Besides my resume, the two most important documents I brought to New York in “The World’s Heaviest Briefcase” are seen above, still intact 30 years later.
I must have saved the AAA 1983 Citibook©, New York Edition, from my 1984 Drama Club trip to the Big Apple.
Not a lot to it besides dry descriptions of the usual attractions and how to get around town. There’s a map of Midtown where I starred the locations for Penn Station and the Sloane House YMCA two blocks from it, a nearby personnel agency, and the Citicorp building where I temped for a week.
Its opening paragraph hasn’t aged well:
“New York City is the business, entertainment and publishing capital of the country. The Nation’s largest city, it is teeming, busy and always rushing. It is a magnet that draws native Americans to its manmade canyons and the city most foreigners have in mind when they think of America.”
Now the “A Temporary Place to Live” directory of hotels and residences was a goldmine. Despite its pre-Internet, typewritten format, it offered a wealth of choices that only true New Yorkers would have known about then.
I had zeroed in on what looked like my best option as a non-student in Midtown: The Sloane House YMCA, 356 West 34th Street, Manhattan. The daily rates in 1989 were:
Single $25.75
Single with T.V. $36.75
Single with private bath and T.V. $39.25
Double $35.50
Double with private bath, T.V. $47.50
Plus Key Deposit
“No weekly or monthly rates quoted; clean and comfortable facilities; convenient mid-town location (two blocks to Penn Station). Cafeteria. No pool.”
Had no idea then I could have asked for a private bath. Or maybe I did and was too cheap to spring for the extra $2.50 a day.
I got a weekly rate of $150. I could stay there for 25 days before the City of New York considered me a transient, then I had to leave.
I eagerly agreed. 25 days seemed plenty of time to find a job and an apartment to share.
I was wrong.
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