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 .

I live in a small apartment. Actually it’s only one room with a tiny kitchen. At the moment we are three people living here. People in my staircase don’t like that I always keep my front door open. But it is a way for me to get air. The apartment feels bigger that way. I like cooking and I guess people don’t like the smell of food in the staircase. I have another problem; my roommates don’t eat meat because of their religion. As I don’t want to step on any toes I am barbequing in the garden. Everyone else does that during the summer so there’s nothing strange about it. But yesterday the super stopped me and made a big deal out of it. He said that I was setting up fire too close to the house. Neighbors where afraid. It’s silly to be afraid of me, I am more afraid of them.

Sitting in the waiting room, again. The doctor wants me to come in every month now, for check up, he says. What’s the point, I know I have a bad heart, and he ain’t making me any better. As long as Medicaid pays for it… They always make me wait forever. The girl at the desk keeps telling me “The doctor will be with you soon, please take your seat.�? Pretty young thing but I can tell she doesn’t like me, doesn’t want me to approach. Reminds me of the girl next door, the one I share the toilet with, I sometimes watch her through the peephole in the door when she passes by in the hallway. She looks at my door funny.

The questions are always the same: “How have you been? Are you still experiencing shortness of breath? Are you taking your medications? Is there anyone, a family member, who could look after you?�? Told him a number of times, “The wife is dead, and my son and I, we’re not talking.�? But he keeps asking. “You need to take better care of yourself, pay more attention to your hygiene.�? None of his business, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like to take showers and smell all soapy. I like to smell like myself, reminds me of who I am and where I belong. I like it when I come home and can smell myself long before I reach my apartment door.

The people in that building, they have no idea what I’m doing for them. Spent my life delivering their mail. Now I pick up their garbage for them, the brochures and delivery menus they just let pile up in the hallway at the entrance. And how many times have I chased away the homeless guy who tries to sneak into the building to sleep there. I bet he’ll just move in once I’m not around any more, but that’s their problem.

It’s Monday early evening, sometime after 6pm, and both elevators are backed up at the Gothamberg. Four residents of the co-op are waiting in the lobby to finally get home after a day’s work. Only one is an actual co-op member, two are sublettors, and one is the Super’s sleepover girlfriend. Waiting affects everyone differently. Two of them are resigned to the wait, having waited already for the subway which was late, and waited all morning for lunch, and then for five o’clock. One is pacing back and forth, tapping his fingers against his pants like a nervous drummer, and the other has forgotten that he’s waiting for the elevator and is lost in thought, composing a story in his head for some crazy interactive art project. There are five people now, waiting. Six. No one knows any one else’s name. One person recognizes everyone by sight. Another one recognizes four people. Two recognize three people. One recognizes two people. And the one lost in thought isn’t recognizing any one at the moment. If he were to look beyond the world inside his head, then every one would at least recognize one person in common - the Super’s girlfriend. It’s understood that the Super bears some responsibility for the elevators being messed up like they’ve been since Sunday afternoon. Two or three awkward glances have already been directed towards the girlfriend since the beginning of this story, even though she’s not her boyfriend’s keeper. There are eight people now waiting for the elevator, only now, five people know someone’s name - Melinda, the graduate student working on the research project about Lint. Of the five, two people think she’s crazy but nice, one thinks she’s a geek and a dyke, but nice, one thinks she might really be FBI or is it Homeland Security these days, and one would like to get a couple glasses of wine into her, pull those chopsticks out of her hair, and see what she’s like in bed. If the guy lost in thought was noticing anything other than the story he’s composing in his head, he’d recognize her too, only he wouldn’t remember her name, though he does know the guy named Shaun who used to be a chef but is DJing now at a club downtown. They talked about the club in the elevator one time last month. A young woman enters the scene talking loudly on her cell phone, saying, “Yeah, that’s what I told her — Harvey’s an idiot! But she’s like, no, the presentation’s on THURSDAY and Harvey will definitely show up with the whole thing done ……….. Exactly! That’s what I said to her. But she’s like… hello?, hello!, Marla, can you hear me? Marla? Shit!�? She closes her phone, sees there’s nine people waiting for the elevator, reaches into her bag and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Back in the lobby by the elevator, there’s some talk about the weather, the elevator, the game last night, and that it’s only Monday. There’s little eye contact, and lots of attention to numbers moving very slowly (the elevator on the left), or not at all (the elevator on the right, stuck at 12). There’s also much attention to shoes. Of the nine people, oh, ten people waiting for the elevator in the lobby, three are wearing sneakers, two are wearing boots, two have shoes with velcro, one medium heals, one pair of sandals, and one Chinese slippers. Shaun sneezes loudly into his hands. Two people say, “Bless you.�? One says, “God bless you,�? even though she’s an atheist. The elevator on the left (which officially is a freight elevator) appears to be on 2 and heading towards the ground floor. Finally, the elevator door opens, and there’s no one inside except for the Labrador Retriever that lives on 7. The dog looks up at the crowd, grins, then runs into the lobby and out the front door of the Gothamberg onto the sidewalk.

To have a shower I have to walk out of my apartment, down the staircase and walk cross the garden and down to the basement where the shared shower room is located. During my walk I feel changes in the weather; early morning sunshine, wind, rain or snow. Discover the first spring flowers or when the leaves start to fall in the autumn. Sometimes I meet the garbage man or if I am late the postman. Often I meet some of my neighbors on their way to work or somewhere else.

Sometimes I have to wait for my turn in the shower. That’s ok. There is a bench to sit on. When I am alone waiting I always wonder who is in there and it has become a sport to try to figure out who it is.

One morning there is a women waiting already. We instantly start talking. She is excited about something and wants to tell me immediately. It happens that the she is into lint and she collects it from people’s laundry. She opens her bag and shows me something that looks like a sausage of gray dust. Well I have heard of people collecting many things, but lint. We can both hear that the person in the shower is still not ready so I tell her that my lint looks like what she has in her bag, gray and dull as I use mostly black clothes. But it is what’s behind the lint that is interesting she tells me. And that may be dull or awful or totally amazing. The man behind this lint is…

Our conversation is interrupted when the bathroom door opens and to my surprise the sleeping man walks out. I guess next time I do my laundry and rinse out the lint I will try to guess who it came from.

Dear Alex,
Ira’s aunt entertains, even in her absence. Pearl’s annotated appliance
manuals are the best read this side of a cereal box, and her shoe
collection keeps me especially busy on those days when I just can’t
face the tramp in the hall. Who knew I’d trade in visual for olfactory
excess? Morning laundry at Melinda’s Lint Lab (why didn’t Ira mention
this???) is THE place to be where your ears drink in what your eyes
can’t take.

Pour a beer ON Chris!

’til soon,
Mariusz

Sitting every day looking out at the courtyard of Gothamberg, behind my screens. Well I don’t want to meet those bums do I? At first it was sexual, you see a nice girl all tricked out and you fantasize, you know. Then I got to thinking, these fantasies, it’s in their heads too! Men don’t have that so much. The most boring are the teen girls, they all look the same, like they belong to some clan or something, cute though. Ha, teen boys can be amazing costumers, you haven’t a clue what they are, military peacenik rappers! And then the bums, you can daydream about their past and such. Its ok. There’s this old guy, bent double, hobbles along, he wears a paper bag as a cap, like he’s in a charade, like he used to be a real worker.

Its dull when its couples, or groups, or the gossipers, the way they act kills the act. It’s only when they walk alone, then they wear their souls on their cloths. Kids too, too obvious, and the old ladies, can barely tell the difference between them. I think its death, the nearer you are to death, that kills your soul, like, you’re getting ready for the big never, what’s the point of an act?

It’s the women, between old and young, they are the best. They must have training or something. This girl who tried to get my lint, stupid! Each day, first she is a 50’s picnic, the next all in black and dark makeup like a matron, then a teenager in a miniskirt. Lint! As if you can find out anything about people with lint! You got to track them, watch them each day, notice how they move, then, boy, you get inside their minds! You do.

On the first warm day of the year, The Sleeping Man entered Gothamberg through the back door by the dumpsters on the East Wing. The storage room brought him to an elevator.

Late last night, The Sleeping Man decided to sleep outside. He found a short strip of lawn shielded by a wall of shrubbery; it was too hot in the staircase.

It had been a long winter and the staircase smells awful, he thought, facing the elevator door. Wide awake by this point, The Sleeping Man pushed the up arrow (his only choice). The door immediately opened, as the elevator rested on the basement floor from the cleaning personnel’s last use (each morning at 5 am, the trash is collected and tossed out – surely they were guilty for leaving the exit propped open). With a jerk, the elevator began its trip to the top floor. The Sleeping Man decided to watch the sun rise from the end of the hallway before returning to his belongings in the staircase many flights below.

He probably thinks I don’t care because I don’t know anything else but I do remember playing with friends outside. I remember all the smells, of trees, and grass, and garbage cans, lots of smells here, too, but it’s different. It mostly smells of me, which I don’t mind, I like it, though it gets a bit boring at times. And then there’s the smell from downstairs, human, and intense. It changed a few days ago, it used to be musky and stale, now it’s more like dead rat. I often go to the window when he’s gone to get a whiff of whatever is out there, no trees, just another wall with lots of stairs going down. Sometimes there are these rubber sausages flying across the shaft below me and hitting some bags on the ledge on the other side. The bags sometimes smell like cat, and the rubber sausages splash some liquid onto them. I wish I could catch them, I don’t like the smell of the liquid, though, it’s sharp and unnatural, much worse than the cat smell.

What I miss most is running around, I wish I had some space to run. When he’s gone I sometimes race around, left corner, jump on the chair, jump on the couch, right corner. I know I’m not supposed to do it and he wouldn’t like it. I don’t know why he never takes me with him, perhaps he’s afraid something might happen to me outside. Or perhaps he just has to show he’s the master but I know that anyway. I do love him, he feeds me and lets me stay with him but I do get sick of sitting here and waiting when he’s gone. Sometimes I’m begging to come with but he doesn’t understand me, he doesn’t react. It makes me angry. I’ve been thinking about going for his legs and just squeezing by when he opens the door. Sometimes, I think about killing him. He’s bigger and he’s the leader but I know I could, that makes me feel better.

One morning I could not open my door. There was a sleeping man on the other side. First I got angry, because he was in my way. But later on I felt a little embarrassed that I had shouted at him to move. I had been morning myself in my nice bed, I had even watched the news and this guy had to wake up with a door slammed right on to his back.

After that morning he started to come back regularly. I guess he liked our staircase. My neighbor and I started to get used to having him there and when he did not show up we wondered if everything was okay. But he always came back.

The sad thing was of course that he was homeless; he did not have a place that was really his place. But it was not that pleasant for us either. The snoring was okay but he also smoked and sometimes he left the staircase in a mess. As the house was old and had mainly wood construction, it was a little bit scary to have a sleepy man smoking in the staircase. Instead of throwing him out, we decided to install fire alarms in the staircase. Some weeks later I found out that somebody had removed the battery from all of them… I guess he did not like the noise when he was smoking the last cigarette of the day.

At first Melinda was surprised that the homeless man who sleeps in the hallway on the third floor volunteered for her Phenomenology of Lint project. Then she realized it was a way for him to get his clothes cleaned. Not authorized to use the laundry room himself, Melinda volunteered to wash and dry the man’s clothes. She also slipped him some cash before they sat down in her apartment to do the oral history. Sitting across from her, now in clean clothes and freshly washed hair (she let him use her shower), Melinda saw the man for the first time. He wasn’t just the homeless man who sneaks into the building after hours most nights when its cold and sneaks out before most people leave for work in the morning, he was actually a rather interesting looking man with olive colored eyes, a fine long nose and a sweet laugh that bubbled up out of nowhere and made her small, sparsely furnished apartment feel warm and not so claustrophobic. Norman had been a professional man; he’s got three kids out in the world somewhere and an ex-wife who’s remarried; and his twin brother died not too long ago that was the hardest loss of all. It only took one or two follow-up questions before it came out that Norman sleeps outside the apartment that the smelly man used to live in because the smelly man whose name was Leonard, was his twin brother.

After Norman said good bye and thanked her for everything especially the good conversation, and she thanked Norman for his generosity in sharing his story and his lint, Melinda closed the door and began to wonder about all the stories of her students who she never has the time to really get to know, and the stories of the janitors in the Social Science building at the university, and the shopkeepers at the stores she frequents, and the token booth workers and the people who work at the Duane Reade and all the other homeless people she steps over or steers clear of going to and from the Gothamberg every day.

I’ve been here a week now and staying with Shaun, who is not a chef anymore, instead he’s a DJ at a place called the Mud Club, playing his 6 punk singles over and over. His apartment’s got an amazing view, it looks at the back of the Chelsea Hotel. Every window is like a TV set! One window, they’re screwing, in another they’re shooting up (don’t show this to..). One window, someone throws condoms full of piss at a fire escape, luckily not this one, but yesterday I got a whiff! Another wacky window has a heap on the floor and a stuffed fox on a shelf looking at us. Well, today an ambulance crew came and took the lump on the floor away, sad.

Shaun told me that if you slice a cabbage in half, that’s exactly the sound a head makes when it hits the concrete below. Tomorrow I move in to Ira’s Aunt, so may not experience that one!

Have a beer with Chris on me, when is he coming?
Soon,
Mariusz

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.