Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

40 Threading the Needle on West 12th Street: NANCY SMITH, JOHN CASEY, AND THEIR DAUGHTERS IN THE WEST VILLAGE (April 18, 2010)

2 1 7 40 Threading the Needle on West 12th Street Nancy Smith, John Casey, and Their Daughters in the West Village ApRIL 18, 2010 Nancy Smith, John Casey, and their daughters in their pre–Civil War town house in the West Village. (Librado Romero/The New York Times) 2 1 8 Back in the mid-1990s, when John Casey and Nancy Smith were about 30 and looking for an affordable place to live in the West Village, Mr. Casey chose an unusual approach to house hunting. Both he and his wife held midlevel jobs in publishing, and only by finding a distressed property that could generate income did they have a prayer of being able to afford what they wanted. So day after day, Mr. Casey prowled the narrow, tree-lined streets in search of rundown buildings. Then he pored over records at the offices of various city agencies, hoping to locate an owner who was financially on the ropes and thus desperate to sell. “I started out going to the Surrogate’s Court,” Mr. Casey says. “When that proved completely useless, I began going to the City Registrar’s office . I’d find addresses of owners and write them letters. I’d tell them we were a nice couple who wanted to own a house, and if they wanted to sell their house to us, we’d promise to take good care of it.” In 1997, after a hundred such letters, the couple struck gold. But they did so the old-fashioned way, through an ad they saw in the newspaper. Gold might not seem the word to describe the red-brick town house on 12th Street in the West Village that had seen little love since its construction shortly before the Civil War. The four floors of what had started life as a single-family home had been mercilessly chopped into small apartments , and the structure was so run-down that Ms. Smith called it “the loser house on the block.” Despite the obvious drawbacks, Mr. Casey and Ms. Smith bought the building for $640,000 and discovered that the challenges associated with this particular address were just beginning. All six apartments were occupied , and all the tenants were protected by rent regulation, as a consequence of which dislodging any of them was likely be protracted and arduous. At one point, the couple slept in the attic, a space that had neither heat nor electricity, not to mention ceilings so low that Mr. Casey, at 5-foot11 , could barely stand. “Our friends would come to visit us, and they’d be shocked,” Ms. Smith says. “They’d say, ‘We’re very worried about you.’” But as one by one the tenants left, the couple colonized successive parts of the house. Today, except for two apartments on the second floor and one in the basement, they occupy the entire building, which today is also home to the couple’s three daughters: Roma, 9, and Beatrice, 7, both adopted from China, and Frances, who is nearly 4. T H R E A d I N g T H E N E E d L E O N w E S T 1 2 T H S T R E E T 2 1 9 The story might have ended differently had Mr. Casey not turned out to be an ace carpenter with a special touch when it came to historic details . The grandson of a pipe fitter whose Republic Steel helmet hangs on a wall in the kitchen, he’s almost entirely self-taught, “or I should say This Old House taught.” Yet despite the absence of formal training, Mr. Casey proved remarkably adept at nursing a troubled building back to health. He removed collapsing ceilings. He stripped floors to reveal wideplank hemlock and eastern white pine. He installed gas lines, built a laundry room (“and does all the laundry,” his wife notes). He transformed a onetime kitchen into a bathroom, laying black and white tile on the floor and buying a shower online. “Somehow he not only figured out what we wanted, he also figured out how to do it,” Ms. Smith says. Except for the kitchen and the attic, which were retrofitted with the help of an architect, he did nearly all the work himself, stripping 150 years of paint from intricate moldings and dragging tons of old plaster to Dumpsters in five-gallon buckets...