Kate and I moved to Brooklyn in February 2021—to Carroll Gardens; but right on the border of Carroll Gardens and Gowanus. Carroll Gardens is a nice place. It’s formerly (and barely still) una piazza for Italian-American Brooklyn; nowadays, it’s more where 45 year-olds talk to each other about New Yorker articles that they’ve skimmed. Neighboring Gowanus is a series of EPA-condemned industrial warehouses that is about to see massive redevelopment, and thus extremely cool to a specific subset of tattooed millennials.
So I’d tell my comedian friends that we lived in Gowanus. I’d tell people who love TSA pre-check that we lived in Carroll Gardens.
We thought we were going to live in Carroll Gardens for awhile. Having just entered our 30s, the Next Phase™ was approaching. The Lower East Side, where we lived together for the previous 5 years, quickly felt less and less like the place that, pre-pandemic, we thought we were going to be in forever—partly due to us, partly due to COVID. We were becoming the people we used to make fun of; content in routine and stability, and increasingly aware that our purposefully frenetic way of living was going to be unsustainable in the next decade.
South Brooklyn felt like the next logical step. A little less drunk screaming, a little more farmer’s market. It was a way to “grow up” while not moving to a stale suburb. When I talk to friends who have made a move similar to this, I sense that it’s a way to balance the inertia of getting older with remaining plugged into the endless possibilities of New York City. Sure, you may only have one 4am night per year. But living in the city makes that night perpetually possible. On a personal level, this type of transition ensured I could keep my identities as a tour guide, standup, and vaguely cool New Yorker.
One of the big selling points of our new apartment was that we were around the corner from Ugly Baby—a Thai restaurant that is widely considered the best in Brooklyn, and possibly the entire city. We figured we had to try it pretty immediately. Especially so because we were 30 and 31 years old respectively. In case you are unaware, this is peak age for being people who consider eating at bloggerati-approved restaurants to be a major facet of their personality.
But we didn’t end up eating there right away. It was still COVID, and Ugly Baby was only open a few days a week with very limited seating. They also only accepted reservations via instagram DM, which I found to be obnoxious. Although not fully activated at this point, there was a sentiment growing inside me that was becoming disenchanted with this “you should be so lucky to step foot in this restaurant” aspect of NYC life. We found another Thai restaurant a few minutes away called Boran which was incredibly good and there were no annoying extra-curriculars. We definitely still needed to try Ugly Baby, but it was no longer an immediate priority.
One of Kate’s very good friends and her boyfriend visited us. I regard their first night staying with us as the first real normal “night out” with a larger group of friends since the pandemic. We went to this restaurant Jajaja in the West Village, a vegan restaurant that first opened on the Lower East Side, right down the block from where we had lived.
Immediately upon walking in, I sensed that something had shifted. We were in our 30s, almost conspicuously so. It was as if during the pandemic, GenZ had boarded themselves into a Trojan Horse, rolled it through the Washington Square Arch, and conquered downtown New York City. It was a vibe that I could only really describe as real-life TikTok. Social media phone culture had increasingly become part of NYC culture prior to the pandemic, but here, it was undoubtedly the dominant aesthetic. Part of me knew that the city was always changing and that’s what makes it the city, but this was a shift I was not entirely ready for.
The night ended with the friend-group coming to one of my standup shows; instead of keeping the night going, which might’ve happened pre-pandemic, we took the subway home. (It might’ve been an Uber pre-Covid, but the millennial lifestyle subsidy was now over, and we, now married, were more acutely aware of not frivolously spending our money.)
Over the next several months, our Next Phase™ planning was getting more concrete. In a stroke of financial savvy given the sudden renters market explosion a few months later, we had signed a 2 year lease in our Carroll Gardens/Gowanus apartment in February 2021 at a deflated price. Our intention was that when it expired in February 2023, our days living in one-bedroom walkups would be over. Now in our 30s, we were legally required to get super into real estate and were hoping to buy something in the next few years. And even if we didn’t buy something, we knew we’d need at least a 2 bedroom for this Next Phase™, since we wanted to have kids.
So, the ongoing conversation began; one that I’ve now seen stymie many a couple:
Where, exactly, are we going to live?
We were still new-ish to Carroll Gardens, but less so. We loved walking around the neighborhood, running up to Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the slightly more reasonable pace of life in Brooklyn. But we were now looking at it with a magnifying glass and downsides were becoming more glaring.
There’s no need to list them all because that would end up being an indictment on someone else’s perfectly happy existence, but one example: On a brownstone-lined block nearby, I once noticed a dad place handwritten notes begging a few cars parked on the street to move their cars on a Sunday morning, so that a birthday party van could park in front of their home. Apparently his son was going to have his 7 year-old birthday party in this van.
I remember thinking there was no way those cars were going to move because this is Brooklyn, and parking spots are one of the few things in which the fabled Old Brooklyn toughness still somewhat lives on. But lo and behold, these cars did all end up moving. That Sunday, I walked by as maybe fifteen 7 year-olds had a birthday party in the back of a van. Normally I wouldn’t judge, but knowing that this guy was either the owner of $1.5+ million property or paying boatloads in rent, I couldn’t help but find the fact that he had to have his son’s birthday party in a kidnap mobile extremely depressing. (I’m sure the son loved it, and possibly even requested it, but still. Absurd.)
Increasingly, we began to contemplate alternatives to our slice of Brooklyn. We were firmly staying in the New York metro area, there was no question about it. A combination of family, career pursuits, and shared love of eggplant parm meant that realistically there was no other place to set down roots. Out of places in the city, we had honed in on Carroll Gardens—possibly Park Slope, (although we didn’t love some of its Upper-West-Side-of-Brooklyn dynamics), and possibly the Columbia Street waterfront (although we preferred not to live in a flood zone). So if it wasn’t the city, it was either Long Island, New Jersey, or Westchester.
For reasons that, again, if I went into it would be an indictment on someone else’s perfectly happy existence, we decided against looking into New Jersey or Long Island; and decided to tentatively explore Westchester.
I began to think about my possible life in Westchester a bit more. In contrast to the move from the LES to Brooklyn, moving from Brooklyn Westchester would require a somewhat significant identity and mindset shift of who I was as a person.
I had spent most of my 20s, particularly the second half of them, building momentum in stand up comedy and as a New York City tour guide with a growing small business. Sure, I could still do standup and tours living in Westchester, but it would be way less convenient, and likely way less routine. A move like this would be actively declaring that these weren’t my primary priorities.
At the same time, this shift was slowly and subtly happening. My thoughts toward standup, which was a career pursuit that I thought was always going to necessitate being in or very near the city, was changing for me. This was something that first involuntarily shifted with the suddenness of the COVID shutdown; but with the forced time off to contemplate, I began to conclude that my pre-pandemic strategy of being out every single night doing standup was not a sustainable method in The Next Phase™.
I also knew that at some point, my pursuit of a standup career would be in direct conflict with being a good dad, especially because the amount of money I was making doing standup didn’t really justify the all-consuming time commitment. More so, I began to think of the ideal Saturday night less as doing four shows in a row, and more so eating ice cream and watching The Sopranos with Kate. I was beginning to value building a life that sought to be in harmony with my most important relationships, rather than one in which I was pursuing something that came at the expense of it. Standup was (and still is) great, but I suddenly became extremely fearful of being one of those 41 year-old comedians on the road all the time, scrolling through their phone at a bar. I was OK with (and honestly relieved) to not have “made it” just yet.
We first started looking at the Sound Shore area of Westchester on December 18, 2021. Since Kate had grown up somewhat in the area, it was her who introduced me to it; I had a positive first impression of the Larchmont/Mamaroneck/New Rochelle corridor, and totally saw a future in which we could build a life there.
It only took me a few days until I fully decided that I was all-in on Westchester.
It was Christmas Eve. We were getting into the car to drive up to my father in-law’s, when a man who lived down the block from us snidely informed me that I was parked in front of his apartment in “his spot” and that I was rude and inconsiderate. Those who know me know it takes a lot to get a reaction out of me, but this situation was so insane that I ended up telling this guy off, driving away, and fully realizing that I did not need this to be my life for the next 25 years.
It took Kate a few months longer to come to the same realization, but Westchester it was.
***
The next part is a bunch of logistics that are interesting to Kate and I, but not that interesting to other people. I know this because whenever we talk about this, I could tell that most people don’t care.
You’ve also read a lot up until this point, so I’ll do this in bullet points:
We started looking for a house in Westchester in August 2022, hoping we’d find something by the time our lease in Brooklyn expired in February 2023.
Around this time, we were informed by our Brooklyn landlord that she would not be renewing our lease in February. This was due to a classic NYC landlord move in which they were turning over the entire building for unclear purposes.
While we weren’t going to stay in our Brooklyn apartment another year, this meant we HAD to be out by February, and couldn’t extend month-to month.
By mid-December, we had not found a house. Our new favorite talking point was about housing inventory being so low.
Needing somewhere to live in February, I ended up finding us a month-to-month rental in Mamaroneck. We chose a rental in Westchester as a way to intro us into the Sound Shore area, and because finding a month-to-month rental in the city is sort of like finding a likable cryptocurrency enthusiast.
I think Kate was initially suspicious because I found this rental on a site called Furnished Finder, and she seemed to recoil every time I said the words “Furnished Apartment.” Luckily, she grew to very much enjoy our time there.
The day after Christmas, we had officially signed a 90-day lease at the Furnished Apartment to kick off our Westchester Era™, which would start in just a few weeks . Knowing that our time in Brooklyn was coming to a close, we made a very short “bucket list” of everything we wanted to do before leaving Brooklyn: One was to go to Junior’s and eat cheesecake, which we did not do.
The other was to finally eat at Ugly Baby.
It was still pretty difficult to get a reservation; but I ended up snagging one on December 30 at the slightly unhinged hour of 10:00 p.m. We were coming back from a 3-day getaway to Vermont, and despite the reservation time, figured this would be a great way to end the vacation. Though as the day arrived, our Ugly Baby dinner became less a thing we were looking forward to, and more of an obligation. And we were conflicted: Given our aforementioned identities as early 30s bloggerati-influenced food eaters, we felt it would be sacrilegious to never have eaten at Ugly Baby despite living 60 seconds away for two years. But at the same time, we also really didn’t feel like going out to eat at 10:00 p.m.; and increasingly felt like we didn’t have to. The chic restaurant identity part of us was fading.
So as our 10:00 p.m. dinner time approached (increasingly our bedtime), we contemplated not going. We decided that a good compromise was to show up a little bit early. That didn’t really work. It was obviously a privilege to eat there, and our allotted time had not begun. We were (to be fair, very nicely) told by the host to come back at 10:00 p.m.
We return, and we sit down. The restaurant, essentially the size of a railroad apartment, is buzzing. There’s probably 35-40 people in a space that should realistically have about 15. The walls are bright orange, and look like they’ve had 20 coats of paint. It’s tight in a way where everyone is literally on top of each other; servers are practicing advanced ballet to pirouette through the non-existent aisles and gaps. I think there’s music, but conversational noise is bouncing off the walls so furiously it's hard to remember. We’re seated in the worst spot in the restaurant–a two-top with stools maybe 15 inches above the ground, directly next to the host stand and a fanfare of winter coats. The stools are so low that I immediately develop moderate back pain.
They take awhile to get to us, as per the standard of this type of place. The restaurant starts clearing out so thankfully at around 10:45, they offer to move us to a much more comfortable table not meant for toddlers. They inform us that we’ve come on a week that they’re debuting a new menu—but that because it’s close to closing, about 75% of the menu is no longer available. They tell us we should’ve come earlier. Kate’s allergic to shellfish (in fairness to this delicious shellfish-heavy cuisine, this was one of the reasons why we took our time getting around to eating here), so there was only one thing she was actually able to have. Our food is definitely an experience—I’m very into spice, but my dish is one of those in which the spice overpowered everything; clearly a new creation that just needed some tweaking, and probably now is out-of-this world good. We concluded that all of the meals we had in Vermont were miles better.
As we leave the restaurant, we overhear the table next to us making plans to go to their next place, a bar that requires an Uber, which was to be followed by possibly another bar. It hits home that the problem with this night wasn’t so much Ugly Baby,—the problem was us. If we had done this five years ago, we’d probably think Ugly Baby was one of the greatest restaurants we’d ever gone to. I have a slight pang of regret for not experiencing Ugly Baby at age 27, when we’d fully be able to embrace the magic conjured by the space, the food, and the overall experience. But we were now 32, and were no longer those people. We were at a very cool restaurant, but we ourselves were no longer cool.
After the previous night’s dinner, we couldn’t be happier about our decision to stay in for New Year’s Eve. We had decided to cash-in on an Eataly gift card that my brother and sister-in-law got us for Hanukkah and cook up a storm.
I woke up early to beat the Eataly rush. On the F train home, I realized that, having lived near or off the F for most of my 10.5 years in the city, that this major part of my life—that I kind of hated but also grew to appreciate—was no longer going to be a constant companion. In just a few short weeks, I’d start to become foreign to its fluctuating energies, rhythms, smells, and skin-crawlingly infuriating advertisements that I’d subsumed for so long. I was hit with a pang of Stockholm Syndrome-esque nostalgia, and climbed up the stairs of the Carroll St. stop to return home.
I excitedly unfurled my bounty: some sausage, nice butter, cavatelli, sage. Kate patiently waited for me to finish, then revealed something wrapped in gift paper. One more holiday present, she said.
It was a pregnancy test. Positive.