Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

6 Her Cottage by the Sea: AMY GOTTLIEB AND HER FAMILY ON CITY ISLAND (February 28, 2010)

4 1 6 Her Cottage by the Sea Amy Gottlieb and Her Family on City Island fEBRUARy 28, 2010 Amy Gottlieb, a special education teacher, and her children in a 1920s cottage on City Island in the Bronx. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times) 4 2 When the towers fell, Amy Gottlieb was in the kitchen of her family ’s Battery Park City apartment, serving breakfast to her twin daughters, not yet a year old. Ms. Gottlieb, a special education teacher, and her husband, Terry McElroy, an artist, had rented the apartment only three months earlier, attracted by the complex’s child-friendly vibes. Just the previous morning, Ms. Gottlieb had begun sharing a babysitter with a mother of twins who lived nearby. By 12:30 on that brilliant blue-sky day, Ms. Gottlieb had packed up her daughters in the double stroller, scooped up Mishka, her chow chow, along with baby formula on ice, and was aboard a boat headed to New Jersey. Except for the twins and the dog, she was alone, and she had no idea what was happening back in the apartment. “We were told they weren’t letting husbands back in the building,” she says. Nor did she ever set foot in the apartment again. When Mr. McElroy returned a few weeks later to collect their belongings, the remains of breakfast still sat on the kitchen table. Ms. Gottlieb did not lose family or friends in the attacks. She was not sickened by the grime-filled air or permanently traumatized by the violence of that day. But like so many New Yorkers, she can recount in practically moment-by-moment detail what happened in the minutes and hours after the towers were hit. Her description of the remains of the family’s breakfast recalls one of the most moving images to emerge after the attacks, the photograph of a tea set blanketed with white dust that was found in an apartment near Ground Zero. And because she was living in the shadow of the towers, amid the debris and the seemingly endless physical disruption, her life and her family’s was upended. Also like so many New Yorkers whose domestic arrangements were convulsed on September 11, 2001, the couple instantly faced the question of where to go next, a question complicated by the presence of two babies. For a time they camped out in her parents’ apartment on the Upper East Side. But finding permanent housing in Manhattan proved financially daunting, especially given the modesty of their respective salaries . And despite Ms. Gottlieb’s affection for Rockaway, the waterfront community in Queens where she grew up, she had no desire to return to the streets of her youth. She did, however, respond to the siren song of another close-knit neighborhood encircled by water, City Island in the H E R C O T TA g E B y T H E S E A 4 3 Bronx. “It felt very comfortable, like the Rockaways,” she says. “That was a major plus.” The family moved to the island in 2002, living for a time in a rented apartment. Yet almost from the beginning, Ms. Gottlieb and her husband began to look for something more permanent, and she took a liking to a two-story-plus-attic candy-pink house with daffodil-yellow shutters. From the shrubbery garlanding the front porch to the oculus and stainedglass windows, the place exuded old-fashioned charm even though it had been erected well into the 20th century. That the house sat just steps from Eastchester Bay was an added attraction; Ms. Gottlieb, perhaps thanks to her Rockaway youth, loved the idea of living so close to the water. She was also enamored of the log-burning fireplace in the living room and the wallpaper in the dining room, with birds and flowers worked in a palette of gold, maroon, brown, and green. “This house had a history,” she says. “I fell in love with everything about it.” Not until a year later would the price fall to a level the couple could afford. “I kept looking at other houses,” she says, “but I was determined to wait for this one.” In 2003, she and her husband bought the house for about $570,000; their son, Julian, was born the following year. Yet period charm failed to prove a recipe for domestic contentment. Two years ago, after...