivid and intimate stories about how New Yorkers really live in their brownstones, their apartments, their mansions, their lofts, and as a whole presents a rich, multi-textured portrait of what it means to make a home in the world’s most varied and powerful city.

These essays, expanded versions of a selection of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, take readers to both familiar and remote sections of the city—to history-rich townhouses, to low-income housing projects, to out-of-the-way places far from the beaten track, to every corner of the five boroughs—and introduce them to a wide variety of families and individuals who call New York home. These pieces reveal a great deal about the city’s past and its rich store of historic dwellings. Along with exploring the deep and even mystical connections people feel to the place where they live, these pieces, taken as a whole, offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the world’s most fascinating cities and a vivid portrait of the true meaning of home in the 21st-century metropolis.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

NYU Press
Publication date

March 25, 2013
Dimensions

6 x 0.59 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0814771548
ISBN-13

978-0814771549
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rosenblum is a fine storyteller, and it is this eye towards telling a good story that is one of the great strengths of this collection. The primary downside to this collection, is, in fact, a plus: the short exposes often leave the reader wanting more, and after a few pages of hooking the reader, suddenly the fascinating story ends, and the interesting characters and their beautiful homes are gone. If you like to peek into residential windows when walking down the streets of New York City and imagine the lives of the habitants, then Habitats will give you a satisfying look into how urban dwellings, and urban dwellers, come to be." ― New York History

"The tales of luck or hard work that resulted in the securing of perfect tiny shoebox apartments, rehabbed brownstones, and converted industrial spaces provide a frisson of envy that keeps us reading; its the same urge that has us gaze up at lighted windows from the sidewalk below and wonder if someone elses house, and thus, their very existence, is better than our own. Rosenblums profiles are a celebration of New York, and of what E.B. White called 'the gift of privacy, the jewel of loneliness'the difficulties and pleasures of finding a place and making it a home." ― Publishers Weekly

"A collection of recent newspaper columns on the homes of New York residents illuminates the ways in which the city has (and hasnt) changed. The byline of Rosenblum (Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, 2009) may not be familiar even to regular readers of the New York Times, and the column she was the last to write no longer exists. Yet these 40 pieces have greater staying power than many collections of newspaper columns and show the ongoing fascination with the subject of how, where and why people live where they live. These expanded selections from the newspapers Real Estate section are less concerned with that marketprices and square footage, though such details occasionally highlight the piecesthan they are with the stories of the inhabitants. I wanted to use the column to write stories, writes Rosenblum. I wanted to use the physical nature of a home as a wedge to delve into personal history, and to produce, as one reader nicely put it, biography through real estate. The results, she continues, offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the great cities of the world. There are examples of shelter voyeurism that will leave readers in other parts of the country amazed at how much some are willing to pay to live in New York (often for so little space). But mainly, the interest in the home reflects the interesting people who inhabit it: the two clowns who must combine living quarters and rehearsal space (so many of these stories find residences serving double duty), the woman who rescues and nurses ailing kittens, the artists in their communal building, the stepdaughter of a famous author. Whether the living space in question is a fresh start or a link to the past, the thread of continuity throughout is that the story of urban renewal has been written, rewritten, and rewritten yet again." ― Kirkus

"...a must-read for all of us New Yorkers who are forever obsessed with the never-boring topic of New York real estate and who are forever curious about how our New York neighbors, from across the street to across the river, live their domestic lives behind their curtains, blinds, and wrought iron gates." -- Yukie Ohta ― New York Bound Books

"a book rich with poignant, colorful, and endearing portraits of the common New Yorker" -- Lauren Palmer ― Urban Omnibus

"Part urban sociology, part journalistic snooping, Constance Rosenblums remarkable stories reveal the true variety of the meanings of home. Closely observed and beautifully written." -- Witold Rybczynski,author of The Biography of a Building

"Rosenblum writes evocatively about a city where 'neighborhoods, streets, even individual buildings are saturated with memory.' Reading these pieces is like walking down a street at dusk and glancing into people's illuminated living rooms...From these fragments of lives she weaves an intimate portrait of a city and its inhabitants." ― The Guardian

""Gracefully written and full of surprising insights, Rosenblum's book is a tribute to the capacity of New Yorkers to create entire worlds in the smallest of places: their apartments."" -- Ariel Sabar,author of Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York

About the Author

Constance Rosenblum, most recently the author of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, was a longtime editor of the paper’s City section and a former editor of the Times’s Arts and Leisure section. She is the author of Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYU Press (March 25, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0814771548
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0814771549
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.59 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,387,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,305 in Mid Atlantic US Travel Books
- #6,951 in Sociology of Urban Areas
- #278,736 in Social Sciences (Books)

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What comes first? An interesting house or interesting owner?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 19, 2013

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The compilation of Constance Rosenblum's columns for the New York Times is called "Habitats", with a sub-title of "Private Lives in the Big City". Her book gives the reader an interesting look at both pieces of real estate and the people who own them. Sometimes the house or apartment is more interesting than the owner or tenant, and sometimes it's the other way 'round.

Rosenblum writes about 40 homes and apartments in all five boroughs of New York City. Mostly written from 2009 to 2012, these brief glimpses into the lives and abodes of others is a startling examination of what makes a "house" - whether a 374 square foot apartment or a house with 20 some-odd rooms - a "home". She looks at how - often - the inhabitant turns the house into a place of interest and, conversely, how the house can turn the inhabitants into people of interest. Many times the owner has found a house of his or her dreams and invests that place with a personal touch - through the use of art work, masks, and furniture. The houses become a personal testimony of the lives lived within.

But the house can also be seen as a molder of lives. Several apartments are highlighted as the homes of multi-generational families. Three closely-related families have found a house that will give them all shelter and a true sense of "family". Is the house "special" for its architecture? I don't think so; it's "special" for what it allows its residents to do in the house.

Rosenblum has taken a diverse group of people and houses, most with interesting lives or histories, and matched them up. My only complaint about the book is that I wish it included more pictures, particularly of the houses themselves. This is not a coffee-table book, with tons of photos, but rather a smallish paperback, with only the residents pictured. I assume the original New York Times pieces these chapters were once did not include many pictures, either. But, I wish - somehow - more had been taken and included in this book. Other than that, I can recommend it as the picture of New York City it is intended to be.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

B. Wolinsky

Lives of the Upper Crust

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 12, 2013

Collected from the Real Estate section of the New York Times, these articles show you the elegant, or sometimes eccentric flair of the city's apartment dwellers, and some private houses too. One of them is a white couple in Mott Haven, which is probably the last place you'd see an upper middle class couple in this city. The place is called the "Bertine Block" on East 136th, an area not known for elegance, despite the stately-looking buildings (the housing projects in the area didn't help things.) They'd lived there since the 1920's and never left, and as for the thugs in the streets, they left the family alone because they knew they lived there. But the stained glass windows were ruined by bullets.

As for the other articles, they're not as interesting. One of the problems with the Real Estate section is that it's all about apartments none of us can afford. Most of the city's unmarried people live with roommates, and they don't put much effort into decorating. If they do, then it mostly consists of painting the walls with eccentric designs and/or furnishing the place with dumpster-diving treasures. Then again, the New York Times Sunday section doesn't market itself to people that have no money to spend, so the elegant fancy stuff is all we see.
Still, sometimes I'd rather see a section titled "getting along in a cramped pad."

One person found this helpful

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A voracious reader

You don't have to be a New Yorker....

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2013

....to find this book quite enjoyable. I loved reading the columns in the NY Times and the author has included some of the most interesting in the book. You can "live vicariously" and you'll almost feel as though you know the people. The author has a very pleasant writing style, too.

The author will give a free lecture at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on October 23 at 6:30 p.m.

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ILW

Fascinating and heart-warming

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 1, 2013

Verified Purchase

Wonderful glimpses into the lives and homes of people in New York - paints a fantastic picture of the changing landscape of one of the most famous cities on earth.

As a non New Yorker, the collection really highlights the unique characteristics of the city, while at the same time bringing out the touchpoints of universal humanity.

Brilliant book!

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Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City Paperback – March 25, 2013

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