By Kim Barker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Grace Ashford and Sarah Cohen
When Neri Carranza went to see the apartment on
West 109th Street in Manhattan, she folded money into the pocket of her
blue jacket, just in case she liked the place. This would be the first
apartment she had ever looked at, the first time she could make a home
of her own, paid for with the earnings from her first job, at a glass
factory. And the apartment was exactly as her friend from church had
described it: small but comfortable.
So on a freezing Sunday in 1956, Ms. Carranza,
then 32, with a crown of black hair and a fierce desire for
independence, moved into the narrow two-bedroom apartment. She made it
her own, cleaning and decorating every Sunday, planting yellow roses and
hot-pink geraniums in window boxes, painting the walls white when they
needed a new coat. As landlords came and went, Ms. Carranza stayed,
becoming a fixture in the largely Latino neighborhood.
“I had everything I ever wanted,” Ms. Carranza said.
But one day in 2010, when she was 87, Ms.
Carranza learned that her new landlord wanted to evict her for what
seemed like the most nonsensical reason: She supposedly didn’t live in
her own beloved home.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The New York Times (via Empire Report New York)
No comments:
Post a Comment