On March 8th, Bibi Farber announced on Facebook to her friends and community that she would be moving out of her 2,400 square foot apartment at the Apthorp. Her family had lived there for 56 years! Full of memories and planning for her future, Bibi was ready to say goodbye … but not like this. Since life in the city has changed so drastically, it has not been the send off Bibi was hoping for. In her own words, she tells us about what life has been like trying to move in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.
Bibi wishes to emphasize that the building manager at The Apthorp and all the staff have been doing an outstanding job keeping the residents safe during this surreal time, and she and her family are grateful for their service now and through the years.
It was already the most disruptive undertaking my family could possibly imagine – leaving our grand apartment in The Apthorp after 56 years.
The Apthorp is the gigantic fortress of a building that takes up the whole block between 78th and 79th Street and Broadway to West End Ave. Step into the courtyard and there are four different lobbies, leading to 154 unique, enormous luxury apartments.
When my parents moved in in 1964 the rent on the sprawling UWS apartment was $365/month. They loved the 3 bedroom, 3 bath urban palace with 12 foot ceilings and a marble mosaic floor in the foyer.
I was a year old and my sister was on the way, so they moved in from a one bedroom across the street on West End Avenue. Easy as that!
My father, radio broadcaster Barry Farber, was 34 years old when he moved in.
On March 21st of 2020, a few weeks shy of 90, he was hustled quickly out into a car by masked doormen in the courtyard as we moved him and his wife in the middle of the unfolding coronavirus crisis.
We took a buy-out that had been in the works for more than a year. Meaning we surrender our rent-stabilized lease in exchange for a sum of money. As with many seniors who wish to remain independent, the escalating expenses require not one but several large pots of gold. Fortunately for us, we found them another place in the neighborhood.
There’s a House on the Roof of this Upper West Side Building
The paperwork was finalized in early March. Our contract has us out of here, broom swept by April 30th.
We got them out at the last minute. The building management hesitantly agreed, before what would become a complete lockdown, that we were allowed to hire movers, donning masks and gloves, to move out as quickly as possible.
We slapped neon post-its on furniture (which) the movers rushed into the truck. They were likely the last outside contractors allowed on the property.
The Apthorp then ushered in a complete lockdown. Most of our family stuff – and all of my personal stuff — didn’t make it.
So we both have to move and are not allowed to actually complete the move.
I had moved into my childhood home last year, to help with this herculean task. I wanted to salvage my father’s vast archives of work. There’s plenty of published writing – a weekly editorial column since the 1970s. Audio? I’m coming across literally every recording format known to man – from acetate discs (an early type of phonograph records) to two track reels to cassettes to DAT tapes, CDs to hard drives with mp3’s, mini cassettes, mini disks and more. Decades of letters, awards, boxes of photographs, hundreds of books, thousands of little pieces of paper he uses to trigger stories to tell, anecdotes, and of course language learning. Barry Farber is a student of 26 languages and has taught and published books on the subject.
Yesterday (April 9th), the building staff were outraged at me. I had someone – donning a mask and gloves – help me remove a chest of drawers. My first crime was that I didn’t know that even moving ONE item through the courtyard would potentially upset residents, as it is “exposure to risk”. My far larger crime was that I didn’t know that no one who was not a resident was allowed in The Apthorp. The guard came up to our door demanding my guest leave immediately. He stayed there, on a walkie-talkie with the super, very angry at me, until the man was gone.
It was as if I had let a monster into the castle.
“No one is allowed inside the building! I’m even turning away dog walkers!” the building manager told me.
Of course I want to comply. The LAST thing I want to do is incur more risk for anyone. The last thing I WANT to do is move right now.
When I explained that my father and his wife have already moved, but I have not, I was told to “Only take what is essential”. I’m thinking OK, blow up mattress, coffee maker, laptop, a pot and pan, my guitar and my pet rabbit Boxer, some clothes. Wait but… until when? June or beyond?
The Old Apthorp Mansion of the Upper West Side
I’m stuck here with A LOT of stuff. At first I was told that I can’t have ANYONE help me, not even friends or family members with masks and gloves. Even if I did get clearance for anyone to help me, I must foot the bill for a full decontamination spray treatment of the lobby. I was told they don’t want me to move out any furniture.
“But I’m paying rent as of April 1st in Astoria! And I need to meet the terms of our buy-out!” I plead.
Moving companies are allowed to operate as it is considered “essential” by New York City guidelines. But I’m not allowed to move.
In this most glorious family headquarters, more than 50 years of life unfolded. We grew up riding bikes and playing softball in the courtyard. We trick-or-treated through all four wings. We’ve had a dozen cats, 2 hamsters, a dog, rabbits and goldfish from Woolworths back in the day. My sister Celia had her wedding reception here. Holiday parties for half a century, Thanksgiving feasts, graduations, and hundreds of birthday celebrations. My nephew and his friends took over our trick-or-treating route in the 1990s.
College Graduation day, 1987: Bibi with her father in the courtyard.
Halloween in the 1960s
Barry Farber has been married three times. I sit literally amongst fragments of all our family members, living and deceased. My mother’s ashes still sit in an urn on the bookshelf. Her household decorations, linens and Scandinavian touch grace our everyday lives even 20 years later. His second wife’s antique chandeliers hang in all the rooms, though they have been divorced since the 1980s. My American grand mother’s china and silver are in my impossibly large KEEP piles, and we have furniture from our great grandmother on the Swedish side.
The plan was to empty the apartment- broom swept – by April 30th.
I look out onto a desolate Broadway from the maid’s room, the room off of the kitchen. This was my room, where I used to blast The Who’s “Who’s Next” every morning before going to 6th grade in 1975.
Expensive Upper West Side Buildings with Naughty Celebrity Stories
I wonder as I try to pack up apartment 3A: will anyone ever live here again for 56 years? Will anyone ever move in between their first and second child and move out … at age 90?
When we moved in you could live here comfortably on a broadcaster’s salary. Whenever I get our stuff out, it will be slapped into shape and go on the market for over 4 million dollars.
As of this writing, the building has agreed to let me have one assistant to help get my stuff out. It has to be someone who already works for my father and his wife. So that would be either a radio producer or a home health aide. I’ll take what I can get.
We are now redefining “broom swept”. Because I can’t move out the rest of the family stuff, the new plan is to surrender the keys but leave everything, boxed up and organized, until some undetermined point in the future when the restrictions lift.
I’m alone in 2,400 square feet, when people all over the world are losing their minds in cramped homes with families that can’t get away from each other.
It’s absurd, surreal and heartbreaking. I have to move, but I’m not allowed to move.
The term Catch-22 could not be more apt. Joseph Heller and family lived right here, in our A wing, on the 7th floor, 4 stories up from us, where he wrote the book.
Every day the staff sprays disinfectant on all the garbage dumpsters, and holds a cheering session at 7:00pm in the courtyard, waving the American flag at either end.
I had envisioned grand farewell parties, full of live music, friends from near and far. Now I’m not even able to hug goodbye the neighbors I’ve known since the 1960s. I’ll just have to come back sometime in the future, when they let non-residents enter The Apthorp.
As of 5pm on Thursday, April 9th, Bibi was given clearance to move the following day. We wish her the best during this difficult time and are thankful to her for sharing her story.
Bibi Farber is a musician and songwriter who’s family has lived in the Apthorp since 1964. www.bibifarber.com
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My late father attended Barry Farber’s Language Club at the Apthorp for many years on Saturday nights.
Great reporting, heartfelt. I remember well your father’s broadcasts that my dad used to listen to every day from our home in Teaneck. Now I’m down the block from the Apthorp here in NYC and I am wishing him — and you — all the best. And thanks to him for all those radio memories.
This woman seems to be quite a bit tone deaf to the utter devastation this virus is bringing onto neighbors in our beloved city.
Pain is pain. It’s not productive now ( or ever )to rank other’s experiences. There needs to be room for this west Siders history and story now.
One need to negate the other.
Typo: Need not negate the other.
People are dying. Leaving your mansion in a speedy manner is not important. This is not about you.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Ms. Farber knows people affected by the tragedy as so many of us in NYC have, and I don’t understand how you interpret that she wouldn’t have compassion for others. I found the account touching and a realistic moment in time from a surreal chapter in our city’s history, and 2400 sq. feet doesn’t sound like a mansion to me; well, since my studio is probably 400 sq. feet, 2400 sounds BIG, but I thought the point was that a family had history there and the market forces and coronavirus converging create a sad ending to a personal story. I hope it’s not long before she can hug her old neighbors.
The arrogance and heartlessness of the new ownership pervades everything they do. Several months ago while carrying out some building work with a crane, they blocked the sidewalk — half the block — well into the roadway, on West End and diverted pedestrians out to the busy street with no orange cones or other barriers to protect against traffic. I was rushing to the bus stop at 79th and Broadway, with a clearly visible injured foot. I turned to walk through the precious preserve of the courtyard when I was blocked by a very big, very surly guard. I explained that I needed to get to the bus stop, didn’t want to walk out into traffic. He refused. Clearly I was a threat – a short, older woman who would no doubt have invaded the sacred precincts to pillage and rob. i pleaded my case, and had decided to go anyway (would he risk an assault?) when a passerby offered to walk me through the road and back to safety. I really weighed the options: it would have been satisfying to defy him but I had to get to an appointment. in the end, I went with the good New Yorker…but that is now the hulking, privileged presence of the Aphthorp.
Are you trying to say that they been still paying $365/month until now 2020?
No, Lubomir, but they were probably paying those pitiful yearly rent-controlled increases that this duo of socialist NYC and NYS governments allotted. The current communist in charge, DeBlasio, is one of the worst, forcing owners not only to undiscriminately subsidize their tenants but also limiting the owners more and more by outright communist rules and regulations (should not the government, logically, subsidize needy tenants, and not force the private owners to do it for them?), regardless if the tenants are rich or poor, or if they work for their living or not. If they were to remove the rent regulations, hundreds of city and state bureaucrats, implementing these absurd laws, would lose their jobs (thus saving the city a lot of money) and the market rents would naturally go down, making those rents more affordable to newcomers in NYC. I assume you also come from Central Europe, as I did 44 years ago, fleeing communism just with the clothes on my back. My husband (also originally from Eastern Europe) and I achieved comfortable living, only and only by hard work – which this privileged lady obviously did not have to do, since she and her family always paid peanuts for a luxurious apartment! On top of that, she received a pay-off of millions of $$ from the landlord – and now complains that she also has to pay rent in Astoria! How much more perverse can one get in pursuing the communist ideology? The communists in the old country stole from my family everything my family gained through hard work, while my father ended up in prison as a political prisoner, and on top of it we were locked up behind the Iron Curtain – we were very impoverished through all that. DeBlasio is defying the laws of free enterprise (a value so very American, otherwise, which I came here for as well!) by denying the rights of private ownership, similar to what the raving, Castro-loving Sanders was planning to implement here, in the the US, thus he would be setting a stage for another Venezuela… I do not like any parasites, whether they are rent-controlled or stabilized tenants, able-bodied welfare recipients or young, naive and short-sighted voters, mislead by Bernie’s promise of unlimited free handouts… Yes, we are now living in the midst of a horrible pandemic and DeBlasio is promising rent-free living for 3 months. How could a small owner afford to pay for all his expenses (especially for DeBlasio’s outrageous real estate taxes) and provide proper services to his tenants, particularly if he also cannot rent out his vacant apartments now? This Farber lady is crying over her furniture, while most of us are struggling not only economically, but mainly are witnessing friends and family getting sick and even dying around us! How sad!
Rents would not drop. What bs. Why would they? There are by 27 thousand rent stabilized apt in NYC. And around 3.5 million apartments. How will that even make a dent. NYC wouldn’t be in the shit shape it is if we didn’t treat our middle income families like shit.They should be protected from greed. Not the other way around. Your family was treated horribly by the communist. Why would you wish the same on others and justify it by saying it’s anti free trade. We have anti trust laws to keep monopolies down in this country that is so the rich don’t take to much control. You are insane if you think these companies give to shits about anything other then money. That is the point of a company. To make money. It’s the government’s job to keep it in check. The owner of these rent stabilized apartments buy them for 25 cents on the dollar so don’t feel bad for them. And They would dance on the rent stabilized people graves if given half a chance and have taken away everything American stand for. And that is the American dream. A dream that you have a right to do better for your children then your parents did for you.
These apartments buildings are not owed by mom and dads they are owed by huge companies That’s a monopoly. Not free trade.
You are very ignorant about basic economics.
If rent regulation laws were eradicated then yes, some people’s rent would go up but the vast majority of people’s rents would go down.
Furthermore, both the quality and quantity of housing stock would go up.
There is no excuse for wealthy people living decades in a giant apartment in a luxury building and paying a pittance in rent then getting a huge payout when they mercifully leave.
This distorts the market and hurts everyone else.
This is hard to read. I don’t know the Farbers and I understand that change, particularly now, can be hard. I do empathize with that. But really? People are dying alone. Many at home. Individuals have lost incomes with no immediate support to provide food for themselves or their families. This is just a classic person of privilege with a woe is me story that is hard to take right now in light of the real suffering people are enduring.
Wow. Anti-Semitic much?
I see your code words.
Typical U.W.S snob turd of a being
Really? Lots of people lost their jobs, are battling the virus, others are risking their lives and you’re complaining about leaving a basically “rent free“ apartment in a luxury building that you can’t afford plus you’re getting a huge amount of money for the courtesy of vacating … Give me a break. Get real and devote time to humane causes.
Since moving to the UWS almost a year ago, I have been struck by the level of self-pity and anger at the least little change (oh, my favorite deli that I’ve shopped at for 50 years is closing – how inconsiderate that the owners died of old age). If I lived in an apartment bigger than a suburban split level for way, way less than market price my whole life, honestly, I’d be ashamed to whine so publicly, especially with now with grief and death engulfing the city. Well, change is here – even in Astoria. Better hope that buy-out was big enough to cocoon you in another alternate reality.
This piece reminds me so much of Nora Ephron’s New Yorker article on leaving the Apthorp, and they are both equally frustrating and entitled. I know and admire every one of the kind and generous staff members who work in the Apthorp, especially the building manager described by Ms Farber. In order to protect staff members and residents, to effectively social distance, and do everything possible to contain the spread of Covid 19 in the city of New York, the employees in the building have been cut to less than half, and special rules regarding guests, gatherings, and cleaning/disinfecting were put in place weeks ago. Those rules include no visitors (friends or family), no household employees, etc. I sure hope Ms. Farber doesn’t go around hugging her neighbors before her departure! Yes, we clap for the skeletal staff from our windows–for the employees commuting on the subways and working their asses off so residents, including Ms. Farber, get mail, packages, security, and garbage removal. To so gingerly write a piece about her buy-out, her “pot of gold,” for a rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan, in the midst of a global pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, is not only tone-deaf, but incredibly obnoxious.
Than you 🙂
This family has been living in a ginormous 2,400 square foot apartment in a luxury building since 1964 and paying a pittance in rent.
Now that the family is finally leaving they will be rewarded with a huge “buy-out”.
It’s a disgrace that these people – who are clearly not poor – have been living with these entitlements while other people struggle to support much smaller apartments.
This family is greedy and has been abusing a corrupt system for decades. People like this are the reason NYC has housing affordability issues.
The day of the rope is coming.
Horrible person. Why print this crap?
Wow….talk about 1st world problems. The world is crashing, people are dying, small businesses will be devastated and lives ruined. You can’t get your furniture out of your apartment? You should be embarrassed that you even published this garbage.
I’m so glad people are ripping this lady, so I don’t have to 🙂
Just because others are suffering doesn’t mean the writer doesn’t deserve some sympathy–after all, “people are starving in India” and all that. Leaving after 56 years has to be a fraught, sentimental experience, as she nicely expressed. Her parents moved to the UWS at a time when things in the city weren’t looking very rosy–they didn’t call it the Wild West for nothing. Real estate was going for nothing then, and may I remind everything that anybody who bought or rented for decades made out pretty well financially. It’s not like the Farbers are the only ones who got a payout (not necessarily a “pot of gold”) for relinquishing a huge, glorious apartment. Not to mention that her father was one of the talented, unique people who made the UWS the special place it was then and, because of economic and cultural changes, is not now.
No they aren’t the only ones profiting off of a rent controlled apartment,
no they aren’t the only ones getting a buy out,
no they aren’t the only ones that moved to the UWS when it was unsafe.
YES, SHE is the only one complaining about not having a send off party, during a global pandemic in a neighborhood where some people are moving out of their apartments in a BODY BAG.
It is selfish, there is no excuse (not even the starving people in India argument works here.)
Thank you EB. Much appreciated.!
Moving is an essential service. And if your leaving why the heck would you even care and dare them to try and stop you
Some people commenting on this article can’t seem to hold two thoughts at the same time: 1) there is the covid crisis, somewhat worse than the normal flu season, and 2) someone’s family’s plans have been thrown into turmoil — another of the million compelling stories coursing through the Big Apple at any point in time, and Bibi did not reveal the worst of it. To imagine that Bibi, as compassionate and caring person as I’ve ever known beside maybe my departed mother, doesn’t care about suffering and death due to the covid crap is crazy talk. You don’t know her if you are saying anything like that and you should just shut up and maybe turn in some unfortunate on the street who doesn’t have a face mask. Maybe that will make you feel better. Don’t take your fear, anger and jealousy out on an exemplary person. Thank you.
James Schaefer, well said.
James Schaefer, well said.
1) The coronavirus is unlike anything in our lifetime, it is far deadlier than the flu, far deadlier than any flu season. Even for younger people, the difference is striking. Flu killed .02% of infected patients age 18-49 – It’s 10 -15 times that for COVID-19. Our healthcare system doesn’t have the capacity to deal with this. The world is shut down. We’re putting bodies in freezer trucks. Remind me during last years flu season did we turn the Javits center into a field hospital?
2) Comparing the novel coronavirus to the flu is dangerously inaccurate and only a sad argument to support you excusing this absolutely tone deaf article. Sometimes we have to admit when our friends are wrong, and move on.
3) This isn’t turmoil. Turmoil is the thousands of family members grieving the untimely death of their loved ones. Not money grabbing a huge payout.
4) No one is jealous of your friend, we’re ashamed of her.
Hope this reality check helps you.
I am in complete agreement with James Schaefer. I have known Bibi for years and she is an astonishingly compassionate and caring person. Her account is very personal of course– one of many varied and extraordinary stories of living and coping in the current worldwide pandemic. I’m hoping that many more are written and published as our sharing of such stories can be both heartwarming and healing.
Wait a minute: This story was meant to highlight an absurd and heartbreaking situation. I did not mean to say that any person or policy within the Apthorp had ill intent or was not doing EXACTLY what they were supposed to do.
My attempt was to juxtapose the elements of stability and sense of safety that came from a lifetime in The Apthorp, with the chaos and panic that the Corona era brings.
It is the Bizarre Situation, rife with heightened tension and potential for misunderstanding, that I intended to poke fun at — not the individuals and not the restrictions and policies. The Apthorp did of course, promptly make accommodations so that I could move. They did work with me.
We are all on edge these days. Stressed, short tempered, more humorless and we’ve lost our sense of footing. Yes, I had an edgy experience. Yes, I wrote from an edgy place.
I regret that this has been interpreted as insensitive to the staff. I am honestly and deeply grateful to them and impressed every day that they are here at all. They are doing their absolute best to protect us.
This piece was written in haste and stress, and I failed to properly bracket the telling of this ludicrous incident with the praise and appreciation for the men who take care of The Apthorp.
To those who feel this writing reflects someone out of touch, “tone deaf” with the suffering in our city, I have this to offer: Not all writing in the time of Corona is going to be a journalistic report of the whole scope of the horror. Creative expressions will be coming from all over the spectrum. During the Vietnam War, not every song written was a proper Protest Song. Would you have complained to the songwriter of “Last Train To Clarksville”, a pop song recorded by The Monkees? Would you harshly say that they didn’t REALLY deal with the war? What fluff! It’s about some girl that’s supposed to get to a train station to see the guy. Are they tone deaf to the fact their generation is being killed in Vietnam? The only way you even know this jangly upbeat song is even about Vietnam is the hook: “And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home” It’s an enduring tune, and it gets the point across –with just this one brilliant innocent line, nestled in a love song.
Indeed my piece is not about the bigger picture of the suffering in the city. It’s a love song about one family, one absurdity, one week in time.
I remain grateful to the staff at The Apthorp, for keeping us safe and going above and beyond, always.
Bibi Farber
“The Apthorp did of course, promptly make accommodations so that I could move. They did work with me.”
That didn’t come through in the article. Nice of you to point it out.
“During the Vietnam War, not every song written was a proper Protest Song.”
I know that. The Ballad of the Green Berets was a huge hit. So what? The article was about the impact of COVID19 on you, and us, but the tone of the article was about what a poor little victim you are.
Did Barry Farber die of the virus? That would be ironic, as Celia Farber, Bibi Farber’s older sister, is a coronavirus denier
Wow. Holy moly. UFB. I don’t think I could have even imagined, let alone written about publicly and without profound shame, this absurdly ultra-privileged life in a manner which seems to beg for ‘poor, woe is me’ attention. So you had a tough week in over half a century living in the type of luxury literally most people on the planet will never even have the opportunity to see, let alone experience? Good grief. Get over yourself and get just a tiny clue about actual, real problems. Again, just, WOW.
I don’t know Bibi Barber. I found her story moving. Why it has elicited so many acid comments is beyond me.
I pass the Apthorp often and always think of my friend, Bel Kaufman, the writer and granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem who lived there.
And to Anna: Barry Farber was a conservative radio host who was a staunch anti-communist. And I wish you would not spread untruths about Bernie Sanders, a good man.