I lived in my first — and only — apartment building the summer after my sophomore year of college. I had snagged a great summer job working for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Co. in Boston. My dear friend Kit, who was part of my Comstock Hall crowd, had a job as a research assistant for a Harvard professor, so we decided to get a place together. The address was 65 Martin Street, at the corner of Martin and Gray Streets, near the Radcliffe Quad. I don’t remember how we found it, but I suspect it was through the Harvard Housing Office. It must have been a summer sublet, because it was fully furnished, and equipped with pots, pans, dishes, etc. This was fortunate, because neither of us had any of that stuff.

It was the basement apartment, and we entered through the outside stairs you can see in the picture (right where the red pointer is – thanks Google Maps!), so we never went into the lobby of the apartment building. I didn’t really have the sense of being in a large building, and was surprised to see how big it actually was when I pulled it up on Google Maps to get the picture. I’m not sure if we ever took a broom and knocked three times on the ceiling to get our upstairs neighbors to quiet down, but we might have, so that’s the reference in the title song.

I have only fond memories of that apartment and that summer. I loved my job and I loved living with Kit — there are no horror stories. Because we were in the basement, the windows were quite high up, and all we could see outside was people’s feet going by on the sidewalk, but we got used to that pretty quickly. Kit’s boyfriend, who was in Providence for the summer, came to visit on many weekends, and that was great, because he was a good friend of mine too. There were lots of other friends either living in Cambridge or visiting from time to time, so life was never dull.

1482 Cambridge Street

My first grown-up residence, after I graduated from college, was less than two miles away from the Martin Street apartment, on the other side of Harvard Yard, in a neighborhood called Inman Square. I definitely found this place through the Harvard Housing Office, which had a large bulletin board filled with “roommates wanted” notices. It was the second floor of a three-story house. There were two actual bedrooms, and the dining room and family room had also been turned into bedrooms. Cathy and Bonnie were already living there and looking for two more roommates. They had the two real bedrooms, which were at the back of the house. I was the third one, and I chose the family room, which was a spacious room at the front of the house, symmetrical with, and about the same size as, the living room. Arlene, who arrived last, got the dining room, which had swinging doors into both the living room and the kitchen, so not an ideal arrangement, but she made it work. We each paid $110.00 per month, and all utilities were included.

Since I was moving into an unfurnished room for the first time, I needed furniture. My mother took me to buy a foam mattress from a little old mattress-maker in Nutley, New Jersey. It was a beautifully crafted mattress, which I still have today in my house in Sacramento. The wooden frame for the mattress we bought in Cambridge either at Design Research or the Door Store. That frame died after a few decades when the rubber holding the wooden slats became brittle and cracked, but the mattress is still in perfect condition! My father wondered aloud why I wanted a double bed instead of a single, but my mother and I just ignored him. My parents drove me up to Cambridge from New Jersey with the mattress, a maple dresser that had been my grandfather’s, two small bookcases, and a 6′ x 9′ Rya rug from my bedroom at home. I have no idea how we transported it all, but somehow we did.

It turned out to be a wonderful living situation. Cathy was a nurse who worked at Cambridge City Hospital, right across the street from our house. Bonnie was a social worker at some social services agency. Arlene was a graduate student in sociology at Boston University. I had a job at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s think tank in Kendall Square near MIT. We all had very different schedules, so we mostly didn’t cook or eat together, but we got along pretty well – at least most of the time. There was some friction, like when Bonnie’s parents sent her a box of oranges from Florida and she wouldn’t let the rest of us have any. We had the last laugh though, because the oranges went moldy before she could eat them all.

On the other hand, when I decided to audition for a musical that was being put on at Harvard Law School, Bonnie was the one who wanted to go with me. We both got roles in the show, and had a great time singing and dancing, as well as dating the law students who were in the cast. Bonnie ended up marrying one of the law students, and is still married to him!

After the first year Cathy left to go to dental school, so we had to interview for a new roommate. When Lita came to see the place, she was not at all bothered by the fact that all four of us were sharing one bathroom, but she was shocked that all four of us would be sharing one telephone! Despite that glaring defect, when we invited her to move in, she accepted.

It was sad when we all decided at the end of the second year that it was time to move on. I was going to California to start law school. Arlene was moving to Knoxville to finish her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee. I don’t remember where Bonnie or Lita were headed, but it was somewhere else. We hated to leave that wonderful house, but it was time for the next chapter in all of our lives.

I had the IUD inserted just before coming home for spring break my junior year at Brandeis. It was a Dalkon Shield and not really meant for young women like myself. I lay in bed for the rest of that day, bleeding and in pain. In fact, I bled for a long time after.

I took my father and brother into my confidence, but never my mother, who would be hysterical and not know what to do with this information anyway. Immediately after returning to Detroit from Boston, we began an extended road trip, the last our entire family would take, as I married 14 months later and my brother would be ordained as a rabbi two weeks earlier, then begin his PhD, so be swamped with his studies.

My father drove a Buick at the time and we had our AAA TripTick route all marked out in orange marker. We headed to Baltimore to spend Passover with my cousin Louise and her family. Most probably, Aunt Sara, dad’s sister, was there too. We stopped somewhere overnight on the way and both my father and brother asked how I was doing…still bleeding and cramping was my response. They were concerned and consoling.

After celebrating Passover, we moved on to Williamsburg, VA. We had visited once before, when I was in 7th grade. That was a wonderful trip. We were all older now, but it was still enjoyable. Dad went off to play golf in the morning, while the three of us toured the historic sights. We dined in an old tavern at night. It didn’t seem quite as magical as it had so many years earlier, but still interesting.

On we went to Virginia Beach. One of my Brandeis suite mates lived close by and other friends were visiting for the vacation, so we stopped in there one night to visit Rozie (now long-deceased), Netsie, my roommate, and Drucy, whose father was a well-known rabbi, so my brother was interested in talking with her. Rozie’s parents were pleasant hosts to all us and we passed several hours there. But we were looking for a beach vacation and that was what we found in Virginia (debatable whether it was for lovers…we stayed at a family motel, but the beach was expansive).

Dad and I took a long walk, just as we did the day before I started Brandeis, up in Ogunquit, ME in 1970. Predictably, my nose got burnt. It was always good to have a long talk with my father. I’m sure we talked about the IUD. The bleeding and cramping had finally subsided and I felt better. Now 46 years later, I can’t remember what else we spoke about, but we never held back. He was my rock and it feels like a cruel joke that he has been gone 29 years. That sunny vacation day was the last time I walked with him alone without a care in the world.

My first real apartment, not counting the college one with mean notes posted on the refrigerator to clean the bathroom and the dial removed from one roommate’s television so no one else could watch it, was the basement unit (AKA Garden Apartment) my new husband and I inhabited right after our wedding in August of 1968. I found it on an index card posted in the teachers’ lounge of the school in which I would be teaching that fall. The price was right, and being very young and inexperienced in apartment hunting, we took it sight unseen.

A large part of its appeal was the rent, $150 per month, which we could afford on my $6,000 per year salary as a high school English teacher. Since my new husband was earning nothing as a medical student, the rent was the thirty percent of our income recommended by “how to budget” articles. The apartment’s other claim to fame was its proximity to public transportation.

We furnished it with a goldish-orange sofa and a round gold tweed shag rug created from a remnant. Not sure why we went with round. We must have thought it was different and therefore added a touch of class. Those colors went well with our avocado appliances. Remember, it was 1968. We had received stackable TV tables as a shower gift, so we placed them at either end of the sofa. We also had a bedroom set, a wedding gift from my parents. And some sort of kitchen table with black vinyl chairs. Not sure where we purchased that, but it was cheap and served the purpose of filling the kitchen and having a place to eat.

The pièce de résistance was our wall unit, which was a wedding gift from my husband’s parents. It consisted of three black metal poles to which shelves and cabinets were attached. We put it together assuming the poles would hold up everything, even though they were sitting on a vinyl tiled floor and touched a ceiling that was the floor of the tenant above us. All of our worldly goods and treasures were housed in that unit. Our good china and stemware were in the cabinets. Waterford vases and bowls decorated the shelves, along with what turned out to be too many heavy books.

Note wall unit on poles in the background

I’m sure you can guess where is story is headed. We woke to a loud crash in the middle of the night. There were most of our finer things shattered on the floor. Amazingly, some treasures hit the round rug and survived. After shedding a few tears, we cleaned up and headed to work minus some pieces of Lennox stemware and serving dishes and a good portion of our Waterford collection. For years, my parents gifted us with these lost items as anniversary presents. Today, they reside, unused but safe, in my dining room cabinet.

We couldn’t afford much art to decorate our walls so my father’s paintings and some cheaply framed reproductions did the trick. The kitchen really needed something to perk up its white metal cabinets, white walls, and black linoleum floor. Wallpaper, which was very popular back then, was not in our budget. But contact paper was. Yep, we put it all over the walls, smoothing out the inevitable bubbles as best we could. As I recall, it was orange, avocado, and gold. Stunning. Well, at least it was colorful.

Having a basement unit definitely had its drawbacks. First of all, the view. If you like looking at people’s legs, it was pretty good. Also, since I was alone on nights when my husband was on call, I felt exposed and vulnerable. For these reasons, we kept the shades drawn all of the time. This annoyed our landlord, who came into our apartment when we were at work and school without our permission and raised the shades. Seems the windows were so poorly insulated that drawing the shades led to condensation and rotted the wood.

The other huge drawback to our basement unit was the people who lived above us. Lucky us, it was a family with three little kids. I felt sorry for the children who had so little play space and didn’t mind at all that they played in the hallway or rode trikes and scooters above us or jumped on beds and furniture, except on weekends when it would have been nice to get some extra sleep. Even worse, though, was that their parents had huge and loud fights many evenings after the kids were in bed. The only solution to that was to sleep with a broom next to our bed and pound the ceiling. Very classy.

I was more than ready to leave this first apartment, which we did when I was eight months pregnant. I have definitely repressed the details of that move, although our next one with kids ages three and one was much harder. And where did we move? To another apartment in a high rise building on the campus of Michael Reese Hospital. My husband loved it because it was so convenient for his residency. I hated it even more than my first one, but that’s another story.

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We married after I graduated from Brandeis in Waltham, MA in 1974. I went home to Huntington Woods, MI to prepare for the wedding. Dan lived in the Boston area with his parents, so found our first apartment at 1105 Lexington Street, in Waltham, almost in Lexington. He worked in Waltham and within two months, I would work at the same company, a few miles from our apartment, which was a small complex on a main street across from a strip mall containing a large grocery store and several other smaller stores. Down the street was “Wal-Lex”, a roller-rink, now long gone. The apartment also had good access to Rt. 2, which Dan took to Cambridge, as he started Harvard Grad School that autumn.

On Sunday mornings, Dan walked across the street to the grocery store, picked up the Sunday Boston Globe and two 3 Musketeer Bars for us to savor as we read the paper. Ah, for the days of youthful metabolisms that allowed for such indulgence.

There were several buildings, all alike, around a parking circle, though we had assigned parking behind the squat building and entered from the rear. The trash dumpster was close to our parking, and just beyond was the enclosure to a somewhat grimy pool. I don’t think I ever used it, but it was packed with young families in the summer.

There were four apartments on each of the two floors, and less expensive apartments (tile instead of wood floors; poor window views) and coin-op laundry in the basement. It was a two-bedroom apartment. We bought some furniture (blue and red, Ethan Allen traditional), some was lent by Dan’s parents. My parents even sent a few fine old Baker tables. Bridesmaids provided a large box of kitchen essentials. My wedding gifts filled out the pantry with the dishes, kitchen ware, cooking needs, linens; all the essentials and many decorative items.

We bought shelves for the living room and a large desk (Dan wanted a really big one for his computer print-outs) at the Door Store in Cambridge.

Our pride was a Delft lamp on an end table in the living room. Our bedroom bureaus had been Dan’s grandmother’s. With a large, early first anniversary check from my father, we bought a Queen Anne’s embroidered wing chair and end table. The rest of the money paid for Dan’s grad school.

Of course, the the kitchen and bathroom appliances were pink, which didn’t go well with my blue and red color scheme, but nothing to be done about it. Our dining room table was a round bridge table and chairs, a gift from my parents’ best friends. That was among the most practical gifts given, traveled from home to home and remains in my basement; is still taken out when I have a large number of guests for dinner, as my current dining table does not expand.

We had many guests and visitors during our two years of living in the apartment. I regularly had college friends over for dinner and out-of-town cousins and other friends were welcome to stay in the second bedroom. Other guests were less welcome.

We had no dish washer or disposal. I had a trash bin under the sink, but, after bringing in groceries, at times became lazy and left a bag out for trash. One day, early in our marriage, before I even had a job, I picked up a full bag to take it out back and throw it away. A cockroach crawled out onto my arm. This Jewish girl from the suburbs screamed bloody murder and dropped the bag, spilling contents all over the floor. After I recovered my composure, I cleaned up and quickly threw everything in the dumpster outside. I tried to be more careful with the waste material, but it didn’t matter; we were infested.

During our two years in the apartment, we were fumigated twice. I had to take everything out of all the cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom, placing it all in the second bedroom, while they came in and sprayed. It only helped for a few days. I got so used to seeing bugs that I named them as they climbed the walls when we turned on the lights. “Hi Harry, hi Sam”! Squish! I killed them with my bare fist. This princess toughened up a lot.

But getting up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom once and coming back to bed to find one on my pillow put me over the top. Also, finding one in my underwear drawer…way over the top. Too many bugs for me!

We had one other uninvited visitor. I came home from work one day and found a cat sitting, grooming herself on my prized wing chair. I like cats, but there were no pets allowed in this complex and I had no idea how she got there, as the apartment was locked up tight. “Hello, who are you?” She was friendly and we nuzzled for a while. I went to the bathroom; she was gone when I returned. Houdini. She visited several more times. I couldn’t figure out how she got in or out. I awoke one more morning, quite near-sighted without my glasses. There were Venetian blinds covering the window, which was open. I saw something hanging out, blowing in the breeze. Through my squint, it looked like a pair of stockings. When I put on my glasses, I saw it was the cat’s tail! Too much invasion of privacy. She jumped down and I followed her into our kitchen area and right into one of the low cabinets. There was a hole in the back, which evidently led to the neighbor’s apartment. She scuttled back and forth through that passage. We put our griddle over the hole and had no more intruders.

The bugs finally got to me and, while visiting a friend who lived in a condo complex in Acton, much further west along the Rt 2 corridor, on a whim, we stopped at the last two model units in December, 1975, as President Ford put an initiative in place to “WIN”; “whip inflation now”. There were huge tax incentives to buy real estate before the end of 1975, so we agreed to buy one of the models. We didn’t really have any money, but the brokers knew that Dan would be done with grad school in June and had rosy prospects (he already had a job, but would change to a different one just as he got his degree). We agreed to move in June, 1976, rent for a few months with the rent being applied to our downpayment and still get the tax breaks. It was all too good to pass up, so on June 16, 1976, our 2nd anniversary, we moved into our first condominium, miles away from anywhere I would consider I wanted to live in the future.