Rape New York

How I Had Ended Up in Harlem

36 | rny how i had ended up in harlem ON MY FIRST NIGHT in Princeton, I cried nonstop. The humid atmosphere made it feel like a suburban rainforest, too green and too clean for me. I had arrived late in the evening at the end of August 1997 with my boyfriend A, and a yellow suitcase, to live out his dream rather than my own. During my three long years in Princeton, I learned how to drive and even how to enjoy the green of the American lawn, but the suburbs didn’t suit me. I wrote a paper, “Domestophobia : An Approach to the Deconstruction of the Concept of the Domestic as a Pleasurable Space in the US in the 1970s,” and I graduated in May 2000. What I had learned about architecture was that buildings are game boards with people as pawns moving across the boards. For my master’s thesis I made a building game board with magnetic figures, which I placed on a metal surface on top of a coffee table. Before leaving Princeton, I temporarily stored my coffee table and other things at P’s, and parked the 1972 Mercedes 240 in the parking lot in front of my old house in Butler 37 | rny graduate housing, and left for New York. I had a few days to look for an apartment, and a job before going to Spain for the summer. B, a classmate, took me to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Only the Domino Sugar factory held some appeal for me. Another classmate suggested I look for a place north of Columbia University. He told me to start with apartment postings at bus stops.There were none at 116th Street. I took the 1 train to 145th Street and Broadway.Around 143rd Street on Broadway I saw a note in a barbershop: Se rentan cuartos. I talked to the woman in charge to see if she knew anything about apartments for rent in the area. She replied, “Vete a ver a Wilfredo,” and wrote an address on a piece of paper. I walked to the building, south on Broadway and left onto 129th Street. When I buzzed the doorbell no one answered. I sat on the stairs to the entrance of the building to rest and wait. It was early in the afternoon and there were no passersby . Some neighbors sat outside in chairs as if the sidewalks were an extension of their living rooms. A man in a sleeveless T-shirt came up the stairs. I asked him if he knew the super. He told me he was the super. He had a friendly face. I asked if there were any apartments available. He said he was on his way to do some construction work in a vacant apartment, but it was not ready to rent. I asked him to show me the place. He didn’t reply, but let me follow him in. On the way up the stairs we passed an elderly couple whom I thought would make nice neighbors. The super showed me a one-bedroom apartment. The 38 | rny kitchen was at the entrance and the living room looked south toward the Empire State Building. The apartment was filthy. There was graffiti on the walls, thick dirt on the floor, and a sofa with its upholstery ripped lay upside down. There were clean round holes in the walls in two places and they looked like bullet holes.I found it hard to believe what I saw.It looked like a set from a detective show on TV. The super said several apartments would be renovated by the fall,either in this building or in the one adjacent. I wrote down his phone number. Ready to take my first holiday in three years, I left to join A in Spain. A few days before a scheduled trip to the Greek islands, I had a motorcycle accident. The skin of my abdomen was severely lacerated and my clavicle broken. I spent most of July in Madrid looking at the ceiling from the bed in A’s apartment. By the time my skin had healed, and the bones knitted, the summer was gone. I left for New York during the last week of August, after the pins had been removed from my shoulder. A had left earlier to find a place for us to live. When I arrived in New York, A...