June 3, 1996
On June 3, 1996 it rained over 3″ in NYC, a record that still stands. I know this because that’s the day, 30 years ago today, I started a sublet in Hell’s Kitchen and the pouring rain against the urban backdrop that night made me feel like I was stepping onto the set of Blade Runner. Hell’s Kitchen was in the middle of its transition from urban blight to NYC chic and the guy whose apartment I was subletting told me to tell the bus driver from LaGuardia I was headed to ‘midtown’ just to be sure he’d stop for me. I brought a suitcase, a guitar, and a backpack with my brick of a laptop.
I spent the summer getting my bearings here in the city, doing a few shows, meeting comics, and finding my way to the alternative performance scene on the Lower East Side at Surf Reality and Collective Unconscious. I also pounded the pavement looking for an apartment for a longer stay.
To find an apartment I would go on AOL (LOL) and search the classified ads. I realized the NY Times Sunday classified ads were available online starting on Friday evening and apartment managers were AMAZED at my foreknowledge of their listings. And I still remember a story* the Sunday real estate section did that summer about a young college graduate whose monthly rent budget—with the help of her parents, of course—was $2k ($4,250 in today’s $), which made a mockery of my 500-800 budget with no parental help. Sunday NY Times real estate has been trolling New Yorkers for generations!
I didn’t have a cell phone so I used the apartment’s land line and answering machine for messages, which feels like stone age technology now. I used tokens for the subway because Metrocard readers weren’t yet in every station. I remember when they were finally installed in my Brooklyn station (Union & 4th Ave) in late ’96 or early ’97.
A lot of my Chicago comedy friends said they’d come visit me that summer but only one did: the now well-known W. Kamau Bell, who was pondering a move to NYC. He took one look at the apartment I was subletting and decided to move to San Francisco. The Upright Citizen’s Brigade, some of whom I knew from Chicago, had just set up shop here, and I caught an early show of theirs in a basement theater called The TriBeCa Lab Theater, with Bill Chott subbing for either Matt Walsh or Ian Roberts.
There were a few other Chicago comedy people in town, mostly from the improv world rather than the standup scene I was involved in, but it was enough to have some semblance of a social life. My friend Joanne, an actor and high-end hair stylist who hosted some epic loft parties over the years, would check in on me; and my sister’s former college roommate, a broadway actor who helped me get that summer sublet, suffered through the first and last bringer show I was stupid enough to do.
One of the things that prompted the move was my dad passing away at the beginning of 1995. He and my mom had lived in Weehawken for a few years in the early 60s when they were first married, my dad getting his master’s degree while studying method acting with Bobby Lewis, my mom working in an office in midtown (she was a secretary at a chemical company, she said) before giving birth to my older sister.
And here it is 30 years later, about a year and a half after my mom passed away and I’m still here. Do I consider myself a ‘New Yorker’ yet? Let’s not label things, man. There’s always some nativist who needs to work into every conversation the fact that they were born here, as if it were an accomplishment that they themselves achieved when in truth it’s something their parents gave them, like the rent money the college grad in the Times piece got. Whatever. NYC has been home for 3 decades, which is more than half my life and longer than I’ve lived anywhere else.
And the record rainfall on June 3, 1996 still stands.
*I found but wasn’t able to reread that story because paywall. Even logging in with google to access a free article only brought up a big subscription window that blocked all of the content and couldn’t be clicked off. Do you have a times subscription? Wanna send me a gift link or the text so I can see if I remember it correctly? Also, the NYTimes subscription window has the audacity to say “support independent journalism”! Oy. One of the biggest corporate news outlets in the country, the one that fully supported the Iraq War, dubya, and has both-sides-ed politics from Clinton to fascism calls itself ‘independent’!?! Eff all the way off!
