Top Floor Apartments

In the last year, I have gone to great lengths to secure a top floor apartment.  There was the place in Brooklyn near Prospect Park, a top floor that faced back (as quiet as you can get in this jack hammer of a city). Never mind that getting to work would have taken over an hour, I fell in love.  But the affair was short  lived.  The board didn't approve.  Like the end of many affairs, the board thought letting me down easy meant not explaining why they didn't want me.  Was something inherently, unremediably wrong with me?  The board remained mute.

 After licking my wounds, my search intensified when the quiet old Russian lady above me was replaced by a young, spike-heeled woman with a yippy dog and an overweight boyfriend (thump thump in the night).  So I found the current place:  a fifth floor walkup on Thayer Street.  Despite the climb that takes a daily toll on my joints (early arthritis in the hip?), the freedom from someone treading on my head makes the workout worth it.  But the bedroom faces front onto a street so popular that it invades my dreams.  My existence is confined to the living room, where I sleep on the pullout sofa and placate myself:  simplifying one's life unclutters the mind, I say.  And when that doesn't work, I try another:  one room is easier to clean (usually does the trick).

I knew from the beginning that this would be a short-lived relationship.  Now I'm salivating over the next top floor place.  If all goes according to plan, in a few months I will move into a fifth floor walkup (why let muscles go soft when they have been honed from a summer of mountain climbing?), back facing, corner unit (no shared walls with anyone!)  To get any quieter you'd have to move to South Dakota.

This quest for a top floor place is common among creative types.  Take, for example, the Bohemians in La Boheme.  They shivered and counted pennies in their Paris garrette.  Then there was Monet, who painted the Villas of Bordighera from his top floor vantage point on the Italian Riviera.  Think also about V.S. Naipaul, who in his book of personal essays, "Literary Occasions", reveals that the happiest and most productive years in his early writing life were spent in a top floor apartment in London.

Why the draw?  Some might say that nobody wants a top floor place, ergo the rent is cheap (us creative types need cheap rent).  But the truth is that having a separate spot, quiet and removed from the workaday world is necessary for art.  Because any creative endeavor demands entering into a zone of sustained concentration, easily broken by stiletto heals overhead or muffler-less cars racing past.  So I insist on it, I make sacrifices for it.  Peace of mind doesn't come cheap, and is worth the effort. Including the twenty flights of stairs (in total, more if I forget something) that I climb each day.