What was it that Robert Frost said about good neighbors? Oh, yeah.
"Good fences make good neighbors."
Ezra thinks that about 12 inches of soundproof insulation makes good neighbors. Particularly if you live in what passes for an apartment or rented room in Ithaca. This generally tends to be a reconverted one or two family house subdivided into 6 to 8 separate living units. But it could just as well be a former garage, chicken coop or onetime outhouse. The walls and floorboards will probably be so thin that the sound of a kitten playing upstairs will seem more like a baby rhinoceros. The Ithaca housing market is a case study in greed, human (or inhumane) ingenuity and misery.
In Ithaca. if you can't afford to own or rent your own home, you are likely to be squeezed into close quarters with strangers whose life style is the exact opposite of yours. You will find yourself living next to or below students whose idea of bedtime is 4 am in the morning
and whose idea of a quiet evening is having 15 guests over who happen to bring over their drumsets and a couple of electric guitars. Or you will discover one night at 2 or 3 am that you live below the people who do the closing shift for the Nines or Castaways and that is just about the time they like to start unwinding with a few sixpacks, a video rental and a nice home cooked meal prepared about 6 feet from where your head is resting on the pillow.
Who hasn't lived in an apartment and been woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of bedsprings reverberating to the symphony of passion and animal lust coming from someone else's bedroom? It's hard to fall back asleep again listening to the sounds of sex even if you try to count backwards from 10,000 or think about the most boring aspect of your job. Your predicament is likely to be exacerbated if your neighbors happen to be going through the full hormonal rampage associated with adolescence. (Remember now that studies have shown that the onset of puberty is hastened by fast food consumption. Maybe the same diet helps to prolong it?)
The transience of many Ithacans makes it difficult predict who your neighbors are going to be. You may move into an apartment in July, and think you've lucked out only to find in late August that you're going to be living under the Cornell hockey team. The tell-tale signs are when the Hertz rental truck pulls up to the driveway and they start unloading the barbells, the Nautilus equipment, the
6 foot high fur covered speakers, the 12 piece drum set and synthesizers. That's when you dig out your copy of the lease and start reading the fine print clauses.
This is probably a good time to bring up the issue of Ithaca landlords. They tend to suck, as a rule.
The real estate market drives the Ithaca economy. Even Ezra Cornell, my namesake, dabbled in real estate back in the 1840's, You can lay the whole student housing nightmare on his doorstep. Ithaca is an owner's market. They have a captive audience and they know it. The market is so lucrative than I've met kids, graduates from Cornell, who, instead of moving elsehwere to pursue their chosen professions, settle down in ithaca and start snapping up foreclosures. 24 year old landlords. Absentee landlords. Billionaire
real estate moguls. 24 year old absentee billionaire real estate moguls. Living in Florence, Italy and operating 2,000 rentals in Ithaca.
They're all the same when it comes to fixing a leak under the sink. Yeah, somebody will be over Monday. They don't tell you that it might be any Monday sometime in the year 2006. Waiting for your landlord to do repairs is like waiting for the Millennium. You're likely to be disappointed one way or the other The skies won't open, legions of angels won't show up and your pipe won't get fixed.
Ezra has a dream. He wants to buy the Masonic Temple on the corner of Cayuga and Seneca and fix it up as a townhouse. It looks like a nice, solid building - more like a bunker actually - with excellent soundproofing, solid wood floors, high ceilings. And you can't beat the location. You can close the Chanticleer, still buy a six pack at A Plus and stumble home with little likelihood of getting mugged, DWI'd or losing your way Then you're always close to all that prime retail on the Commons. So what if you have to pay double for a tube of toothpaste at a convenience store? If you can afford the Masonic Temple, you can afford to pay more for toothpaste. And it's such a cool looking building!. Chances are you can throw parties that won't disturb a soul, won't bring the police and inasmuch as you're enclosed in a foot of concrete, would be likely to survive a terrorist attack. Sure you could duct tape the windows. Retreat to the inner sanctum and practice your Scottish rites. Maybe I'll ask Jason Fane or whatever his name is about the asking price.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 4:05 AM
