Negril Notes

Brooklyn it is . . . Vinny from ?

June 14, 2007

Sunset Park Brooklyn to be exact. It’s a nice upscale Spanish neighborhood, a ground floor apartment, and only a few minutes from the Subway. I’m excited to make the move. My suburban Philadelphia existence needed some shaking up, so I decided to try something, and somewhere, completely different. It’s been years since I lived in a city.

It wasn’t a hard decision really, I work in Manhattan three of four days a week and the commute has been killing me. Moving closer to NYC is a way to get more productive time into my non-working life. My first plan was to move to Northern New Jersey, but Vinny from Paramus has no ring to it. Manhattan is too expensive, The Bronx is too scary, and Queens is too far out, so Brooklyn it is. There are a few bad neighborhoods, but most of the borough has gone through a re-birth with the real estate boom over the last half-dozen years.

I did my search for the place on Craig’s List, I love the site, and I’ve been a big fan for years, but I think this is the first time I’ve used it for something productive. I was amazed how easy it was, and by how many responses I received. I responded to, maybe, three dozen ads, and I got responses from about half.

Sure, some of them were like, “I’m sorry sir, but we don’t want some old guy for a roommate.” OK, I shouldn’t have responded to the 19yo female struggling artist, but she’s the one who put her picture in the ad! Most people were serious about renting, and only several were agencies scamming that they were real people.

In the end I found a place that agreed with me, with a roommate who I’m sure I can get along with, and the price was right. I only ended up looking at four or five places, most of them were decent, but I liked Sunset Park as soon as I climbed out of the subway.
I thought it would be cool, in a romantic, wanna-be writer sort of way, to live in Bed-Stuy, or Crown Heights, maybe even Flatbush or Cypress Hills, but I realized I’m too much of a wimp to live in the ghetto (I downloaded the song from I-Tunes).

I make the move at the end of the month, and now the only problem is dealing with all those Giants Fans

Vinny

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