I’ll admit I was in a bad mood. Boy issues, maybe, or something at work? I don’t remember. But I do remember that, in the middle of whatever it was, I had to take my trash out. So I yanked the Hefty bag out of my garbage can, only to realize it was leaking. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I screamed into the world’s tiniest abyss: my 400-square-foot West Village studio.

That Hefty bag was stuffed into another Hefty bag, which I then lugged down three flights of dimly lit stairs as trash juice seeped deeper into my sweatpants. I threw open the door, ready to chuck my double-Hefty monstrosity into the dumpster below.

In so doing, I nearly hit four 20-something girls taking photos on my stoop.

“Sorry, excuse me,” I said, pushing past them.

They shuffled to the side.

I dumped my bags and turned to head back up. They’d already re-assumed their photo-taking positions.

“I need you guys to move again,” I said, irritated. They shuffled back over as I stomped up the stairs.

Then, when I’d reached my door, I turned back around. “You can’t take up someone’s whole stoop,” I hissed. “People live here.” Then I slammed it.

My older neighbor Beverly, who sometimes taught guitar lessons out of her apartment, peeked out into the hallway. “I think we should put up a sign,” she said.

You’ve likely seen my block before, even if you’ve never been to the West Village. It’s the one supercut in all the TikToks—the “Days in the Life”s, the “Come with Me”s—and the one in the backdrop of the Instagram of your favorite high-profile creator. And I get it: Its charm is why I wanted to live there in the first place.

I moved to the West Village during the pandemic. Things aligned perfectly: rents in the neighborhood had plummeted just as I got a raise at work. When my lease on my old apartment in Yorkville ended, I signed a new one in a historic 19th-century brownstone that was once a boarding house for sailors. They paid pennies for their rooms. Two centuries later, I paid thousands.

The price wasn’t reflective of the space (dark, cramped, and, as I’d later find out, plagued by a slight mouse problem), but the block itself: a tree-lined one with townhouses and critically acclaimed restaurants that spilled out onto the sidewalks. It felt like something from a movie—because it actually was. Film crews often shot there, and one building on my street had famously stood in as Rachel and Monica’s in Friends.