Underground
Interesting article in the NY Times today on the basement apartment:
The vertical nature of New York City has long helped define its image, with families stacked on top of each other and penthouse apartments reaching the clouds. But for generations, tens of thousands of people have made do with another New York reality - the basement apartment - and they literally climb out of the ground to enter the city that is always on top of them.
There are building superintendents who have lived below ground for decades. There are young artists who are crammed into dark, illegal dormitories. There are secretaries and flight attendants, teachers and musicians, all trying to eke out a living, all trying to find the cheapest digs possible. For some, the basement represents a stopgap measure, a housing option of last resort. For others, they offer a gamble to live in illegal, unsafe cubicles, sliced up by criminal landlords to maximize tenancy in only hundreds of square feet of space. But for still others, the basement apartment has a quirky and quiet charm that can actually grow on a person, month after month, year after year. Either way, the very notion that people are willing to tolerate such subterranean conditions is, in the end, another testament to a distinctly New York brand of urban adaptability.
More on living underground:
Abandoned subway stations
Notes from Underground: The agony, and the ecstasy, of New York’s subway system