Downtown

Composer Philip Glass in the March issue of Details:

Q: I understand that in your early days as a composer, you rented a Manhattan loft for 30 bucks.
A: It was down in the Fulton fish market. I paid $30 a month. My friends paid $25, and they thought that I had betrayed the community by allowing the rent to be pushed up that high. I was deeply apologetic for having destabilized the neighborhood.

I decided to do a little recreational house-hunting on Sunday afternoon to see if the Manhattan housing market is really as resilient as it's cracked up to be.

My experience hunting for a rental apartment downtown in August had been thoroughly depressing—I did not see a single inhabitable apartment for under $3,000 a month and even then, the choice was between living in a shoebox or in a grungy, amenity-free condo. After reading all the 2007 year-end market reports released by the brokerage firms during the past few weeks, I braced myself for the house-hunting malaise familiar to most New Yorkers. But it never came.  read more »