As it goes in New York City, the apartment was small, it was expensive, but it was theirs. Heidi Russell and Valentina Bajada owned an 860-square-foot second-floor walk-up, and they loved its single living-room window, cramped kitchen, and two little bedrooms. Their building was on a quiet, tree-lined block of Barrow Street close to the Hudson River. Neighbors kept libraries of free books and walked their dogs in leafy, open courtyards. It was as close to a village as the West Village gets.
Bajada, a Soviet immigrant who owned a catering company with her ex-husband, spent ten years on a waiting list before she was approved to become a tenant in 1998, back when the West Village Houses were still subsidized. They were the result of an affordable-housing triumph of the ’60s, when Jane Jacobs defeated Robert Moses’s plans to demolish the neighborhood and build a highway. Now they are market-rate co-ops in one of the most upscale neighborhoods in Manhattan.
