When Rudy and I met twenty-five years ago, we both lived on 76thStreet, me on the east side and Rudy on the west. We were both working our first jobs, me at Christie’s, Rudy at a commodities trading firm. My place was tiny and grim, as first New York apartments tend to be. Rudy lived on the third floor of an Upper West Side brownstone overlooking a row of mature plane trees. But what really caught my eye in that space was a sprawling 1994 painting by Gabriel Silva Rubio hanging in the living room: a collection of yellowed pages, like a deconstructed sketchbook, painted over with watercolor figures that resemble sea creatures and nymphs. I knew right then that we were wired similarly, excited by the same things. ↩Since those first New York Apartments we’ve lived in Los Angeles and London, Miami and Guatemala City, Boston, Mexico City, and, more than once, Manhattan, where we’re still based half of the time today. We returned to New York from London in 2010 after almost a decade away. Coming back to New York, we knew we wanted to be in Greenwich Village. This place—the first we rented together in the city—was imperfectly perfect. High ceilings, big windows . . . and probably a quarter of the size of our flat in London.
