Everyone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell. Gothamberg is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Together, these tales of unwanted sounds and smells, lobbies and bathrooms, laundry room gossip and unexpected favors form a single collective building, Gothamberg. The stories describe characters immersed in social dilemmas - guilt, responsibility, legalities and banality. Voyeuristic or chance encounters are concocted from the daily habits of the story makers. Their experiences form the elliptical threads of inhabitation, a mnemonic quality expressing something of the shared nature of dwelling.

This blog was set up to document the process by which Gothamberg was derived. These included meetings with a group of people, each meeting they would either write a story about Gothamberg, or analyze the stories and their relationship to eachother. The group also discussed the first interfaces .

Notes: Each member was asked to write a short story or a synopsis. These texts are then used as material to discuss the site:

Melinda Feingold may live in a basement apartment, but she talks like she’s one hundred percent ivory tower. It’s saturday night and the twenty-six year old, single, post-doc student is nothing short of obsessed. The object of her late night fascination is lint. Not belly-button variety lint, but those long colorful patches that get trapped every hour of every day at the laundry. Melinda’s thesis: If a society can be judged by the way it treats its prisoners, perhaps an individual or family can be better understood by the lint that gathers in its washer-dryers. The population base of her study are the lucky inhabitants of her nine story apartment building, the Gothamberg.

Despite the strangeness of her request, a remarkable 38% percent of the building’s adult residents agreed to give Melinda an interview and five lint samples. Having collected the raw data, she compares the oral histories with observations and analysis of the lint swatches in search of patterns of discrepancy and/or correlation. On this night she’s studying subject # 67, a 34 year old male who says he came to the United States because India was no place for a gay man to feel in any way free. He was always hiding. Hiding. Always Hiding.

Melinda writes in her log: Subject 63’s colorful clothes produce unusually prismatic, shimmering patches of lint. Fluffy beach towels, silk pillow cases and chennel scarves give these specimens a velvety, almost luxurious tactility. Microscopic observation of the lint specimens reveal a topography that resembles the Himalayas, the land where the subject is from and a land of incredible variegated peaks, plateaus and valleys, a land the subject has tried so hard to reject, as he was rejected in its midst not that long ago.

Every spring and summer, when the air shaft window was open, our apartment was invaded by the stench of urine. One weekend morning we noticed the cat litter overflowing from its bag on a broad ledge two floors down, across the airshaft. How he decided to start throwing condoms full of bleach-water at it, I don’t recall, but it became a frenzied activity. He stood buck-naked in front of our curtainless kitchen window hurling these bombs through the opening, trying to hit the target. This went on until the supply was gone.

Several weeks later we learned that the upstairs neighbor kept a dog indoors — all the time. The malodorous source was directly above us and had nothing to do with the cat litter across the way.

So Lee calls me from the corner and has an hour to kill before going uptown to meet a client. He comes over and the lights go out and the pesky UPS’s are screaming so I shut down the computers. The East Village substation had a fire a year ago, it must be the same nonsense. We chat for two hours into the late afternoon sun. Time for Lee to go, we open the door and the neighbor (X) tells us there is no power on the whole eastern seaboard, didn’t we know?? Hmm. Anyway Lee leaves for his meeting. Lee comes back half an hour later with two bottles of wine, his clients are on the 17th floor and there is no way he is going there.

So arms full with candles and wine and whatever is in the fridge we walk to the roof and set ourselves down. Half the building is already there. This is a New York Apartment building and I recognize many, we’ve been saying hello for a decade, I say hello again. And then, we all start talking to each other, we share wine and spirits and water and whatever anyone had in their fridge they feel nervous about. There is plenty of talking, there are dogs running around and children to introduce, jobs to define and building gossip to finally exhale. The East Village is dark, like a dark sea, with a few flickering lights here and there. It gets darker, later. The super comes up and wonders if we shouldn’t go, its 2am.

So slowly we descend back to our gloomy apartments, finding yet another enlightening use for those marvelous mobiles.

While I was in grad school in the early 80s, I was sharing an apartment with two roommates, although most of the time there also were other people temporarily staying at our place — siblings, boyfriends, friends who were “in-between�? apartments. One night around 2 AM, my boyfriend, one of my roommates, and I were having a nightcap in the living room when the door bell rang. We assumed it was our roommate or one of our temporary guests and I buzzed whoever-it-was in, opened the apartment door, and joined the others in the living room. After a while we heard steps approaching, the apartment door was closed and into the living room walked an obviously completely drunk stranger and sat down on our couch as if he belonged there. We all stared at him speechlessly — there was something puzzling and disarming about his sense of belonging and purpose. He had a bad haircut (the mullet so popular among European soccer players in the 80s) and the red in his bulging eyes testified to his condition. He just stared at the carpet. “Excuse me Sir,�? my boyfriend said, “where would you like to go?�? His politeness seemed to be remarkably out-of-sync with the situation. “Sir, where would you like to go?�? The intruder for the first time seemed to notice us and tried to look into our direction. “The party,�? he said, making a considerable effort to wrap his mouth around the two words. “In this house?�? my boyfriend asked. “We’re not having a party here.�? The intruder stared at us. “I think you need to leave,�? my roommate said flatly, and my boyfriend guided the intruder to the door and closed it behind him. We discussed whether it was irresponsible, cruel and heartless to just abandon him in the stairwell — considering his condition, he might not make it up or down the stairs. Driven by a growing sense of guilt, we finally looked for him outside but he was gone. After two decades, I once in a while still feel bad about our inability to assist a helpless fellow citizen that night.

I never met him eye to eye but I could smell him. The whole staircase could smell if he’d walked by. Him and I shared the toilet! I am not going to describe the toilet, I think you understand. But a good thing about him was that he never peed on the side, until one day. And then it suddenly stopped smelling on the staircase.

For some few days I was happy to not have the smell around. But when I stopped thinking he had suddenly decided to wash himself, I started to get worried. He had not touched his toilet paper and there were commercial brochures on the floor outside his door. It was obvious that he had not walked in or out of his door for at least a week.

Well I decided to investigate so I knocked on his door. A little scared to meet him eye to eye but more scared that he wouldn’t answer. No answer. For some reason I tried to open the door, to my surprise it was open. Many thoughts ran through my mind when I stuck in my nose to smell. After a few seconds I could smell him. The smell I knew so well. I started to shout: hello, hello, are you in there?

No answer. The radio was on and I saw a stuffed fox on a shelf. Some cushions were lying on the floor. Now I was sure he must be dead and I did not want to meet him like this so I went to call the police. Ten minutes later they knocked on my door. The smelly man was dead.

Now the smell is gone from the staircase and my toilet. I can’t say I miss him but it is a sad story. Now I have another neighbor and sometimes another man sneaks in and sleeps on the floor outside our doors. He is not smelly but he snores, that is another story.

In our chelsea apartment there was a tradition that people would leave objects they wanted to get rid of in the foyer. the weird thing was that people would leave stuff that was valuable–interesting books, a large unopened bottle of good scotch, and so on. One day we had tickets to a really expensive broadway show and at the very last minute couldn’t go, so we just left the tickets there - we checked and five minutes later they were gone.