Moving Downtown!

See ya later, Harlem. It's been... er... Harlemish.

I am finally moving downtown to a new apartment. I found an ad for a room that is available July 1st in Chelsea, three blocks from where I work. Naturally, I checked it out. The room is on the third floor of a walk-up building (goodbye elevator) that was built around 1910. The building is a 6 story townhouse that someone in their infinite wisdom decided to paint canary yellow with baby blue trim. As I was walking to go see the place I saw it from a distance and thought, "Aw crap, it's going to be that one, isn't it?" I know my luck. It's a nice building though; well maintaned and clean.

The apartment is actually two apartments combined together. When you enter on the first floor (on 3rd) you walk into a kitchen. There's a bedroom on the right, and mine is on the left. There is a spiral staircase in the corner of the kitchen that leads upstairs (4th floor) where there is an open space with a second entrance to the building's hallway on the 4th floor. The third bedroom is on one side of that upstairs space, and a big full bathroom on the other. My room is by far the smallest at about 7' by 12' and doesn't get much for natural light. I'm ok with it since it's about the same size as my room up in Harlem which also got little light. This new room, though, has a small 1/2 bath tacked on the end of it that will just be mine. Score! Regretably, I forgot to take any photos of the apartment itself, but I did take some of the building later.

Looking from the front door down the hallway to the stairs:

Looking from the stairs back toward the front door:

The view South from the rooftop. I can't wait to go up there at night!

The neighborhood is awesome, basically the area I would pick if I had a choice. The modeling agency is in Chelsea (26th St. & 11th Ave.), as is my office, on 7th ave and 19th street. The apartment? Three blocks South on 16th street between 7th and 8th. I will be able to just walk down the street to my office, walk home for lunch (save $$) and after work, walk home to pick up my gym clothes. I have been carrying a heavy gym bag with me to work since I switched gyms back in February. I can't tell you how excited I am to not have to drag that with me all the time. The walk takes me about 4 minutes. I timed it. To get from my place in Harlem to my office requires about a 40 minute commute with two different trains. I'd call that a good change!

Just in terms of neighborhood environment, take this as the comparison: Harlem- litter on the sidewalks, occasionally heckled for being white, occasional gunshots, no good places to eat/hang out really. Chelsea- tree-lined street with townhouses and rowhouses, banks, restaurants, nightlife, art galleries, parks in walking distance. Here's a photo of 16th street, the street I'll be living on.

From the corner of 16th, here's a shot down 7th Avenue. My office is in the tan building in the middle. My current apartment? Oh, about 113 blocks in that direction.Speaking of my office, here's a shot of the building

And the storefront

And my desk. I'm on the end of the row, under the whiteboard on the right.

So, there you have it. The big news. More photos once I start moving. I promise!

Shoot Today: Fun Fun!!!

First of all, you should hear Harlem right now. Cars honking and people shouting in the streets. Complete madness! Reed cooked a really nice dinner tonight and we were enjoying some wine when the election was called, so we grabbed the bottle and ran up to the rooftop and watched it all unfold. It's crazy out there!

Today I had so much fun at my photoshoot! It was a spec shoot for a hair editorial that will hopefully be popping up in a magazine soon. The concept was really edgy and avant garde, kind of an eighties, angry vibe to it. I showed up at 10am and sat down for the hair and makeup. The hair was caked in hair products and slicked into different shapes. The look was a bit dark with highlights of different colors of light. To get the light to illuminate the skin in an interesting way they covered my face, neck and shoulders with baby oil. I was so greasy! Each look had a different pop of color. The first one I had a pink stripe under my left eye with white on the eyelid, the second had teal on the eyelids, and the last shot had bright blue lips. It was pretty intense. For each shot the photographer had me twist my shoulders into intersting positions and crank my neck in a strange angle then then we went for the emotion. Angry! Scowling and clenched jaws and angry stares. It turned out to be really interesting and I can't wait to share the photos. I'll find out in about a week which, if any, magazine picked up the story. If nothing else it will add some diversity to my book. It was just fun to play around with an edgy look today.

I should be getting the photos from my shoot on Sunday tomorrow sometime, so I'll throw those on here soon.

NoDak in 17 days!!!

Thanks to: Ikea & FDNY. No Thanks to: Apartment Mgt.

Yesterday (Monday) started off as a good enough day. My roommate and I took a little trip to the Ikea out in Brooklyn to pick up some cheap stuff for our rooms. I'm pretty excited about the stuff I snagged, it but I'll wait until I get it all put in place before sharing. Quick side-note: the Ikea has a shuttle bus that takes you from the subway stop to their front door! It was amazing! The bus was basically a coach bus that had reclining seats and a radio that was playing ridiculous 80's and 90's music. I'm sure the few other people on that bus must have thought we were crazy because we started singing along and laughing hysterically. I suppose you had to be there...

On the way home he informs me that it is Rosh Hashana and, even though nobody in our apartment is Jewish, we decided to celebrate. I guess it is tradition to celebrate by eating apples with honey. He looked up a recipe online for baked apples and, after a quick trip to the grocery store, this is what he came up with:...and after a little baking:
(btw those are not my horrible cut-offs. That would be of my equally-as-skinny roommate.)
They were pretty good.

We had a friend who is a model with my roommate's agency over and we stayed up pretty late hanging out. By the time he went home and I had gotten ready for bed it was about 4am or so. I was actually reading some of the blogs I follow when around 5am I started smelling something. Smelled like smoke. I looked out the window in my room into the air shaft and to my surprise the whole airshaft was filled with grey smoke. I started getting out of bed and *bang* it sounded like a machine exploded or something. The smoke in the airshaft turned dark black and I started scrambling for the things I wanted to run out of the building with. I grabbed my computer, cell phone, camera, modeling portfolio (I paid a lot for those pics!) and ran out into the hallway. I was met by a roommate who shared my idea of a hasty exit. We knocked on everyone's doors and went down to the street where a lot of our neighbors were gathered around. There were firetrucks everywhere and we stood there for a little over two hours while they drug hoses into the building and broke out windows. Here's a video of the scene.


The fire apparently started from the laundromat on the first floor and went up through the walls into the apartment on the second floor just above the portico entrance on the side of the building. There was some fire damage in the apartment above it on the third floor as well. These apartments are across the air shaft from my window and when the firemen broke the windows out into the airshaft a huge cloud of black smoke and smoldering embers flew up into the sky. I caught a little of the smoke in this horribly blurry photo. One of my roommates didn't leave as quickly as I did (I went straight for the street, I don't mess around!) but on the way out looked through the window and saw flames coming up the airshaft. Not cool! After the fire fighters got everything contained we were allowed back into our building. It was surreal, like out of a movie, when we quietly walked single file back up the stairs to our apartments. The floors were wet and dirty and the walls were covered with soot. It was eerie. I took some photos of the air shaft from our apartment. The windows were broken out on the second and third floor. The guy in the third floor window was leaning out to take a photo of the second floor apartment which was pretty much destroyed. Sidenote #2: Don't I have a nice view out of my bedroom window? This photo was taken out of the bathroom window. My window is about four feet to the right and half-obstructed by that metal laundromat ventilation duct. Sweet huh?

On my way to work this afternoon I took a photo of the front door of the second floor apartment where the fire was the worst. I didn't want to go inside just in case someone was there, but I got a feel for how bad it was just from looking into the doorway.
Fortunately nobody was injured and the fire was stopped before reaching our floor and before serious damage to the building occurred. A big thank-you is owed to the FDNY for their quick response!

Really, I'm unhappy with the building management at this point because I found out today that nine years ago there was a large fire that destroyed the seventh floor of the building. When they renovated the building they didn't upgrade the 100 year old wiring. Also, the building management had padlocked the door to the roof which is a no-no for fire safety. We have yet to have our gas turned back on and we still don't have hot water. I understand that there will need to be some checks here and there, but I seriously want to be able to cook and take a hot shower tomorrow. Hop to it guys. Chop-chop!