Last Days In New York
As I alluded to in my last post, we are moving out of New York City this week.
We bought a house in Piermont, NY – a village of 2,500 people in Rockland County, on the west of the Hudson, about 30 miles north from our apartment in Brooklyn. We'll still be close to New York, but no longer immersed in it. Basically, we're moving to the burbs – a well-worn path for families like ours.
For eight years we've lived on the same block in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. The first four were in a tiny apartment above a pest control shop on Court Street. When the pandemic hit we moved into a garden duplex around the corner to accommodate the second kid and work-from-home.
There's an antique shop called Yesterday's News on our block, and a guy who works there named Craig. For eight years, I've walked past Craig while he polished his wares on the sidewalk and we've had this interaction:
"Hey Craig."
"Hey Greg."
That's it! I know almost nothing else about Craig other than his name. But we've had that same brief interaction a few times a week for the last eight years – hundreds of times in total! That's not nothing!
I'm going to miss saying hey to Craig.
This is Ms. Diane, one of our many neighborhood crossing guards. Every morning Ms. Diane steps out into the crosswalk, 30 yards from her apartment, and protects families on their way to school. This photo is from Emma's first day in Kindergarten. By this point we'd been crossing under Ms. Diane's watch for a year.
Five years ago I ran into Ms. Diane during a Memorial Day ceremony in Carroll Park. She was with her mom, who was sick. I snapped this picture, printed it out and gave Ms. Diane a framed copy.
This was the moment, a couple years later, when Ms. Diane told Rachel that her mom had passed away.
Our conversations with Ms. Diane are frequent, but never longer than it takes for the light to change. We've been having those conversations for eight years, and we've been through some shit together during that time: parents passing, kids being born, kids growing up, a pandemic. Those shared moments – short as they may be – add up to something meaningful.
There's dozens, if not hundreds, of folks like that in our neighborhood: crossing guards, barbers, baristas, servers, clerks, neighbors, teachers, administrators, sanitation workers, police, firemen, parks department folks, fellow parents... I don't even know the names of many of these folks who I – nonetheless – consider to be my friends. We have a non-trivial relationship that's grown through eight years of consistent, though perhaps brief, shared moments.
These moments feel uniquely New York.
It's a beautiful aspect of living in such a dense, pedestrian centric environment – all these moments of human interaction that you don't get when moving in the bubble of a car. Moments that are uniquely valuable in a time when our interactions is increasingly digital.
My friend Gabe refers to New York as "America's largest collection of small towns." Carroll Gardens feels like a small town. In fact, ever since the pandemic hit, it's felt less like, "we live in New York" and more like, "we live in Carroll Gardens with easy access to a few dozen other small towns."
We know it's time for us to move on. We've deeply considered the problem of where to live for the next phase of our life, and I'm confident we're making the right decision based on the information we have and the options on the table. And it's by no accident that we're moving to another small town (about 1/5 the size of Carroll Gardens). We're excited for what lies ahead. We're excited to invest in a new community. But all change involves loss, and I will deeply miss these uniquely New York moments.
The last few weeks we've been running around New York, checking things off our list, and saying our goodbyes. These photos were all taken on our farewell tour.