Habitats: Private Lives in the Big City

Publishers Weekly

In this collection of snappy columns originally printed in the Real Estate section of the New York Times, Rosenblum (Boulevard of Dreams) gives an intimate look at 40 unique New York City spaces and the people who inhabit them. From the decrepit Bushwick mansion turned music collective, to the cozy, customized studio in Lennox Hill, to the family-heirloom rowhouse in Long Island City, to the classic eight on the Upper East Side, to affordable housing in the Bronx, to the custodial apartment in a Staten Island museum, Rosenblum’s elegantly compressed portraits offer charming “biography through real estate”; together, they represent a tiny sample of the infinite possibilities of life in New York City. The stories describe the metropolis as a palimpsest, one that maintains traces of its past despite inevitable change. The tales of luck or hard work that resulted in the securing of perfect tiny shoebox apartments, rehabbed brownstones, and converted industrial spaces provide a frisson of envy that keeps us reading; it’s the same urge that has us gaze up at lighted windows from the sidewalk below and wonder if someone else’s house, and thus, their very existence, is better than our own. Rosenblum’s profiles are a celebration of New York, and of what E.B. White called “the gift of privacy, the jewel of loneliness”—the difficulties and pleasures of finding a place and making it a home. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Literary Agency. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

Part urban sociology, part journalistic snooping, Constance Rosenblum’s remarkable stories reveal the true variety of the meanings of home. Closely observed and beautifully written.-Witold Rybczynski,author of The Biography of a Building

“Gracefully written and full of surprising insights, Rosenblum's book is a tribute to the capacity of New Yorkers to create entire worlds in the smallest of places: their apartments.”-Ariel Sabar,author of Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York

"A collection of recent newspaper columns on the homes of New York residents illuminates the ways in which the city has (and hasn’t) changed. The byline of Rosenblum (Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, 2009) may not be familiar even to regular readers of the New York Times, and the column she was the last to write no longer exists. Yet these 40 pieces have greater staying power than many collections of newspaper columns and show the ongoing fascination with the subject of how, where and why people live where they live. These expanded selections from the newspaper’s Real Estate section are less concerned with that market—prices and square footage, though such details occasionally highlight the pieces—than they are with the stories of the inhabitants. “I wanted to use the column to write stories,” writes Rosenblum. “I wanted to use the physical nature of a home as a wedge to delve into personal history, and to produce, as one reader nicely put it, biography through real estate.” The results, she continues, “offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the great cities of the world.” There are examples of shelter voyeurism that will leave readers in other parts of the country amazed at how much some are willing to pay to live in New York (often for so little space). But mainly, the interest in the home reflects the interesting people who inhabit it: the two clowns who must combine living quarters and rehearsal space (so many of these stories find residences serving double duty), the woman who rescues and nurses ailing kittens, the artists in their communal building, the stepdaughter of a famous author. Whether the living space in question is a fresh start or a link to the past, the thread of continuity throughout is that “the story of urban renewal has been written, rewritten, and rewritten yet again.”-Kirkus,

"[T]hese 40 pieces have greater staying power than many collections of newspaper columns and show the ongoing fascination with the subject of how, where and why people live where they live."-Kirkus,

"The tales of luck or hard work that resulted in the securing of perfect tiny shoebox apartments, rehabbed brownstones, and converted industrial spaces provide a frisson of envy that keeps us reading; it’s the same urge that has us gaze up at lighted windows from the sidewalk below and wonder if someone else’s house, and thus, their very existence, is better than our own. Rosenblum’s profiles are a celebration of New York, and of what E.B. White called 'the gift of privacy, the jewel of loneliness'—the difficulties and pleasures of finding a place and making it a home."-Publishers Weekly,

Kirkus Reviews

A collection of recent newspaper columns on the homes of New York residents illuminates the ways in which the city has (and hasn't) changed. The byline of Rosenblum (Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, 2009) may not be familiar even to regular readers of the New York Times, and the column she was the last to write no longer exists. Yet these 40 pieces have greater staying power than many collections of newspaper columns and show the ongoing fascination with the subject of how, where and why people live where they live. These expanded selections from the newspaper's Real Estate section are less concerned with that market--prices and square footage, though such details occasionally highlight the pieces--than they are with the stories of the inhabitants. "I wanted to use the column to write stories," writes Rosenblum. "I wanted to use the physical nature of a home as a wedge to delve into personal history, and to produce, as one reader nicely put it, biography through real estate." The results, she continues, "offer a mosaic of domestic life in one of the great cities of the world." There are examples of shelter voyeurism that will leave readers in other parts of the country amazed at how much some are willing to pay to live in New York (often for so little space). But mainly, the interest in the home reflects the interesting people who inhabit it: the two clowns who must combine living quarters and rehearsal space (so many of these stories find residences serving double duty), the woman who rescues and nurses ailing kittens, the artists in their communal building, the stepdaughter of a famous author. Whether the living space in question is a fresh start or a link to the past, the thread of continuity throughout is that "the story of urban renewal has been written, rewritten, and rewritten yet again." Some intriguing stories better read the way newspaper columns are published--one at a time--than as an extended series in one sitting.