Last week I moved apartments into my second New York City apartment. I left my 5th floor walkup and now reside in an elevator condo. I can't tell you how long I've been looking forward to living with an elevator. It is a New York right of passage to live in a pre war building with a questionable layout, noisy heating pipes, and of course, a single winding stairwell as the sole means of transcending to your apartment.
The challenges
A walk up presents a number of challenges. Carrying things up is hugely difficult. Both a weekly grocery haul and a one-time new couch are challenging and can leave you huffing and puffing at the end (and potentially a sore back the next day). Carrying my bike back up to the 5th floor after biking over one of the bridges in the summer time filled me with dismay as I shouldered the bike and made my way up. A walk up is also is challenging for elders, kids, or disabled people to make it up and down. Finally, if you are not intentional, you find yourself making extra trips to grab the mail or throw something out in the garbage bins on the ground floor.
What I miss
While I've discovered that an elevator alleviates most of these pains, I've also been surprised by some of the things that I miss about the stairwell in my walk up; the main thing being how the open stairwell connected the building and made the barriers between floors permeable. The caveat of an elevator is that each floor is fully isolated. While this means that you have less visitors on your floor, it also feels more isolated. The identical hallways that open up from the elevator feel hotel-y; too uniform and orderly to be a home. In my old walk up, every unit's door opened to the tight stairwell. Now this isn't always a plus; if someone is being noisy in the hallway like taking a call, the echo booms for several entire floors to hear. But the plus side is that there is common space shared by all within that compact stair shaft. Nearly everyone traverses the first flight of stairs and knows what each of the lower floors look like. In my new elevator building, I have yet to run into anyone else in the halls. There was a collective understanding of the struggle of lugging things up and down that started many spontaneous conversations in the stairwell.
Advice
I'm looking forward to discovering more differences in building living in the coming months and seasons. But for now, here is some advice I have for moving into a walk up:
Introduce yourself to your neighbors: you will frequently run into them in the stairwell or in the neighborhood. Don't be a stranger. They may lend you a hand if you need help. Furthermore, saying hello to another friendly face will improve your days. Having friendly faces in the building will undoubtedly make your life better.
Invite company over: Although your friends may be unenthused about making the trek up the stairs, the effort makes it memorable. Lay the foundation to create memories with those closest to you. What will your friends think of when they say "Remember when we lived in that walkup..."
Make the most of your trips: If the climb is arduous, be intentional about when you do it. If you're already leaving the house to go to work, take the garbage out too so you don't have to make another trip when you get home later.
Don't be loud in your hallways: While the connectedness of the stairwell is nice, you don't want to be that neighbor. Sound travels and nothing is fully sound proof in New York.