Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

8 The House That Saved His Life: PETER MARCHETTE AND HIS FAMILY IN LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS (August 9, 2009)

5 3 8 The House That Saved His Life Peter Marchette and His Family in Long Island City, Queens AUgUST 9, 2009 Peter Marchette and his daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons in their apartment house in Long Island City, Queens. (G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times) 5 4 Peter Marchette and Julia Walsh of Long Island City, Queens, were the ultimate childhood sweethearts. They met in 1958, when he was 7 and she was 5, in a neighborhood whose mostly working-class residents were bound by family ties and often by roots that went back to the same Italian town or Irish village. “We met right here in this yard,” Mr. Marchette says, sitting in the backyard of the three-story apartment house on 47th Road where he grew up. By 1965, the two were going steady, and in 1971, when he was 20 and she was 18, they were married at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, just around the corner. Their son, Peter Jr., was born later that year, and a daughter, Victoria, followed in 1977. Within a few years of living elsewhere in the neighborhood, the family was back on 47th Road, in an apartment on the first floor. For the most part, New York is a place of relentless change, a place where people move about at warp speed. But just below the surface there lies a different New York. The story of this house and its inhabitants over the years sheds a rare light on that other New York, a world of countless small residential buildings in immigrant neighborhoods, buildings that stay for decades in one extended family, with multiple generations living under the same roof. Nearly from the moment this house was built, around 1870, it was owned or occupied by Mr. Marchette’s relatives or members of his wife’s family. And three years ago, when his wife died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 53, the house came to his rescue. Mr. Marchette still lives on the first floor, where he lived when his wife was alive. His daughter, along with her husband, Anthony Voss, and the couple’s sons, Anthony William Jr., 4, and Zachary, 10 months, moved into the four-room railroad flat on the top floor. And while Mr. Marchette is still picking up the pieces after the death of his wife, the presence of these four cheerful people under his roof may have saved his life. “Without them,” he says, “I probably would have folded up my tent a long time ago. I would have gone into the tank.” His voice shakes as he speaks. For Ms. Voss, the arrangement has proved equally comforting. Thanks to her father, she was able to return to her job as a preschool teacher shortly after the birth of her younger son. Her father, who is 58, had recently been laid off from his job as a customer service representative for T H E H O U S E T H AT S A V E d H I S L I f E 5 5 a French wine importer, and she asked if he would be her babysitter. He was reluctant, afraid he wouldn’t be much good at what he always considered women’s work. “A woman knows these things instinctively,” Mr. Marchette said to his daughter of the challenges involved. “I can only try.” Yet despite his misgivings, he proved a natural. “He’s a wonderful grandfather,” his daughter says. “When he’s with the baby, I have peace of mind.” Mr. Voss, who grew up in Greenpoint, just across the BrooklynQueens border, and whose parents were divorced when he was a teenager , found a different sort of support within these four walls, a closeness he never experienced as a young boy. “Sitting in this chair,” he says this day in the backyard, “I felt a warmth. I was closer to my mother-in-law than to my own mother. My father-in-law the same thing. They always told me they loved me.” Having grown children under the parental roof doesn’t always work smoothly, as countless parents who have tried and abandoned the arrangement can attest. The closeness is too much. Parents try not to criticize their children, or the way the grandchildren are being raised, but biting one’s tongue over and over can strain a relationship to the...