Michelle Castillo

Back in Los Angeles, hot water was always the big problem when it came to plumbing. So waterwise, I was more concerned about that than anything else when I looked for an apartment in New York. What I should have considered was that I was getting a pre-war apartment where the plumbing was several times older than I was.

True, people like to talk about how sturdy prewar buildings are. But in a poorly maintained building like mine, it meant years of buildup clogging the pipes, triggering a series of plumbing heart attacks.

One of the downsides of living in a walk-up is the lack of a doorman. In NYC, where it’s not safe to leave packages outside your front door, the absence of someone to accept them can make deliveries a virtual nightmare.

I’ve been living on the railroad.

One of the main reasons that I chose my apartment was because it was one block away from the entrance to the 96th Street 1,2,3 Subway station. I’m frequently late, so the idea that I could dash down the street and jump on the train was very attractive.

As it turned out, this was one area in which my fledgling renter’s instinct turned out to be right, for reasons of proximity and others that I hadn’t anticipated.

In fact, it took awhile to realize how transportationally fortunate I really was.

Coming from Los Angeles, where pretty much everything seemed to be constructed in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn’t even think to ask if my Upper West Side prewar apartment was cable and Internet ready.

It turned out that although the building was cable ready, my prewar walkup apartment only had one cable outlet, and it was in the inconvenient middle room.

When my real estate agent told me that my sight-unseen apartment had a massive walk-in closet, I thought I could be exactly like Carrie Bradshaw, handily stowing stacks of fashionable New York clothing.

But my jaw dropped when I finally saw the space after signing the lease and moving here from California: My “walk-in closet” was a walled-off hallway.

When I told my friends I was moving into a pre-war building, they warned me about the host of creatures that likely colonized the crumbling, decades-old walls.