Bed bugs and block parties: my introduction to New York

I was now a true New Yorker, friends and colleagues commiserated. On balance, I would have preferred to have remained an innocent, naive expat. Within days of settling into a new Brooklyn flat with my wife, three-year-old daughter and a newborn baby — a badly-timed move forced by a typically ruthless New York landlord seeking a regulation-busting 20 per cent rent increase — we spotted a little critter gorging on our newest family member.

A quick internet search revealed that it was a bedbug, terror of the five boroughs. The cockroaches we soon discovered were an unexpected bonus.

What followed was what the natives joked was the ultimate New Yorker baptism of fire: an antagonistic argument with our uncommunicative, unrepentant landlord, never-ending visits to the local launderette, living out of plastic bags and boxes for weeks, and near-total social ostracism. All accompanied by the soundtrack of a very loud, very demanding baby boy. Eventually, some legal threats finally won the day and we managed to extricate ourselves from the Fulton Street flat, but it was a nightmarish ordeal.

Yet, living in New York has been the wonderful experience we didn’t dare to dream about when we first landed bleary-eyed at Newark Airport in March 2015. New York, I have reluctantly had to admit, has lived up to expectations — and then some.

I was initially apprehensive. When a friend found out that the FT had offered me the opportunity to move from London to lead our coverage of financial markets in New York, his beloved former stomping ground, he insisted on showing us the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, where the quintessential (now disgraced) New Yorker attempts to describe the city’s magic in a rambling monologue.

In truth, it left me feeling underwhelmed. Allen’s city seemed pompous, obsessed with its own grandeur. Other friends talked about its never-ending “buzz” and 24-hour nightlife. For my wife and I — two homebodies moving with a then two-year-old daughter — it all sounded exhausting.

The first month in an anodyne rented apartment in Chelsea didn’t allay our concerns. Manhattanites pretend they own the sidewalk and will unashamedly glower at anyone daring to infringe on their territory with a baby-stroller. But one moment marked a turning point.

After admitting our apprehension to an old American friend, he insisted that New Yorkers came good when it mattered. And as chance would have it, there was a perfect example days later. A man in a wheelchair was deceived by a pothole filled with rainwater, and tipped over in the middle of the mighty Sixth Avenue that cleaves lower Manhattan in two. Instantly, over a dozen New Yorkers scrambled to halt traffic, help the man up and dry his wheelchair.

For someone who has lived most of his life in Norway and the UK, the immediate and instinctive reaction of so many people to help astonished and thrilled me. If the same had happened in Oslo or London, the first reaction of everyone at the scene would have been to look around awkwardly to see if anyone else was coming to the rescue.

After that rainy April day, the sun started peeking out again and New York revealed its charm: its inhabitants. For all their assumed bombast, New Yorkers are some of the most gregarious, charming and friendly people my wife and I have met. This is particularly true for Brooklyn, which has a far more leisurely, family-friendly pace than most of Manhattan.

The first time we visited our local pizza joint — Speedy Romeo, an annoyingly popular place known for its pickled chillies and being featured in Lena Dunham’s Girls — another father there with his son spontaneously invited us over for a barbecue the following Saturday. In Norway, inviting strangers over for dinner would be unthinkable, so we were initially suspicious that this might be an elaborate serial killer ruse. But we overcame our Nordic reserve and ended up spending many weekend afternoons in Javier’s back yard that spring, eating fried plantains and big slabs of meat.

Similarly, the first time my wife Gunvor went to Underwood, the nearby playground that local parents call “Mecca” — because we all turn towards it several times a day — she met another couple that quickly became and have remained our best friends in the city. Chilo’s, a neighbourhood bar with a taco truck in the back yard, is a favoured hang-out for us and many other parents in the neighbourhood.

Everywhere, we have been bowled over by the friendliness of New Yorkers, who are far more congenial than their surly reputation. Even the city’s egregious expense and the ramshackle subway, a hellish psychological torture system masquerading as public transportation, has failed to dent our enthusiasm for the Big Apple.

We now live in the bottom half of a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant in northern Brooklyn, a few blocks away from an iconic mural of one of the neighbourhood’s most famous sons, The Notorious BIG. Other famous Bedstuy natives include chess player Bobby Fischer, the actor Chris Rock and rappers and musicians such as Jay-Z, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Norah Jones and Mos Def.

Bedstuy is historically an African-American neighbourhood, but the relatively affordable, high-quality housing stock has led to gentrification in recent years. That has understandably led to some local consternation, as primarily white middle-class people (like us) flood in and drive up rental prices for those who have lived in Bedstuy for generations, forcing many to move further out in Brooklyn.

As an outsider I’m wary of wading into such a fraught subject. But sometimes it can feel like two parallel communities, with separate cafés, restaurants, bars — even schools. When my daughter started at our local public school, she was the only white child there, as most other recent arrivals to the neighbourhood ship their children off to private institutions or a better-rated school further afield. It didn’t surprise me to learn later that New York schools are some of the most segregated in the US, despite them being in one of most diverse cities in the world. As “socialist Scandinavians”, supporting our local public school was a given, and we cherish being able to give our children a more diverse upbringing than the one we enjoyed in Norway. But, inescapably, we are part of the problem of gentrification.

Nonetheless, Brooklyn has a sense of community that I have never experienced elsewhere and which finds its purest expression in one of my favourite New York traditions: the block party. Once a year, we shut down traffic on our street, a bouncy castle is rented, the local firemen crack open a hydrant, and everyone rolls out their barbecue and watches the kids go nuts. Brooklyn Halloweens are epic affairs, but a good Bedstuy block party comes a close second.

Even the bedbug affair turned out have been a spot of good fortune. A year after we moved out, our old building was badly damaged in a fire. But we still suffer flashbacks whenever we discover insect bites of any kind.

Inside knowledge

Best park for kids
New York has countless well-equipped playgrounds, such as Underwood in Clinton Hill. But the best place for families is Prospect Park in Brooklyn, rather than the more famous Central Park in Manhattan. This is a hill I’m willing to die on

Best coffee
This is the source of heated discussion in our family. My wife favours Stonefruit in Clinton Hill or The Mixtape Shop in Bedstuy, while I prefer Sincerely Tommy’s and Playground. Stonefruit does boast a delightful vegetarian menu

Best rainy-day family trip
We have spent many happy days exploring New York’s sprawling Natural History Museum, but the Brooklyn Children’s Museum — a cavernous building overflowing with activity rooms — will leave most kids hyperventilating with excitement

Buying guide

• Buying property in New York is fairly straightforward, as foreigners are treated like locals legally. But the closing costs can be eye-watering, typically in the range of 1.5 per cent to 5 per cent for buyers, which includes state and city transaction taxes and a hefty commission for New York’s aggressive real estate agents

What you can buy for . . .

$1m Not as much as you’d think. But you can still find renovated two-bedroom, 1,000 sq ft flats in up-and-coming neighbourhoods such as Prospect Heights

$2m A 1,500 sq ft, three-bedroom flat in trendy Park Slope or Clinton Hill

$5m A renovated 5,000 sq ft townhouse in an upscale Brooklyn neighbourhood such as Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights or Boerum Hill

More homes at propertylistings.ft.com

Robin Wigglesworth is the FT’s US markets editor

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