The carpet sample was a square of carpet about two feet by two feet and it was free from the carpet store on Delancey Street. You went in and asked for samples and they gave you a stack of them and you carried them home and you had a rug. The carpet sample was the most honest furniture on the Lower East Side. It did not pretend to be a carpet. It was a piece of a carpet. And a piece was enough.

You put the carpet samples together like a puzzle. Different colors different textures different patterns. The floor looked like a patchwork quilt made by somebody who was colorblind and did not care. Nobody matched the carpet samples. Matching was for people who could afford a whole carpet. The carpet sample floor was a map of how many times you went to the carpet store.

The carpet sample had a number on the back and a name. Names like Autumn Harvest and Colonial Beige and Mediterranean Sand. The names were aspirational. The carpet sample was not Mediterranean. The carpet sample was Delancey Street. But the name on the back said you deserved something better than a cold floor and the carpet sample delivered on that promise for free.

I had carpet samples in my apartment on East Seventh Street and when I moved I left them. The next tenant used them too. The carpet samples outlasted three tenants in that apartment. They were not attached to the floor. They were not attached to anybody. They just stayed and whoever moved in stepped on them and accepted them as part of the apartment like the radiator and the roaches.

You cannot get carpet samples anymore. The carpet stores are gone. The floors are hardwood now because hardwood is what people with money want. The carpet sample was what people without money needed. A warm spot on a cold floor. Two feet by two feet of something soft between your feet and the building. The hardwood floor is beautiful. The carpet sample was kind. Those are different things.

See also: Walk-Up, Rooming House