She told the agent she would love to take it if the priced dropped and was surprised when she got a call the next day: The landlord was willing to rent it to her for what the departing tenant had paid — several hundred dollars less than it was listed for — as long as renovations didn’t have to be done. The apartment had an older kitchen, but was in good shape.
“I didn’t even know it was a block from Prospect Park,” she said. “When I first moved here, it felt like I was on vacation: I could see the trees and the sky.”
When Mr. Fearnley joined her a few years later, she cleared out a closet for him as a Valentine’s Day gift, so it would feel like his space, too.
And then, of course, the space “evolved with each kid,” she said. “We make sacrifices, but it’s not anything that matters.”
Most of the discomfort she has had to deal with, she added, is other people’s: “They’re like, ‘Your poor kids. You can’t raise three boys in there.’”
They did briefly consider the suburbs, but her husband, an organic chemistry professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and York College, in Jamaica, Queens, prefers an easier commute. More important, they realized they didn’t want to move.
They don’t even want to leave the 36-unit building, although Ms. Fearnley has, to no avail, tried to get a larger apartment there. “My neighbors have become family,” she said. “We look after each other’s pets, borrow milk, watch kids if someone has to go to the hospital in the middle of the night.”
