THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 MB 5In March, Kimberly Brown, a meditation
teacher from Jackson Heights, Queens, was
writing a book and regularly consulting in
person with her editor, Alice Peck. When the
pandemic hit, they moved their meetings to
Zoom.
A few months into the quarantine, Ms.
Brown noticed that Ms. Peck, who usually
Zoomed from the dining-room table of her
home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, suddenly ap-
peared from a very different location. Ms.
Brown, who was feeling cooped up, working
from her bedroom all day, was floored when
she saw the expansive space her editor was
calling from: “I was like, ‘Where the heck
are you?’ ”
Like many Americans lucky enough to
work remotely, Ms. Peck and Ms. Brown
had to carve out office space in their homes.
But while suburbanites may have garages,
basements or even spare rooms, New York-
ers in tighter spaces generally have to get a
little more creative. Some have found solace
in a neighbor’s empty apartment, an un-
used therapist’s office or even a hotel room.
Ms. Peck was used to working from
home, which she was already doing before
the pandemic. On occasion, she would work
from a library or cafe, and she conducted in-
person meetings from a co-working space
in Midtown Manhattan. But with her hus-
band, a production coordinator for a maga-
zine, and her young-adult son home all the
time, she lost her focus. It didn’t help that
she could hear her next door neighbor, a
music teacher, giving lessons online.
“I’m used to being alone all day,” said Ms.
Peck, who is an independent book editor
and a writer. “You would just start to get go-
ing with work, writing that perfect sen-
tence, when someone would ask, ‘Do we
have any bagels?’ ”
Fed up, Ms. Peck looked for a quiet space
to work. She first asked a real estate agent
for help but didn’t like what she was shown.
Then she saw an ad in the Listings Project, a
weekly real estate newsletter, for an art stu-
dio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Normally occu-
pied by an illustrator and two filmmakers,
the space had a soaring 20-foot ceiling but
was being used for storage.
“My productivity level soared,” said Ms.
Peck, who is now back at home after losing
the lease at the end of September. Currently,
she has taken to working in her small back-
yard; she said she might look for a new
space once the weather became colder.
Luciana Golcman, a portrait photogra-
pher known for her shots of babies smash-
ing cakes, used to drop off her two children,
now ages 2 and 5, at day care, then she
would return to her two-bedroom apart-
ment in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town and
convert the living room into a photo studio.
But when the pandemic hit, all of a sudden
she was sharing her makeshift work space
with her husband, who is a trader, as well as
the children. “There were Cheerios every-
where,” she said. So Ms. Golcman tempo-
rarily shut down her business.
But a few months later, families started
contacting Ms. Golcman again for photo
sessions. She knew she had to find a space
of her own. Noticing all the moving trucks in
her neighborhood, she announced what she
was looking for on a parent email list.
A friend who had left the city for the sum-
mer saw the request and offered Ms. Golc-
man her apartment in Peter Cooper Village
for free until school started. When the fam-
ily returned, Ms. Golcman consecutively
found two other empty apartments in Stuy-
vesant Town, both of which had been re-
cently vacated but still had time on their
leases. One former tenant gave the space up
for free, while the other charged Ms. Gol-
cman about $200 a week.
Although each new work space has been
temporary, Ms. Golcman said the arrange-
ments had given her some peace to forge
ahead with her work. “I worked really hard
to get my own business off the ground, so
I’m proud of myself for keeping it afloat dur-
ing a pandemic,” she said.
In July, John Hennegan, a sports docu-
mentary filmmaker and videographer,
found himself in a bind. He had just re-
turned from a work trip but then had to
quickly start working on a documentary
about horse racing. His usual office space,
however, a desk in the living room of his
three-bedroom apartment in Windsor Ter-
race, Brooklyn, wasn’t available. His wife
and his sister-in-law had commandeered it.
He realized if he stayed home, he would-
n’t finish the documentary. So Mr. Hen-
negan booked a room for three nights at the
Arlo SoHo, for $140 a night (pre-pandemic,
its rooms were going for $260 a night). The
hotel room was spotless, he said, and he
could make calls at all hours of the day and
night with his production team. He shopped
for food at a nearby Trader Joe’s and ran
along the Hudson River for exercise.
“The hotel worked because I wasn’t there
for room service or leisure, so social dis-
tancing wasn’t a concern for me,” Mr. Hen-
negan said. “Working from home isn’t usu-
ally an issue, but I have to admit, sometimes
it’s hectic, like a 24-hour diner.”
With tourism down, many hotels are ad-
vertising that their rooms can be used as of-
fices. The Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, reconfigured six rooms into of-
fices. At AKA, a long-term stay hotel, two
firms in finance and consulting booked a
block of suites in its Times Square and Cen-
tral Park locations for their employees, said
Larry Korman, the hotel firm’s president.
There are also empty therapist’s offices
across the city, as telehealth has become the
norm. Teresa Stern, a licensed clinical so-
cial worker, didn’t want to give up her
$2,200-a-month office with river views in
Brooklyn Heights, which she described as
“one of the best she’s ever had.” So she sub-
leased.
First she found Michael Randazzo, who
worked there for five weeks this summer.
Mr. Randazzo, now a freelance writer after
losing his job at Long Island University ear-
lier this year, said he wanted a quiet space to
finish a writing project. But with his wife, a
private school administrator, and two
teenage children at home all day in theirtwo-bedroom apartment in Fort Greene,
Brooklyn, Mr. Randazzo needed privacy.
Mr. Randazzo, who paid about $600 for
five weeks, managed to spend as much as
six hours a day writing and the rest of the
time conducting interviews, he said. “Rent-
ing Teresa’s space was a highlight” of an
otherwise challenging time, he said. “The
amount of work I got done, plus the view
from her office, was priceless.”
Now a film director has agreed to rent
Ms. Stern’s space. She is relieved, she said:
“I know plenty of therapists who would love
to sublet their space because many land-lords are not cutting us a break.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Brown, the meditation
teacher, finished her book and started writ-
ing another one. As her husband, a software
developer, has taken over the living room of
their one-bedroom apartment with “his
multiple screens,” she said, she needs a
change of pace. She is thinking about rent-
ing a space at the Queensboro, a restaurant
in her Jackson Heights neighborhood that is
offering work space (and includes lunch).
The pandemic, she said, has forced her to
practice what she teaches: mindfulness and
self-compassion.A Desperate Search to Work Anywhere but Home
Cramped New Yorkers are
renting hotel rooms, empty
offices and vacant apartments.
By KAYA LATERMANABOVE AND LEFT, KAYA LATERMANLuciana Golcman, left, a
photographer, temporarily set
up her studio this summer in a
friend’s vacant Manhattan
apartment, above, and later
worked from two other
apartments, one for a fee. In
July, a filmmaker checked into
the Arlo SoHo, below, for three
days to finish his work.The pandemic set off a
space race among remote
workers and students.DAVE SANDERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESYOUR
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