At least once every day, Pura Fernandez makes her way down the rickety stairs to visit her disabled mother in the windowless world that her family has proudly called home for two decades, a storage basement in a five-story walk-up, not far from Times Square.
If she turns right at the bottom of the stairs, she heads toward her old bedroom, where she grew up listening to the currents of sewage from the neighbors upstairs, sloshing inside an exposed pipe. If she turns left, she heads toward the boiler room, past the garbage bags and the storage containers, and underneath the pipes that doubled as the asbestos-padded monkey bars of her youth.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"It was very makeshift," said Fernandez, 29. "Before I came here, I had heard from other people that -- ooh, New York City, that's America, and everyone does well, and you live in a high-rise. But of course, I found that not to be the case."
PHOTO: NY TIMES
vertical limits
The vertical nature of New York City has long helped define its image, with families stacked on top of each other and penthouse apartments reaching the clouds. But for generations, tens of thousands of people have made do with another New York reality -- the basement apartment -- and they literally climb out of the ground to enter the city that is always on top of them.
There are building superintendents who have lived below ground for decades. There are young artists who are crammed into dark, illegal dormitories. There are secretaries and flight attendants, teachers and musicians, all trying to eke out a living, all trying to find the cheapest digs possible.
For some, the basement represents a stopgap measure, a housing option of last resort. For others, they offer a gamble to live in illegal, unsafe cubicles, sliced up by criminal landlords to maximize tenancy in only hundreds of square meters of space.
But for still others, the basement apartment has a quirky and quiet charm that can actually grow on a person, month after month, year after year. Either way, the very notion that people are willing to tolerate such subterranean conditions is, in the end, another testament to a distinctly New York brand of urban adaptability.
"I prefer the basement," said Maria Fernandez, Pura's 59-year-old mother, who has rheumatoid arthritis. She is a sentimental pack rat whose apartment is cluttered with rocking chairs, family photographs and homemade clothes. "It's more comfortable. It's my home."
In 2002, about 110,000 people lived in 45,000 basement units in New York City, 60 percent of them in Brooklyn and Queens, according to the city's Housing and Vacancy Survey. But the true numbers are higher, housing groups say, because of the often temporary nature of the apartments.
In the annals of New York, underground dwellings may be best associated with the kind of squalor documented most notably by the photographer Jacob Riis, and depicted most recently by Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.
The most atrocious conditions existed in the 1850s and 1860s, when the city's 20,000 or so cellars, crammed with new immigrants, became a breeding ground for cholera and other diseases, said Steve Long, vice president for collections and education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
illegal living
These days, basements are technically defined as places that are more than 50 percent above ground, and cellars as places that are less than 50 percent above ground. Most cellars are illegal. But many basements can be legally converted for residential use if they meet requirements related to windows, exits, ventilation and other measures.
In Queens, most of these units -- walk-downs, if you will -- can be found in single- or two-family houses that have illegally converted the recreation room. With rents that are as little as half of anything above ground, these apartments are especially attractive to poor immigrants with a high threshold for inconvenience, and vital to landlords who say they are pinched by rising taxes, insurance, mortgages and other costs.
The story of Richard Rye, a 43-year-old musician and aquarium designer in Forest Hills, Queens, is not unusual. He has lived alone for the last 10 years in a US$700-a-month basement that has three tiny windows, poor ventilation and a wet bar functioning as a kitchen.
But when neighbors complained about Rye's upstairs residents attracting huge crowds on the weekends, inspectors came, and they stumbled upon Rye's illegal apartment. So now, Rye is facing eviction in housing court, and is bitter about his twist of fate.
"I feel disenfranchised," he said.
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