Crazy Fingers

Check out this New York Times article about people who moved back from the suburbs into the city. It totally resonates with me (recall that I moved back into the city in 2006 after I broke up with my ex).

Paragraphs like this, for example, indicate exactly what life is like for a suburban commuter:

What pushed him over the edge, he said, was the “drama” of his commute by car into Midtown. At 5 a.m., when Mr. Torossian ordinarily made the trip to avoid traffic, it took as little as 17 minutes. But coming home took three or four times that (two hours or more in foul weather), partly because of the bottleneck at his Midtown garage. “Calling ahead doesn’t work because everybody leaves at the same time,” he said. “If you don’t bribe the guys there, you wait 15 to 20 minutes for your car.” He said he spent $100 a week in tips.

I would leave the house by 5 am, at the latest, and hit the gym before work, in order to avoid traffic. Going home would be a total crapshoot. And if I tried to commute by train, it very often went down like this:

“I spent many depressing nights at the Hoboken station,” he added, waiting more than half an hour for a connection. “If you go out for a drink with friends, you’re always watching the clock,” he said. Adding insult to tedium, Mr. McCaul suffered through the suburban version of the Freshman 15, putting 10 to 15 pounds on his normally thin frame, which he attributed to his mostly nonpedestrian lifestyle.

The article is also of particular interest because one of the couples it discusses lived in a house a few doors away from my house on Gregory Avenue, and that house was captured in one of the pictures which illustrates the article.

“You go to these little towns and they are very charming and sweet and have all these cute little shops,” said Brian Lover, who put his West Orange, N.J., house back on the market just three months after moving there. “But I think when you live in these areas full time, those neighborhood shops aren’t so cute. And those neighborhood restaurants that look so great, you know how bad they really are.”

Mr. Lover, 42, a vice president at the Corcoran Group, and his wife, Kristina Rinaldi, 41, an interior decorator, decided to give up their one-bedroom rental on West 55th Street when they had a daughter, Tallulah. They wanted to live in Montclair, N.J., a popular magnet for exurbanites. Outmatched in bidding wars, they expanded their search to neighboring West Orange. There they became besotted by “an old English Tudor with a slate roof, character, an acre and a half of land,” said Mr. Lover, who worked as a fashion advertising director for Esquire magazine at the time.

In July 2001 they bought the house for $480,000; it came with a tinge of unreality. “Every day when I came home, I would say to myself, ‘I really am a king and this is a castle, and who do I think I am?’ “

My house had a lot of problems (such as two leaking oil tanks, a bad roof, and much more) on top of the normal stuff there is to do, constantly, in a big house. That may be why we never got around to decorating very well. There just seemed to be an endless stream of stuff to do.

Though the Sweeneys’ house was many times bigger than their old two-bedroom apartment, it exerted an unforeseen undertow. “All of a sudden you find all these projects to do in the house,” she said. “It keeps you indoors more than you ever thought.”