The Little House on 10th Street

This tiny apartment has been my home for the last three years, and I will be moving soon. Clocking in at a mere 277 square feet, my home is truly little. But it has been a wonderful place to live and I will be heart broken to leave it behind. It is the first home I owned. It is the place I have lived the longest since I arrived in New York eight years ago. It is a space that is filled with my life.

Many of people couldn’t imagine living in my shoebox and wouldn’t care to dream of folding away the Murphy bed each morning, but I have always been happy here. My friends have always remarked that I, “made the most of the space,” shaking their heads at the bed in the wall and the half-size fridge, but no one has complained about the Murphy bed out loud — at least, not yet. This apartment was christened with a house warming of more than thirty people, each guest pressing elbows with the next: people spilling into the halls. I’ve had dinner parties of up to eight guests around my coffee table, and I even cooked a full lobster dinner for friends one February night. (Everything smelled like shellfish for a week afterwards despite multiple moppings.) Lobster wasn’t the end of culinary ambitions in a kitchen fit for munchkins, at one point during my unemployment, I ran a make-shift catering business out of my miniature kitchen, using the fire escape as extra fridge space.

Houseguests while not out of the question always did have to share my full-size bed (including my mother when she stayed). I had three people sleep the night only once, when I had my sister in my bed and our 6-foot tall friend Mandy curled up on my love seat sofa. My old roommate even lived here with me for a week while he sorted things out with his life.

I have had so many good days here and so many friends to enjoy them with. So much fit in to such a small space. But it was enough. It was an embarrassment of riches: This little house in the city that I could actually call my own.