Archives for July 2009

A Great Day for a “Parade”

July 26, 2009 by Joseph Rand

Okay, so I’m trying to be really positive and upbeat about my move to the suburbs, about trying to capture my own little slice of Suma. We had the move yesterday, which was just horrible, but we at least had a bed to sleep in and food in the refrigerator.

And today, in our first day in our new home, there was a parade. I’d like to say that the local municipality is a big, big fan, but the parade was actually in honor of a children’s circus that’s been set up in Memorial Park, a few blocks from my home. To celebrate the circus, the village threw a parade down Main Street, a parade that was extensively advertised as including a LIVE ELEPHANT. Indeed, it was pointed out that it had been like 80 years since an elephant walked down the streets of Nyack, which seems impressive for those of you who track those sorts of thing. At the very least, I now have an interesting question for a bar bet.

But, as positive as I’m trying to be, I have to confess that the parade was a wee bit disappointing. Here’s how the parade went:

1. Two fire trucks.
2. A group of children, whom I later found out were the children performing in the circus, walking. Not doing anything, just walking.
3. A clown.
4. A juggler
5. An elephant, followed by a guy with a scooper, a backpack (you don’t want to know what’s in the backpack), and a shirt saying “What? And leave show business.” Which I thought was funny.

And then it was over. It was the shortest parade I ever saw. If I’d gone in to get a coffee, I would have missed it.

So, again, I’m happy to be in my new home, I’m excited to be part of a new community, and I love a parade. And it was a children’s thing, so I don’t want to be a curmudgeon. But, well, would it have killed them to maybe do another walk around the block, and pretend that the parade was twice as long?

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: Circus, Elephant, Nyack, Parades

Moving In

July 25, 2009 by Joseph Rand

Moving is heinous.

Real estate people (and I’m a real estate person) never tell you that. We focus on all the happy parts of the move — meeting the new neighbors and planting a new tree and setting up the area in the pantry where you’re going to put “junior’s growth chart.” We don’t talk much about the actual moving date itself.

I guess it’s like having a kid. When people picture having a kid, they picture all the fun stuff: little league games, story time, “junior’s growth chart,” etc. We don’t focus on the actual birth date itself, with the pain and the screaming and the gore and something called a placentia that I understand is extremely unpleasant (I should point out that, yes, I am as yet childless).

So moving is like having a child: lots of fun once that actual event (i.e., the move, or the birth) is actually over. But the move itself is no fun.

The worst part of our move is that we did it in two parts. We moved out of our place in the city a month ago, going through a horrible day (days, really) of packing and packing and packing and cleaning and watching guys struggle with our furniture while they went up and down the stairs (okay, that last part was probably tougher for them than for me). And then we had the joy of spending three hours trying to get one couch down the stairs, convinced that it HAD to be able to get down if it got up, and then finally taking parts of it off to get it to fit, all the time wondering if we could amend our sales contract to include the couch in the sale, maybe affixing it to the wall or something so we could pretend it’s a fixture.

So now we did the move in, and it was just as horrible. To get the day started great, we overslept, and the movers showed up at my parent’s place to pick up the stuff we’d stored there (including ourselves). So what was going to be a stressful day started even more stressfully, without time for a shower or breakfast and a hurried stuffing of our everyday things into suitcases so we could move them into the new place.

At least this time, we had an elevator. After 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to cover the elevator with the blankets that we luckily found in a utility closet, we started the move.

And, again, the couch. I’m not sure why anyone (in this case Henredon) sells couches that can neither get down apartment stairs or fit in apartment building elevators. The couch should be specially marked in the catalog with some sort of description like “Only buy this couch if you live on a single-story dwelling with a big door.” Another two hours trying to get the couch up the elevator or, in a potential solution that made the movers none too thrilled, up eight flights of stairs. It didn’t matter. The couch couldn’t fit in the elevator OR the stairs.

So we figured that maybe this was the end of the road for this couch, that even if we somehow got it out we’d just have the prospective horror of dealing with this stupid freaking couch 10 years from now when we moved out of this building. But a quick internet search found a service that actually comes to your home and takes apart your furniture, something we probably should have discovered years ago. It was great. Guy came over, I gave him an astounding wad of cash, and he took apart the couch so we could get it in the elevator. It was a little disconcerting watching him pull apart the couch, it felt a little like he was pulling apart a person. I was flashing to the flying monkeys tearing apart Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

So now we still have this couch, even though I try to sit in it a little gingerly so as not to have it collapse underneath me.

Filed Under: Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: Movers, Moving, Moving Day

Advice for People Moving to the Suburbs: How We Found Our New Home

July 23, 2009 by Joseph Rand

We just closed on our new place yesterday.

I haven’t written about our new home because (a) I didn’t want to jinx it, and (b) I didn’t want to sit here and reveal how much I love my new place while there were still little issues to work out with the seller. Nothing undermines whatever bargaining position you might like to maintain than a public blog that explains how much you love the new place and will pay ANYTHING to get into it.

So now that we’ve closed, I can talk about the process. The first thing you need to know, if you don’t already know it, is that I’m in the real estate business. I’m one of the owners of Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty, one of the largest real estate companies in New York City’s northern suburbs. It’s a family company, started by my mother Marsha about 25 years ago, and now owned by Marsha, me, and two of my brothers (Greg and Matt). In fact, the reason I’m moving from the city is that I’ve been commuting to our offices for the past 9 years, and I’m finally tired of it. As much as I love living in the city, when you work 10 hours a day and commute for 2, it doesn’t leave a lot of time to enjoy what the city has to offer.

So in moving to the suburbs, I was really going home. Going home to the area that I grew up in, that I lived in until I went off to Georgetown for college and law school. And going home to the area where I’ve worked — IN REAL ESTATE — every day for the past nine years. (Okay, not exactly every day, or even every work day, since I took any excuse to stay in the city and work from home whenever I could).

The second thing you need to know is that I was pretty much locked into Rockland County, the smallest county in New York, on the Western side of the Tappan Zee bridge. It’s where most of my family lives, where our headquarters is, and where I’m most familiar. In retrospect, I probably could have spent more time looking in Westchester, but the types of places I wanted were a little out of my budget in Westchester.

All that is by way of saying that I had a bit of an advantage in buying in the suburbs: I knew the area, knew local real estate, and had about 800 agents that would help me buy a home if I asked. My mother is a Realtor, my brothers are all Realtors, I’m a Realtor, and my wife is a Realtor.

And it was still a pain in the ass. Physician, heal thyself. No matter how much you know about real estate, it’s still tough buying a house for yourself.

We had certain ideas about what we wanted. We wanted to be within 30 minutes of Manhattan, since my wife will still be commuting to her job in the city. And we wanted something interesting. If that seems vague, it’s because it is. We really just wanted some sort of home that would be distinctive, that when we brought people out from the city they would nod their heads and say, “ahh, I can see why you moved from your place in the city.

So what were the kinds of things we thought were “interesting”:

We loved this house on a cliff in Upper Grandview, this great architecturally interesting house with amazing panoramic views of the Hudson River. We went to see it about eight or nine times, driving my friend and colleague Margo Bohlin, the top agent in our company and the region, crazy. But ultimately, our friends with kids, knowing that we’d like to have kids someday, explained the fundamental concerns about owning a home on a cliff.
I loved a house in Valley Cottage, this big giant huge enormous house with 10,000 square feet, 25 acres, a pool, and a full basement that I would have turned into essentially a commercial pub complete with the DirecTV football package. I loved it, but my wife was concerned with moving into a house on the top of a mountain, surrounded by 25 empty acres, in an area where she knows no one except me. She thought it would be isolating.
My wife loved this house in Sparkill that was big, comfy, beautifully done up, and only about 15 minutes from the GW Bridge. I liked the house too, particularly that it was about 5 minutes from a private golf course I play on, but didn’t love the lot. Or the price.

We saw lots of other houses, most of them nice but not interesting, or interesting but not practical.

Then something funny happened. We had looked exclusively at houses, houses on big lots. Then my mother, who has had a real estate license for about 35 years and was known as an absolutely killer buyer agent before she opened up her own brokerage, suggested we look at this condo in Nyack. Nyack is this charming old village on the Hudson River, the one really walkable community in Rockland County. It’s got restaurants, bars, shops, all in a very small compact area. People sometimes say it’s “city-like,” but that’s not it. What it mostly reminds me of is my old neighborhood in Noe Valley, San Francisco — charming, cute old buildings, a strong but small commercial district, and a couple of hills.

We hadn’t really looked in Nyack, mostly because the houses were outside our price range. But my mother knew about this condo in a complex right on the water, two blocks from the Nyack downtown. It had been on the market for three or four years, chasing the market down on price for most of that time. It also had a lot of trouble selling because (1) the taxes are outrageous (I’m not even going to tell you what they are, and (2) the place was done up a bit in a very specific style, which a lot of people can’t see through. So it had been on the market for a while.

A condo, but 4,000 square feet, four or five bedrooms, and unbelievable views of the river. With a lot of great touches: three refrigerators, two giant wine fridges, six or seven terraces, high end sound system, etc.
I was resistant to looking at a condo at first, but she made me go look at it. And when I saw it, I realized that it was the right place for us. My wife was concerned about moving to an area where she didn’t know anyone, so moving into a condo complex with other people, and two blocks from the one true downtown in Rockland, made sense. We both wanted something interesting, and what’s more interesting than the biggest and coolest condo in the region. Plus, I don’t need to learn how to cut grass.

So we made our offer, worked it out, and got into contract. Closed yesterday. It’s ours.

Our first night in the place, there was a massive thunderstorm that came through the Hudson Valley. We stood at the windows with the lights out drinking wine watching the lightning strike the Hudson River, outlining the Tappan Zee Bridge in silhouette. Very cool.

Filed Under: Advice, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: Nyack, Real Estate Advice

Date Night in Nyack

July 11, 2009 by Joseph Rand

Last night was our first “date night” in the suburbs. We’re still living with my parents while we wait to close on our new place (that’s a whole different post), so we’re not yet really “living” here yet. More like an extended vacation. But we decided to go out Friday night to our new neighborhood in Nyack, one of the classic “rivertowns” in the Hudson Valley, on the Rockland County side. Right on the water near the entrance to the Tappan Zee Bridge. A great little town, lots of restaurants and bars and antique shops and stuff like that.

So we drove down, actually got a parking spot on the street, and went to LuShane’s for dinner. As is the new custom, we of course ran into someone I know from working in the area for the past eight years. My wife is a little concerned that we can’t go anywhere in our new neighborhood without running into someone who knows me (I grew up here, too,) my mom (lived here like 30 years and started a business here), and my dad (doctor at Nyack Hospital for years). We have sort of lost the anonymity of Manhattan, where we lived 15 years but never, ever, ran into anyone we knew in the neighborhood — even the other people who lived in the neighborhood with us.

Dinner was good. Great little place (we’d been there before) with a lot of atmosphere: old-fashioned tile floors, copper bar, tin ceiling. Appetizers were great (short ribs were fantastic), entrees were okay (her fish was cold, my pasta was a little bland). A little pricey ($100 with tip, no alcohol), but great service and generally tasty. Would go back. We were going to get ice cream at Temptations, a cute ice cream shop on Main Street, afterwards, but it was hugely crowded. Indeed, the wait outside Temptations kind of reminded me why I like Nyack — it has a little bit of a feel of one of those Jersey short or Hamptons summer towns, with a small but vibrant town center that is filled with locals on weekends, even though it’s a year-round residence.

Afterwards, it was off to the Palisades Mall for a movie — big giant mall, big giant movie theater, classic suburban experience. The one lowlight of the trip was finding out that the Fox Sports Grill has closed there, so I don’t know where I’m going to get my Sunday football ten-games-at-a-time fix this fall. Working on it.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: Date Night, Nyack, Restaurants

Concerts in Suma

July 3, 2009 by Joseph Rand

So last night we went to go see Fountains of Wayne at the Tarrytown Music Hall, probably the first live concert I’ve gone to in the past year. So why did it take me moving to the suburbs to go see live music. I have two theories.

First, less competition for tickets. If you try to go to a concert in the city, you pretty much have to be on top of the announcement if you want to get tickets. You can’t wait a few weeks after tickets come on sale and then pop onto ticketmaster or whatever to pick them up. I tried to see FoW at Joe’s Pub a few months ago when I saw an announcement on Facebook, and they were all sold out. Probably sold out the day they were put on sale. Just so many people in the city competing for scarce tickets. In contrast, I found out about the FoW concert about two weeks before it happened, went onto the Tarrytown Music Hall website, and got pretty good seats that day. There were still seats available the night of the show.

Second, and this is more psychological, is the overwhelming aspect of Manhattan — there’s always so much to do, so many places to go, that sometimes you shut down. A few years ago, I basically gave up on trying to stay on top of the restaurant/club/lounge scene, since it was becoming a full time job. And with all the various places to go see live music, it’s impossible to keep track of everything that’s happening to the point that you just stop trying. So there was a little of that.

In contrast, there’s not, ummm, quite so much to do out in the Hudson Valley, so it’s (a) easier to keep track of, and (b) easier to lock the relatively few events as appointments — sort of like “must see TV”.

Anyway, the concert was great. One observation — a very different crowd from the one you’d see at Joe’s Pub. Lots of people in their 50s, and lots of teenagers. I don’t know if that’s subscription based (i.e., people who live in the area might get subscriptions to see all the shows at the Music Hall), since the crowd seemed to know the band. We’ll see if that holds up on other shows.