14 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
medical researchers around the world.
She stopped at a loading dock to over-
see a shipment for Boston. Technicians
in protective gear were standing at a con-
veyor belt, ferrying rows of semi-opaque
plastic boxes—each housing mice de-
signed for COVID-19—out of the build-
ing. They were transferring them into
an eighteen-wheeler. As they worked, it
was possible to see outlines of the mice
scurrying around inside. Lutz headed
out, and the truck departed. “We all rec-
ognize the sacrifice of these animals,”
she said. “If you work here long enough,
you develop a sense of gratitude.”
—Raffi Khatchadourian
1
SIDEGIG
A M E R I C A’SLANDLORD
I
t was a three-story yellow clapboard
house in Park Slope, with blue French
doors and southern exposures. There
were three bedrooms—easily convert-
ible to four—and amenities such as a
dishwasher and a soaker hose for the
back garden (herbs, rose of Sharon, a
dwarf crab-apple tree). The rent was
reasonable: four thousand nine hundred
and fifty dollars a month. And it was
only a five-minute walk to the Prospect
Park Y.M.C.A.
“It felt like a bit of a fixer-upper,” Ju-
lian Hornik, a twenty-five-year-old the-
atre composer, said. “But it was a whole
house, and it was in our price range. We
could clean it up and make it lovely.”
Hornik and his roommates—Lauren
Modiano, who also works in theatre,
and Spencer Bokat-Lindell, an editor
at the Times—were looking to move
out of their six-hundred-and-fifty-
square-foot apartment in the neighbor-
hood. “There’s an upright piano in our
living room that Julian uses for work,”
Bokat-Lindell explained. “When both
Lauren and I were working in offices,
this wasn’t an issue. But, now that we’re
all confined to the same workspace, it’s
not really tenable, because my room,
like, abuts the piano.”
When they saw the listing on Street-
Easy for the yellow house, which had
three times more space than their cur-
wrote. “Your combined income would
need a guarantor and they said they are
not comfortable with that rental situa-
tion.” The friends were puzzled: their
combined incomes were more than forty
times the monthly rent, a typical thresh-
old for New York City landlords. Hornik,
looking through public records, found
that de Blasio’s pre-mayoral salary was
comparable to what he and his room-
mates earned. On the other hand, the
lease was for only one year: de Blasio
will be out of office by the end of 2021,
and even though he and his wife are
empty nesters, perhaps they will move
back into the yellow house.
The roommates found another place
in Park Slope. It’s about the same square
footage as de Blasio’s house, but there’s
no back yard. It’s above Haenyeo, one of
their favorite restaurants. The landlord
is a lady named Janice. “As far as I know,
she’s a normal person,” Bokat-Lindell
said. “She’s at least not the mayor.”
—Tyler Foggatt
Bill de Blasio
rent place, Hornik e-mailed the broker,
Trisha Webster, a former body-parts
model. (Her hands have been used as
stand-ins for Farrah Fawcett’s.) When
Webster called, she had a lot of questions.
“She asked, ‘Why are you moving?’ ”
Hornik said. “ ‘Who are you moving
with? How do you know your room-
mates? How long have you lived to-
gether? What do you do? How much
do you make?’ ” She told him that he
and his friends seemed like “decent can-
didates” for the house and offered to
show it to them if they all signed non-
disclosure agreements.
“Do you know who the landlord is?”
she asked. They did not. She said, “Well,
it’s the Mayor.”
“As soon as I found that out, I was
like, O.K., I don’t think this is going
to work,” Bokat-Lindell said. He con-
tacted the standards editor at the Times
and asked, “What is the policy about
renting an apartment from the Mayor?”
(The gist of the response: If you can
avoid taking the place, that’d be great.)
Bill de Blasio bought the yellow house
on Eleventh Street in 2000, for four hun-
dred and fifty thousand dollars. (It’s now
worth more than $1.5 million.) It was
his family’s primary residence before
they moved into Gracie Mansion, in
- It is not the only property that de
Blasio rents out; he also owns a two-fam-
ily house, down the block, where his late
mother lived, and where he now has two
sets of tenants. The upstairs one-bed-
room unit (dressing alcove, subway-tiled
bathroom) goes for eighteen hundred
and twenty-five dollars a month, and
the ground-floor apartment (E.I.K., three
ceiling fans, no pets) goes for two thou-
sand nine hundred and fifty. Webster
was the rental agent for both.
Bokat-Lindell was surprised to hear
that the Mayor had a side gig as a land-
lord. The notion of signing an N.D.A.
just to look at the place made him un-
easy. He wondered, he said, if there was
also “going to be a clause in the lease
saying that you can’t talk about your
landlord.” But his roommates were ex-
cited about the house—the back yard!—
so they submitted their paperwork to
Webster, planning to sign the confiden-
tiality agreement in person.
The next morning, Webster sent them
an e-mail. “I’ve spoken to the Landlord
about your inquiry to see the house,” she
1
U.K.POSTCARD
ROOMSWITHAVIEW
“
T
he house wants doing up—and
the wallpapers are awful,” Vir-
ginia Woolf wrote to her sister, Va-
nessa Bell, during the midst of the
First World War, about a farmhouse
