Renting in East Village

What it's like

The East Village is a walk-up neighborhood. Five or six storeys, no elevator, no doorman, a tub in the kitchen if the renovation was lazy. The building stock is mostly pre-war tenement, which means high ceilings and bad insulation and radiators that either roast you or do nothing.

It gets genuinely loud. Avenue A and the numbered streets between Houston and 14th carry bar traffic until four in the morning on weekends, and the noise does not stay outside: single-pane windows in a 1900 building are decorative. Move one block east of Avenue B or south toward the quieter end of 4th and it drops off fast.

Who it suits

People who want to walk home from dinner, do not own a car, and would rather have a smaller apartment in a place they actually want to be.

The catch

Fifth-floor walk-ups price about ten percent under the same line on the second floor, and that discount stops feeling like a discount the first time you carry a month of groceries up. Look at the flight before you sign, not just the floor plan.

Getting around

The L at First Avenue, the F at Second Avenue, and the 6 at Astor Place. It is the one part of Manhattan where the subway is genuinely inconvenient: from most of Alphabet City you are a ten to fifteen minute walk from any train, which is fine in May and long in February.

What to check at the viewing

• Run the shower and the kitchen tap together. Tenement plumbing stacks are shared and the pressure tells you what you are in for.
• Ask which windows face the street and stand at them with the window open for a minute.
• Check the radiator knobs actually turn. In these buildings heat is landlord-controlled and a stuck valve is a whole winter.