Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  Quadrant affiliation and construction of social identity

  Many islanders express trepidation and experience anxiety and distress when they travel from one quadrant of their small island to another, considering such transitions inconvenient, time-consuming, difficult, and even unlucky. Superstitiously, some organize their lives and appointments (with their medical, financial, and child-care shamans) so that they only rarely have to leave their immediate area. Quadrant identity also informs practices such as dress and adornment, child rearing practices, and voluntary seasonal migration patterns (western zone inhabitants are more like to seek out mountain ranges in summer, while residents of the eastern zone, particularly the Upper Right zone, have a marked preference for one specific, elite ocean destination. There are also zone-specific warm-weather destinations in winter).

  There is a broad belief on the entire island that two zones are “best” for child rearing and family life. These two zones, Up Right and Up Left, flank the massive, fetishized, and aptly named “Big Field,” proximity to which is highly desirable. This may stem from the islanders’ collective history and prehistory: as savannah dwellers who took to trees for safety and eventually, as propertied agrarians who needed to be on the lookout for hostile intruders, they may value and feel most comfortable when viewing a cleared expanse from a “safe” height. Thus, a dwelling with a view of Big Field is desirable and costly, and confers and reinforces high social status. Big Field is also believed to be ideal for children, who play there under the supervision of teachers, parents, and mostly, alloparents. No industry is allowed in Big Field; there is minimal commerce. It is a sacred zone, and believed to be a powerful health tonic: gazing at Big Field and walking in it are said to have restive and fortifying effects. Those who live closest to Big Field in the Up Right (or Upper East Side) quadrant are the richest on the island, with some of the most distinctive, entrenched, and bizarre-seeming tribal practices, rituals, and beliefs. These are the subject of our study.

  WE HAD decided to move uptown in search of a “better childhood” for our son. Uptown has Central Park, after all, an oasis of sorts wedged between the Upper East and Upper West Sides, and lots of good public and private schools. At the time it also had the things it was so hard to find downtown—kid-friendly restaurants, clothing stores for kids, and places to take your kid for a haircut where he could watch a Wiggles video while sitting in a chair shaped like a fire engine. We wanted some respite from the constant reminders of 9/11, which still hung over downtown nearly a year later in so many ways—poor indoor air quality, unremitting anxiety, and a palpable sadness. We wanted access to playgrounds and a family-focused neighborhood in an excellent public school district. And we wanted to be near my husband’s parents, as well as his brother and his family, a web of loving cousins and grown-ups who lent a hand and propped us up when we were sleep deprived and dealing with teething or temper tantrums. With our commitment to staying in Manhattan, this meant one thing: the Upper East Side.

  Whenever I mentioned to our downtown friends that we were moving uptown, they looked at me as if I were excitedly divulging plans to join a cult. “At least a downtown trophy wife has glasses, a PhD, and her own nonprofit,” a girlfriend’s husband observed as we discussed it over drinks one night. It went without saying that we all knew an Upper East Side trophy wife had blond hair and breast augmentation. And stayed home with the kids. And the staff. Right? I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t ventured above West Twenty-Third Street for years, except to visit my in-laws and go on the occasional museum excursion. Then I could not fail to notice the lacquered, polished looks of the people and the stores and every single surface and outfit and bit of brass. But the mommies had never particularly caught my eye. After all, I had never really known any Upper East Side mommies. How would that be? How would they be? “Be sure to budget the money for a fur coat,” my girlfriend smirked. I laughed, and my husband choked on a cashew. There was no shortage of stereotypes about uptown versus downtown, and I was eager to see for myself how true or false they were.

  First, though, I had to find us a place. And I do mean I, because my husband promptly delegated the apartment-hunting project to me. This was ostensibly logical since, as the mother of a very young child, I had rearranged my work schedule as a writer to be “flexible” and “freelance”—I could put it on hold for days or weeks at a time. We also had a part-time nanny who could watch my son while I searched. But there was a deeper cultural logic at work, too: in Manhattan, women are in charge of finding a place for the family to live. They might also pay for it, or for half of it. But in heterosexual marriages, regardless of who does what, it’s usually the woman who finds the apartment. I had puzzled over this plenty, and in the end had chalked it up to agriculture. While our hunter-gatherer ancestors had roamed and ranged with the food supply, setting up and breaking down camp with little attachment to place or possessions, the transition to a crop-based economy changed everything. With it came the notion of property—“These fields are mine!”—and increased fertility for women, who were now relatively sedentary, and so ovulated more frequently. Before you could say “millet,” women were transformed from gatherers with all the clout, influence, and freedom that came with supplying their bands with nearly all their daily calories, into keepers of the hearth and home with little say beyond what time the dinner they had spent the day making would be served, and little prestige other than as baby vessels. I didn’t mind that I was the one taking care of the baby and tending to our home and finding us a new one. It made sense, given that my husband’s career was more lucrative than mine, and given my intense desire to be with our little son. But there were days when I wondered whether what my girlfriend and her husband had said over drinks was true: that, compared to downtown, Upper East Side gender politics were even more markedly agriculturalist Bantu than freewheeling, downtown-ish, hunter-gatherer !Kung-San.

  Meanwhile, I suspected that it couldn’t be too hard to sell our town house and settle on an apartment uptown, even for someone as clueless as me. After all, in New York City, town houses are a status symbol of the first and highest order. For Manhattanites, having your own stand-alone dwelling, with no one above or below you, is an unusual, highly prized, and highly desirable way to live. It is supposed to confer privacy, which we prize in the West, and a certain spatial grandeur in a town where you pay by the square foot. And so, in spite of our place being relatively modest—the kitchen was small, and there was no elevator—prospective buyers were lining up to see it. I was forever making it look pristine and then rushing out the door so a broker and client could “view” it.

  I used this time in exile to call brokers from a nearby café. Most were women. They would keep me on the phone for a while, somehow peppering me with questions—my husband’s job, my job, where I was from, where I went to school, even our net worth—rather than the other way around.

  Manahttanites also do a version of this at parties and other gatherings, with all the subtlety of census workers, in order to peg who you are. The first time it happened to me, I was bewildered. “Oh, they did Jewish Geography with you,” my Jewish husband observed. “They wanted to know where you stood.” As far as I could see, though, the game knew no religion. In a huge town, knowing whether and how you might be connected to someone, whether they know someone you know or want to know—the Chinese call it being guanxi, a system of connectedness in a country of billions—makes a certain amount of sense. Even if it seems a little (or a lot) mercenary.

  After the inquest, the brokers would inevitably tell me they didn’t have the specific listing I was asking about, but they had some other things to show me. In fact, it seemed that none of the beautiful apartments I saw online or in print advertisements actually existed—phone calls revealed that they were “already sold” or “in contract” or were listed as available because “the website needs to be updated.” When I told my husband about this, he pronounced it a typical bait-and-switch and sugge
sted we needed a “buyer’s broker” of our own. “Sort of like a native informant? Or a guide?” I wondered excitedly, and my husband affirmed that she would be just that. Like the loyal trackers who helped Dian Fossey find her gorillas day after day, and the Inuit people of Baffin Island who took it upon themselves to explain their ways to Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology, when he alit among them, I needed an insider to advise and enlighten me.

  My husband gave me the number of a woman who had helped him sell his small Upper East Side studio years before—and the next day I gave her a ring, introduced myself, and told her I’d like to see some apartments. I thought that, having someone on my side, it would all be easy. I was so naïve. I had merely opened the door. Now the real work began.

  Inga had a glamorous accent—my husband told me she was Danish, and a former model—and was brisk and businesslike. “First of all, you have someone selling your townhouse, right? Because I don’t usually work downtown.” She explained that uptown and downtown real estate were vastly different worlds. And that the Upper West Side wasn’t her strongest suit; she was primarily an Upper East Side broker.

  “Okay, well, yes, we want to live on the East Side.” I stumbled a little here, taking in the apparently immense, insuperable difference between the neighborhoods as far as brokerage practices were concerned. “And,” I found my footing now, “we want a place in the good public school district.” There was a long pause. Then came the curt pronouncement: “That’s not going to be easy.” I had disappointed her somehow, with my requirements, and I found myself suddenly crestfallen and hopeless. This was not going to be easy.

  “But”—Inga spoke in a Scandinavian singsong I already found endearing, “we’re going to try. I have things to show you.” Here I brightened and felt a rush of optimism and relief. She had things to show me! Yes, I had a guide! Inga wouldn’t just help me find a place to live, I had a feeling as I hung up the phone. She would also teach me the grammar of the Upper East Side. Every anthropologist needs at least one reliable, insightful native informant who is willing to show the way, translate the language, explain the customs, and spill his or her culture’s dirty secrets and tacit social codes. In short, informants help you find a way in. And I was pretty sure I had found mine.

  “Is your boss coming today?” the well-dressed woman with an Hermès scarf tied around her neck asked me doubtfully. Her shiny, Botox-frozen brow telegraphing a faint shadow of what must have been confusion as I showed up in an ornate lobby on Park Avenue before Inga for our first day of apartment hunting.

  “Um . . . I don’t . . . have a boss. . . .” I managed, extending my hand and introducing myself. She had obviously taken me for Inga’s client’s assistant, based on my casual “nerdy hipster” Marc Jacob outfit, all the rage downtown. Here was my first clue that women without jobs in my town had personal assistants to scout apartments for them. And that I needed a new apartment-hunting uniform. Inga showed up just then, a tall, razor-thin, beautiful brunette in an exquisite and stylish off-white suit, and I discerned that the other broker admired her, which put me suddenly at ease about everything—what I was wearing, our move, and the entire process of finding a place. It was like magic.

  I wasn’t so far off the mark. The brokerage business—apartment buying and selling—is an ecological niche by, for, and about women in Manhattan. This is especially true on the Upper East Side. Brokerage’s language is clothing. The seller’s broker dresses to channel the respect she wants to garner for her seller; the buyer’s broker dresses to impress and intimidate the seller’s broker, and to project an image on behalf of her prospective buyer, who in turn dresses to convey her seriousness to both brokers (if she is extremely rich, she can dress down, thus conveying that she knows that they know that she doesn’t need to play this game; they are all dressing up for her). It all culminates in a kind of dress-off in lobby after lobby, showing after showing, day after day. Imagine Sergio Leone music and women bedecked in Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana at dawn.

  Bags seemed especially important—many of the brokers I saw that first day, when we “viewed” four or five apartments, had purses by Chanel, quilted and lustrous, with chains and heavy flaps and interlocking Cs. Or rectangular calf affairs with open tops and handles, the Cs just under them, easy and elegant. “If we’re going to find an apartment, I need a new bag,” I half-joked to my husband after I arrived home in the early evening that first day. I was shot from the walking (had I been a different kind of client, one more in tune with the practices of the Upper East Side, I would have arranged a driver for me and Inga) and also the unexpected psychological gymnastics, the emotional exertion, of looking at the apartments and interacting with the brokers and contorting my standards and desires to whatever each place presented, wondering whether it could work.

  Every morning for the next several weeks, I would don my Upper East Side apartment-hunting uniform: demure sheath dress, Agnès B. or French Sole flats, and the most ladylike bag I owned—no slouchy satchel would do for my errand. The final touch was a sleek (I hoped) ponytail. After all, I was headed up to the Land of the Sleek. Thus attired, I would hail a cab and, after what was usually a half hour’s ride north and east, meet Inga in a given lobby of a given prewar building, almost always west of Lexington Avenue. Our search area was dictated by the boundaries of the excellent public school district, so, basically, we were looking in the most expensive neighborhood in all of Manhattan. In order to eventually send our kid to school there for free. The irony of this was not lost on me, my husband, or Inga, who quickly became the third person in our marriage. “We could really see a lot more things if you were flexible about the school district,” she suggested diplomatically to me once we had gotten to know each other. “But I know what you and your husband want,” she added quickly when I shot her a look. “So we’ll keep going in the district.”

  It seemed to take forever to find an apartment. After all, this was during the boom, and the real estate market was tight. Sellers were asking for sky-high prices; buyers were at their mercy. The spot we wanted to be in, Inga intimated over and over, was the toughest nut in the city to crack. We looked and looked and looked.

  We looked at “classic sixes” and “classic sevens” and “classic eights” in “nice buildings” and “good buildings” and even “white glove buildings,” where the staff literally wear white gloves. All the buildings had doormen to greet you and many had attended elevators, meaning someone to push the button for you. But they were all different from a “great building,” which might be on the same block and look exactly the same from the outside, yet demand a massive down payment, refuse mortgages, and require the prospective buyer to prove she had three or five or even ten times the apartment’s value in liquid assets. Great buildings can ask for these things, and also make certain exceptions for certain people if they feel like it, Inga explained early on, because there are essentially private clubs, run by boards of residents who make and enforce rules as they see fit. These are the types of buildings that routinely refuse the applications of wealthy celebrities, buildings that sent Richard Nixon and Madonna alike down the path of town house living, no doubt disgusted and wounded by their rejection. Great buildings are inhabited by titans of industry and their socialite wives and are known by their addresses: 740 Park. 927 Fifth. 834 Fifth. 1040 Fifth. Others have names: The Beresford. The San Remo. The Dakota. River House. They are made of limestone and designed by architects of note, such as Rosario Candela and Emery Roth. These buildings were not for us but neither, apparently, were the “family” buildings, which sounded perfect to me. “No,” Inga explained patiently when I asked, “that doesn’t mean they have a playroom. It means that they allow ninety percent financing. We can do better.” Just as Inga’s outfits—Jil Sander, Piazza Sempione, Prada, she told me when I asked—were a reflection of my status, so the building I wound up in would be a reflection of hers. She wanted the best for us—because she had skin in thi
s game, too.

  I wasn’t fussy about these distinctions—we just needed a good enough place in the right school district. But to my surprise and eventual frustration, being flexible didn’t make finding a place or the process of looking any easier. There just wasn’t a lot of “inventory,” brokers told us over and over. And it was overwhelmingly, unexpectedly strange to enter people’s lives and spaces in such an intimate way—to see their things and their habits, or, for that matter, to see the absence of any traces of people in a perfectly pristine place. I noticed the particular style of decoration on the Upper East Side. There was lots of toile. And yellow. And blue. Again and again. It was hard to imagine what I would do differently, how our furniture would fit here, how we would live in every one of these apartments, my husband and son and I. Which corner would be best for the toddler bed? If we decided to have another child, where would he or she go? Could I work from home in this apartment? And so on.

  If the apartment passed muster initially—in the right school district, with the right number of bathrooms and some nice light and views—then the next day my husband, like all husbands, would come have a look, and the women (my broker and I, the seller’s broker, perhaps the seller, too) would be infused with another kind of energy, an anxious attention, an eagerness to please. I felt like Vanna White, ridiculous, as the other women and I “demonstrated” the apartment, opening doors and showing linen closets. It was not like me to simper and serve, but here I was doing it, as if we were all in a play and knew our roles. In further adherence to this apartment-hunting script, my husband would sniff around, the brokers hanging on his every word and gesture, looking for the subtlest clues of his dis/pleasure. He tended to be polite but by no means overly friendly in these situations. He gave nothing away in front of the brokers, and after a quick circle of the premises, would soon head back to the Important World of Men’s Work. Then he would call me and tell me what he thought.