Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
And yes, that’s to rent, not buy! Imagine that! Once upon a time, that apartment of mine was something like $190 per month! And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon fill you in on rent madness in twenty-first-century America. More than three bedrooms will cost you an average of $9,592 per month. As Bloomberg News reports, there’s never been a worse time to rent in the big city. After all, at the time, all of New York was rent-controlled and veterans stood a reasonable chance of getting a fine apartment they could actually afford.Īs in much of the country now, rent control in New York is largely a thing of the past as rents here have all too literally gone through the roof, with even studio apartments soaring toward $4,000 a month. (Lucky for them as, in the 1950s when I was a kid, they were eternally short on cash.) But no surprise then either. Today, fully renovated, it’s undoubtedly a wildly expensive coop or condo, but, in 1946, when my parents got that duplex apartment, just after my father left the Air Force in the wake of World War II, it was rent-controlled and cheap as hell. And yes, it sounds, I know, like quite a place, which it was (and remains). So many years later, I did just that and, when the present resident of 6D let me in, felt overwhelmed with memories as I saw the staircase to the second floor where my old bedroom was, the living room with the remarkable skylight under which my mother drew her caricatures, and even the little porch beyond it. Even to get to it, you had to step out of the elevator, walk down a short corridor out onto a covered but open catwalk (where you can still see the roofs of New York around you), and then down another corridor. Ours was, I must tell you, a remarkable apartment. I grew up in the apartment you now live in and was wondering whether you’d let me see it again.” To my amazement - yes, this is New York City! - she promptly buzzed me in and I found myself riding to the 6th floor on the barely updated gate elevator I used as a kid. I promptly said, “Hi, I’m Tom Engelhardt. The street door hadn’t changed a bit.Ī few months ago, on a whim, I looked for the buzzer to apartment 6D, pressed it, and a woman’s voice answered. I would invariably stop, stare, and feel an overwhelming desire to visit the place I hadn’t seen in perhaps 60 years. On my way home from the doctor’s office, I regularly pass the New York apartment building where I grew up.
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