(11:24am Sep 16, 2009)

Ira Glass’s account of his NYC arrival in 1984:

I first moved here when the woman I was with decided to go to NYU law school. We lived in married-student housing, though we weren’t married, and they were really just dorms. We were assigned a freshman dorm, and I was 25 and had never felt older in my life. We split up after a few months.

We had moved from Washington, and I was trying to learn to write radio stories. I wasn’t a terribly fast study, so I did other things, like working as a temp secretary. I remember walking by the Dallas Barbecue on the northeast side of Washington Square Park. I would look at people eating in the restaurant and think to myself, someday I’ll be able to afford to eat in a place like that.

After the NYU dorms, I lived in a series of cheap apartments, the worst of which was at Rivington and Allen. That was a truly dangerous neighborhood. I would get out of the subway on Houston Street at night, and there’d be drug dealers and prostitutes and crack vials on the streets, and I always had to make the decision, should I run? And I thought, well, that’s just going to look so uncool. But often I would run.

I rented an illegal sublet that cost me $145 a month; if anyone questioned what I was doing there, I was under strict instructions to say I was visiting somebody. My roommate had come to New York to do art but then had gotten into a dispute with the landlord, and literally, the dispute with the landlord took up every ounce of brainpower that she had. She was suing him for stuff that got damaged when the roof had caved in, and she was forever going on and on about the proceedings and how unfair he was and how he did one lousy thing to her or another. She became unable to do anything but think about this apartment. She was like a character out of a Tom Wolfe novel—her life had made her crazy—and that just seemed to sum up so exactly something about this city.

[This American Life: Behind the Scenes with Ira Glass and Others at 92Y: Sep 16]