You look up at a tenement on the Lower East Side and every window is a television set tuned to a different channel. One window has a grandmother watering plants. One window has a teenager playing guitar too loud. One window has two people arguing about money. One window has a baby crying. One window has nobody because that person works the night shift. You stand on the sidewalk and you are watching six stories of human life stacked on top of each other and separated by nothing but plaster and the idea of privacy. The tenement is the original social network. Six floors. Forty people. One building. Everybody knows your business and nobody moves out.

I lived in a tenement on Avenue D. Fourth floor. The bathtub was in the kitchen. That is not a metaphor. The bathtub was physically in the kitchen next to the stove. You could cook dinner and take a bath at the same time. The rent was thirty-eight dollars a month. The radiator worked when it wanted to and when it worked it sounded like somebody beating a pipe with a hammer because somebody was beating a pipe with a hammer. That was how you told the super the heat was broken. You beat the pipe. The super beat the pipe back. That was a conversation. That was the tenement telephone.

You hear everything in a tenement. You hear the couple on the third floor making love at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday. You hear the saxophone player on the sixth floor who practices at midnight because he works a day job. You hear the Dominican family on the second floor playing merengue so loud the walls shake. The walls shake because the walls are thin. The walls are thin because the landlord used the cheapest materials he could find in eighteen ninety when he built the building for immigrants who had no choice. The tenement was never built for comfort. The tenement was built for profit. Four hundred square feet for a family of eight. That is not architecture. That is arithmetic.

The fire escape was the balcony. The roof was the backyard. The hallway was the highway. The stairwell smelled like somebody's dinner on every floor and by the time you reached the fourth floor you had walked through Puerto Rico and China and Italy and Poland without leaving the building. The tenement was the United Nations before the United Nations. No translator needed. The smells did the translating. Garlic means Italian. Cumin means Puerto Rican. Soy sauce means Chinese. You knew your neighbors by what they cooked before you knew their names.

They are turning the tenements into luxury apartments now. They are putting granite countertops in kitchens where my grandmother boiled water on a hot plate. They are charging four thousand dollars a month for apartments that used to cost forty. They call it renovation. I call it eviction with better lighting. The tenement was not pretty. The tenement was not comfortable. But the tenement was honest. The tenement said here is a room and a roof and a lock on the door and the rest is up to you. That is the most honest real estate deal in the history of New York. A room and a roof and a lock on the door. Nobody promises that anymore. Not for thirty-eight dollars. Not for four thousand. The tenement is gone and the building is still there and that is the cruelest trick the city ever played.