You May Ask Yourself, My God What Have I Done
Most of us who have scraped and finnagled our way into our brownstones know the feeling of awe that sets in that first time you’re alone in your house and you think, “Holy Shit!” Colin Harrison describes that moment 20-odd years ago in his essay this week in New York Magazine: We moved into our…
Most of us who have scraped and finnagled our way into our brownstones know the feeling of awe that sets in that first time you’re alone in your house and you think, “Holy Shit!” Colin Harrison describes that moment 20-odd years ago in his essay this week in New York Magazine:
We moved into our Brooklyn house, a big creaking brownstone in Park Slope. Four floors. Seven bedrooms, three baths. Seven mantels. Walnut detail throughout, never painted. Sure, it needed a little work: They all do. We were deliriously excited. This was our house now? In the hours just after the closing, my wife and I lay on the dusty parquet floor of the empty living room gazing up at the impossibly high ceilings. How would we fill this big house? How would we populate it? What life would we live that otherwise would never occur?
The Deal We Made [NY Magazine]
Do you think they paid proper gift/inheritance taxes on the Nana’s money, which they used to buy the brownstone? Or do you think they found some way to justify ripping off the government, too?
Just a thought…
5:36pm poster: Think about what you are writing. These are private people (like yourself, presumably) one of whom happens to have a written an article for New York Magazine. That hardly gives you the right to post their address online. What exactly are your motivations? Please creep back into the nasty little hole of envy and/or moral rectitude from which you just poked your nose.
Let’s go egg their house — ONLY KIDDING!!!!
I’m surprised no-one posted the address – I looked it up in Acris. It was a joint purchase in 1989 (Nana and C & K). What would it be worth today?
***EEEEEWWW,***
that was a creepy story!!
is that how most people in Park Slope afford their Brownstones? by milking granny’s equity, selling her home and dumping her when she gets in the way??
—————-
I can’t wait until i get to read the “Cobble Hill” nephew’s story of how he tossed his two aunts into the street so he could sell the ratty old townhouse, pay off some gambling bills and buy a place in the Hamptons.
a heart warming tale for the holidays!
not wrong, no. Unfair, maybe.
this article isn’t flattering to anyone: not to the author, his wife, or to nana. and that’s not its point. often, life–the end of it in particular–isn’t pretty. a story like this might not be the one to tell at, say, a memorial service, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
It’s not the choices this family made that I found distateful about this article–families are all a bit odd in their own way, it’s entirely likely this really was the best arrangement for all concerned, and the author himself allows that his motives are mixed. It’s his rather merciless descriptions of a woman at the end of her life–the catfood on her glasses, the state of her neglected home back in LA, her increasing infantilism–that felt unfair (if honest). Nana surely had some redeeming qualities, but you’d never know it from this article. And she’ll never have an opportunity to write her own.
clinton hillbilly, you are suggesting that at the end the compassionate thing would have been to resuscitate her? Panting, delirous, unable to hold her head up, and then rushed to the hospital? Are you kidding me?