Our Year in the City of Binghamton

   
I mentioned in the previous post that I had some funny stories from our two years spent living in Binghamton, brought on by the mention of Speidie Sauce, a "Southern Tier" favorite.  That was 15 years ago, but I'll tell ya, some of those memories are as fresh as yesterday.

As I mentioned, we got married and moved to Binghamton so DH could finish his computer science degree at Binghamton University.  It was difficult to look for an apartment beforehand, not only because we lived three hours away, but it was the countdown to our wedding as well, and we were very busy.  We had traveled out one weekend and looked at a bunch of places.  We weren't terribly thrilled with our choices - we tried to look at very inexpensive places since we had no idea what my income would be - and a lot of the apartments there are in old houses, mostly lived in by college students.  We called on our first choice, but it was no longer available.  There was really only one other apartment that we would even consider of those we looked at, so we called on that one and got it.  We rented a moving truck and had friends and family help us load it up (didn't use a moving company, no luxury like moving companies Los Angeles or anything like that - in fact we've never used professional movers).

The one redeeming feature of this apartment was the landlord - a friendly, wonderful woman with whom we're still friends with today.  The apartment was a 1 bedroom, 1 bath 2nd floor apartment in an old house.  Located one street over from probably the worst street in the city of Binghamton.  Which unfortunately we did not know right away.  The rent was $360 and included all utilities.  Because it was created from a house, it had a bit of a weird layout - you had to walk through the bathroom to get to the bedroom.  The kitchen had no countertops or cabinets.  The only "surface" to lay anything was on the drainboard next to the old sink.  We always had plenty of heat (radiators), but hot water was another story.  If someone else in the house (there were 2 other apartments) used the hot water when we were using it, ours went down to a trickle.  We used to keep a large cupful of water in the shower so that when the shower water would go to a trickle, we could still rinse off with the cup of water.  The old house had a furnace in the basement like I've never seen before - our landlord called it, "Big Bertha".  So at least we were warm that first Binghamton winter.  In the summer we suffocated.  The windows were not in a good location for ventilation and I can remember us just laying on the bed with the box fan blowing right on us just to survive.

    

Rather quickly we realized we were living in a pretty bad part of town.  We should have realized this the day we were looking at apartments, but after a day of driving all over the Tri-Cities, one street started looking like another.  (Believe me, after this we were always VERY attentive to the neighborhoods we were looking in.)  In fact, the house next door was a "drug den".  Over the course of the year there were regular drug busts.  Luckily the people next door and their customers pretty much left us alone, although we did discover that, "Do you want to buy a women's coat?" was code for "Wanna buy some drugs?".  We had very little money and spent most of our time going through grocery flyers to see where we could get free eggs one week, a 1/2 off loaf of bread another week, coupon for free paper towels, etc.  There was a grocery store next to the laundromat and we'd go pick up whatever "loss leaders" they had going that week while we did laundry.  Conversations between us like, "Hey, there was a shooting next to the laundromat yesterday." were common.  One time I decided to walk to the library from our apartment and I left DH a note with a description of what I was wearing in case I went missing.  I remember waking up early one morning to the sound of a car crash, then tires squealing outside our window.  I looked out the window - didn't see anything - and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Over time I grew increasingly unhappy about where we were living, but we did love our landlord and it was very affordable on my tiny salary.  One night we were awakened by the telephone ringing - it was our landlord telling us to get out of the house, the house next door was on fire.  I can remember walking over to the window and just starting at the flames leaping out of the windows of the house next door.  I can remember standing there in utter calm.  It was like I had become numb to all these scary and horrible things going on around us.  It was after this event I told DH, we have to move - I can't live here anymore.
 
And that, my friends, is how we ended up in a small apartment with electric heat in Vestal, NY.  A story for another day.
  
The end.