Moving Day in Little Old New York

Moving! Terror and joy in New York City. All the old rituals again observed. To the post office with a box of books that I want to keep but don’t need with me – to be shipped, Media Mail, to family in California. To the used bookstore down the street with a backpack full of galleys and castaways to be hawked for store credit. Commercial negotiations on Facebook Marketplace, my attempt to defray moving costs while shedding excess furniture.

Upon listing this little West Elm side table, a small circular surface supported on a shiny gold stalk projected from a heavy cube of solid marble – never really my style – a flood of offers and entreaties descend upon my inbox and it’s gone within ten minutes, the woman arriving on the stoop and cutting me off by proffering a few crisp bills before I can even finish asking whether she’d be interested in any of the other things I’m trying to get rid of. The frisson of a transaction successfully completed! Marble cube vanishes into the cloudy afternoon!

Moving! Placing in boxes on the stoop clothes and books and trinkets and spare wine openers and despised old rain jackets and Poshmark purchases that never quite worked out and they’re all gone in minutes, someone takes them, people even take the boxes you put the stuff out on the stoop in – which is too bad because you really need those boxes to pack the things you want to keep – but it’s all part of the ritual, the unequalled appetite of the city for things.

When I came down to put a few more things on the stoop a gangly man with two lit cigarettes dangling simultaneously out of his mouth was there on the curb putting some of my discarded books into a black plastic bag. He gave me a grin. The two cigarettes wobbled and so did their tails of smoke.

“Got any more books?” he asked me. I did indeed.

In the early times in New York City every lease expired on the same day of the year, May 1: Moving Day. Burrows and Wallace write about it in Gotham, their doorstop history of New York:

By 1920 a scene of utter pandemonium, with thousands of people relocating at once, clogging the streets with wagons full of household possessions. It looked, [English novelist and writer on American customs of nineteenth-century renown] Mrs. Trollope observed, as if the population were “flying from the plague.”

In these latter days, traces remain of that superlative commitment to mass movement in the city. New York City has a long tradition of itinerancy, individual and collective: George Templeton Strong, that old New York grandee and diarist of the Civil War era, witnessed in his lifetime the wholesale uprooting of his city’s elite twice over – from near the Battery northward to the vicinity of Bond Street, and then again to Madison Avenue. “We are a nomadic people,” he writes, “Our finest brownstone houses are merely tents of new pattern and material.”

Now, of course, leases can expire any day of the year – I once moved in mid-January, on the coldest day of the year: fifteen degrees in Manhattan – but there are relative peaks, in June and in September. To move, especially on the thirty-first previous and on the first of those months, is to be part of the rush. You’re exposing yourself to the elements, to the crowds, waging the war of all against all – a kind of brute-force trial, a test of will and logistical acumen and physical strength, as well as of financial security and commercial negotiation (if you’re hiring movers) or of personal charm and social standing (if you rely on your friends). Engagement on all fronts simultaneously. No do-overs, no rain checks.

In a typical series of events, my packing process this year descended, parabola-like, from an early phase practically German in its fastidiousness (arrangement of different categories of books into carefully labeled boxes) to a desperate late phase, like an inhabitant of a city about to be sacked by barbarians (objects hurled aleatorily into IKEA bags past four in the morning on the night before the move). Toothpaste, Calabrian peppers, stationery, ten thousand clothes hangers. Old opera tickets I somehow couldn’t get rid of, magazines I still might read, a package of thumbtacks that exploded all over the box they were tossed into, booby-trapping it for the future. How did I acquire so many things? When did it happen? I felt myself sinking beneath the weight of my own possessions.

Birds (already chirping) and the quantity of nicotine required to complete the packing preventing me from sleeping much during even those few hours that lay between me and the task at hand. In the morning it was already warm and you could already see U-Hauls driving up and down the avenue. The women in front of me in line at the bagel shop were also getting ready for a move.

I arrived somewhat late to the U-Haul depot to pick up the vehicle for which I’d arranged and found there a discouraging scene: a line of dejected-looking transplant-Brooklynite men a bit older than me.

We waited at the mercy of the depot attendant, a spirited West Indian man who was occupied taking to task a latecomer, a younger guy who showed up right after I did and tried to take a phone call outside, then tried to cut the line, on the reasoning he’d already checked in online. (We all had checked in online.)

“Why did you sleep in this morning?” the attendant barked at this hapless latecomer. “You were supposed to be here at nine! Now you’re trying to cut the line? You will be the last one to get a truck, Mr. H—. The very last one!”

When the attendant ducked out to fetch a hand truck for one of the Brooklyn dads, another gestured at the door and said, “The number on there tells you all you need to know about this place.”

We all looked. The number on the door was: 666 — Avenue.

“Welcome to hell!” the Brooklyn dad in question pronounced, superfluously.

They were out of trucks, supposedly because someone had forgot to return the keys for one of them – the attendant called the reprobate in question on the phone and left a few messages in tones alternately courteous and richly abusive – so I left with the keys to a smaller van instead, feeling somehow grateful.

As I departed, the attendant was devising ingenious tortures for poor Mr. H—, telling him he had no vehicles for him, mocking him for sleeping in, calling other depots on speaker and asking them whether they could spare any trucks and then saying, “Nothing?” in a gleeful voice when they responded in the negative. … A casualty of Moving Day, no doubt about it, and it was barely past ten in the morning.

The devil take the hindmost! My friends were waiting on the curb when I arrived with the van. I distributed the bagels, we ate them, and then we set about loading the boxes into the bed of the van – and another van my friend had brought in from New Jersey – under the intensifying sun. It was hard work: we paused every so often to drink straight from the faucet in the emptying apartment (glasses packed away) and make small talk and wipe the sweat from our foreheads before we set back to work.

Once everything was loaded up we trundled down in the two vans through Clinton Hill where some sort of graduation was going on. Traffic was stop and go all the way to the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. The summer water of the East River below sparkled, boats carving white gashes into its surface. I was going back to Manhattan, thank the Lord above.

Parking wasn’t so bad downtown as I’d feared, but the new place on — Street was really on the fourth floor, not the third as the apartment number suggested. Perhaps they were counting floors using the European method, where the “first” floor is on the second story. We suffered from this accounting method. Really that fourth set of stairs was the killer. You couldn’t just run back down for another box after summiting the heights – you had to stand and pant for a long moment, maybe douse your face in water from the tap and drink some more from your cupped hands and wipe your face with a towel. And it was hotter downtown than in Brooklyn, or maybe it was just later in the day.

Real exhaustion had begun to set in, along with pangs of hunger, by the time we finished. We stood stunned in the shade and smoked cigarettes and recovered a bit. Then we went to get lunch in Chinatown. Clay-pot rice with eel and another clay pot with preserved meats of varying textures and tastes; cold Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon. I paid the check – the least I could do for my little worn-out platoon – and before we went our separate ways we shared another cigarette outside. It was hot out. Boys walked by in dresses, girls walked by in see-through shirts. Slouching towards Dimes Square to be born?

I still had to go back to Brooklyn and tidy up the apartment but someone had told me Christopher Caldwell would be speaking that evening at Sovereign House, the current event space of choice for the not-so-new-anymore right-wing downtown crowd. To attend a gathering there my very first night downtown – well, it would certainly lend ammunition to my Brooklyn-based friends’ merciless (and unmerited!) teasing about my return downtown. I don’t invariably attend events at that venue to which I’m invited, in part because a handful of the male habitués have seemed to me in the past to be ever so slightly lacking in matters of personal hygiene. (Say what you like about the Brooklyn literary circuit, in those circles B.O. is not typically an issue.) But I did want to hear Caldwell speak, and to say hello to my editor, who would also be speaking.

I arrived late, after a quick shower – one wouldn’t want to exemplify one’s own critique! – obtained a High Life from the open bar, and took a seat in the back, soon joined by a friend.

“He’s the first literate person to set foot in this basement,” my friend whispered in my ear, gesturing at Caldwell.

Caldwell was saying interesting things. The Sovereign House crowd was – being a Sovereign House crowd. A guy in front of me offered the woman next to him a pull from his silver, fish-shaped flask, which he explained was filled with port wine. People were hitting vapes, people were ducking out back to smoke. Someone kept opening TikTok videos at full volume for half a second. It was like holding a panel discussion on a Saturday evening L train.

Three more High Lifes, a few interesting conversations and only a momentary whiff of armpit later, I was on the train back to Brooklyn. It was past midnight and I’d never eaten dinner. Clearing out the fridge and the freezer I ate the rest of the box of frozen taquitos and the remains of a plate of spaghetti puttanesca from earlier in the week – with my hands; the silverware was all downtown. I vacuumed the place and took the last bags down to the overstuffed trash cans out front.

Noise echoes in an empty apartment. The last thing to do always in these situations is to throw away the trash can itself. A sort of fitting ouroboros. But the vacuum cleaner I always take with me. It’s thin and light and it’s good for a New York apartment. Calling the car back to Manhattan past three in the morning, I stood on the sidewalk with it slung over my shoulder, like a ronin’s sword.