Manhattan real estate heads already know that Joyce Cohen's "The Hunt" column in the New York Times is one of the more enjoyable Manhattan real estate reads out there. But as entertaining as it is to read Cohen's interviews with people seeking (and finding) rental apartments in Manhattan, there's always the matter of authorial distance. That is -- and we're not going to get too lit-crit on you, both because it's been a long time since college and because this is the blog on a website about luxury rental apartments in Manhattan -- the question of where and how Cohen herself lives. Does it color her perspective? Bias her discussion of neighborhoods? Are her ceilings higher than yours?
Thanks to a recent profile in the New York Observer, which is kinda-sorta knocking off "The Hunt" with a less-proletarian version called "How Do You Live?" we now know how Cohen lives. Namely, the New York Times veteran lives in a rental apartment on the Upper West Side, and yes, her ceilings are higher than yours.
The whole piece is short and fun to read, but here's our favorite quote, which is pretty perfectly Joyce Cohen, in response to how she found her Upper West Side rental. "I found it 15 years ago through an agent, Bobbi at Brusco," Cohen said. "The fee was 15 percent of a year's rent. I don't think I knew then that broker fees were negotiable." So young! So innocent!
It's not hard news, obviously, but we're looking forward to more on this. Way to be Observer and of course, of course, way to be Joyce Cohen.
