"The Icicle Cave"

The Icicle Cave: as my roommates have dubbed itOn account of once again being sick and therefore somewhat immobile, I'm writing about where I am, right now: my room, in an apartment in Bushwick. It's my room, sure, but I'm not sure that it's home. The apartment's not mine, I'm not going to be living here for very long, and anyway it's not terribly pleasant, though it is cheap and fairly convenient: it's a short walk from the L and my favorite supermarket, Food Bazaar, is nearby.

The apartment's heater doesn't work any more, probably on account of our never having paid for gas, and it might not be that good an idea to contact the gas company about it as the living arrangement here is not exactly legal. That the heater doesn't work isn't a huge problem, even though there's no insulation in the outside walls, the windows are leaky, and the interior walls are made of plywood, sheetrock and styrofoam. We each have small space heaters, and they'll work well enough to ride out what's left of the winter. Shame though, that the main living area of the apartment is now a good ten degrees colder than our individual rooms: it makes for quick dinners and short conversations, and so we are separated from each other, even in our own apartment.

A study by Lee Cuba and David M. Hummon, Constructing a Sense of Home: Place Affiliation and Migration across the Life Cycle, indicated that younger people tend to not form their sense of home based on amenities, as older people do, but for more "practical" and social reasons: to be near places of work or study and to connect to people. This expains the Bushwick young artist/student demographic perfectly, but while the convenience element of a sense of home has held true well enough for me, the social one has fallen through: the people in this apartment spend as much time outside of it as possible, and what time is spent here is generally spent alone in our separate rooms, huddled by the heaters.

Resisting using my space heater for fear of ramping up the electric bill, I had taken to just getting out of bed in the morning and beelining to a nearby café to read, work, warm up and settle into the day. While I was there, the sun would stream into the apartment through our south-facing windows and would warm the place up for my early afternoon return. On overcast days, though, I might just stick to the café. For a little while now, this has been my routine: generally a struggle to stay warm that has kept me outside of the apartment, even outside of my room. The function of shelter, then, has been largely stripped from the place. Now it's like a warehouse with my stuff that I bundle up and sleep in at night. The relative inhospitablity of the place, exacerbated by my not wanting to put effort into making it better, have left me somewhat bereft of a place I truly consider home.

That this has been my routine, in light of Theano S. Terkenli's statement in Home as a Region that "a home region is a system of interlinked patterns of habitual association and attachment", demonstrates to me that in some ways I consider the café more of a home than my own kitchen. (324) I spend my free time there, not here, I talk to people I've met over coffee more than some of my roommates. The way Terkenli sees people as crafting a home requires extended contact and experience with whatever is around us, so that we form associations between these people and things and our memories. To the extent that I feel I have a home here, my home, or "home region", has a very different shape than those of the people I live with—and the shapes of our homes have seem to have little overlap, despite our living "together". Indeed, I still think of the house I grew up in and the town it's in as home, though I haven't lived there with any regularity for quite some time.

Terkenli's definition of home as an element of one's conception of self indicates that both evolve over time, each dependent on the other. I'm not sure what it says about my home or my self right now, as I only halfheartedly see the apartment and my room within it as home, and I don't feel particularly connected with much of the immediate surroundings. These are desolate streets lined with warehouses and only occasionally peppered with places to go. My sense of home, inasmuch as it is contained in the immediate neighborhood of Bushwick, is a series of discontinuous points floating in space. True to JH Kunstler's concept of "nowhere", between the neighborhood's downtown areas are interchangeable industrial spaces that people, myself included, just move through as fast as possible.

My building is a part of the landscape of unwelcoming modern industrial edifices. The upshot of this arrangement is the windows, filling up two of our four walls and giving us an incredible amount of light (and eventually heat) during the day. The building is one of the many American daylight factories that presaged and inspired modernist architecture, and was made possible by the massive steel-reinforced concrete pillar next to the fridge. Most of the apartments in the buiding have one.

The apartment is divided up into several rooms like my own by 2x4s, 4x4s, plywood, sheetrock and foam. The arrangement is ugly, cold and uncomfortable, but also relatively clean, convenient and affordable for the motley of young folks that live here. Its affordability is not expected to last, unless New York City takes a real nosedive, but it is expected that when we either leave on our own or can't afford to be here any more, there will be other similar places to live, somewhere. As students and young people in this society, our lifestyle is transient—I've lived in 5 cities/towns in 3 countries in the past four years, and I'm a positive homebody compared to some of my friends.

That we're not sticking around is a big reason we haven't done more with the place. JB Jackson might identify our living arrangement as vernacular, not in the sense that the building is temporary or mobile but that we the occupants are mobile and that our dwelling here is temporary. JBJ, though quick to recognize the advantages of such an arrangement in terms of economy and mobility, is soundly countered by DJ Waldie and JH Kunstler, who expound the benefits of becoming rooted in one's physical location and the community within it. Terkenli points out that "cultural rootedness is directly related to the creation of a collective home", meaning rootedness causes you to be invested in your environment, allowing you to connect to those around you to form culture and collective identity. (330) The problem is that the entire community here is transient and ever-changing: turnover is high (I'm the twelfth person to live in this apartment this year), and the neighborhood is evolving into one which many older residents will soon become unable to afford. That many of us feel guilty for taking any part in the gentrification process makes the situation even worse.

Like most everyone else in the area, I need a place to live and work but I don't expect to stick around. So all of my furniture is light and much of it can be dismantled and rebuilt easily, as I've done many times before. That I can move all of this stuff easily means that all of the many places that I've called my bedroom in the past several years have been quite similar, and often had much of the same furniture (the ones in the USA, anyway). Further, I am disinclined to devote much time to making major changes to the apartment or my room: winter is on its way out and I don't expect to be around for the next one, so I don't bother to buy insulation and I don't concern myself with the newly non-functional heater. I don't worry about the ridiculous and ineffective soundproofing previous occupants left on one of my walls or the lack of color in my room or the exposed plywood cieling. What decoration I've put up—posters or drawings—is temporary and not at all tied to the space. But hey, I say to myself, I live in New York City: why would I spend much time in my room?

I've sacrificed comfort and a sense of home for a semi-effective shelter I share with interesting people in an interesting place. Being more or less confined to the place (specifically to my room, with the space heater) by sickness has brought this into sharper focus. The truth is, I'm going to continue to live here for some time, and though my quality of life will improve as a matter of course while our hemisphere leans closer to the sun, it's up to me to make that time worth living. A sense of home is not just the physical place itself. It's what I do and what habits I form here that will make it home.

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Terkenli, Theano S. "Home as a Region". Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 324-334. American Geographical Society.

Cuba, Lee and David M. Hummon. "Constructing a Sense of Home: Place Affiliation and Migration across the Life Cycle". Sociological Forum, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 547-572. Springer.

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