She finds an apartment in La Fortuna, a historic building—based on the real-life El Cabrillo condominium in Hollywood—where a bohemian, multigenerational coterie of residents gathers in a shared courtyard to smoke, play music, and reminisce about old flames.
Then one day news arrives that La Fortuna is being demolished to make room for a high-rise condominium designed by a trendy architect named Nick Dylan McDermott , and Gwen starts writing anonymous letters to a newspaper in protest. Nick reads them, at first incensed but eventually charmed. I wish I could say that it was because it had the more repentant developer, extolled communal living, or presented the written word as a political tool.
And there was something so beguiling about that buzzing, open courtyard. I had to stop after I moved back to New York City. When I started looking for a place in Brooklyn on my own a couple of years ago, my friends warned me to manage my expectations—as in, have none.
After weeks of searching, I noticed an apartment within my budget on StreetEasy, but when I went to see it I realized that the living room looked out over a massive Con Ed substation, beyond which lay a cemetery.
I decided that I could do either power lines or a cemetery, but not both. I, too, relied on thin connections. By the time that happened, a year later, rents across the city had grown more than seven times faster than wages, according to a report released in May, , that compared StreetEasy and Zillow listings with data from the U.
