Judith Thurman: "I know it's heretical, but I really loved the 1977 blackout."

Haven't done one of these in a long time but The New Yorker's Judith Thurman goes native for the 92YQ.

How many years, apartments and what neighborhoods have you lived in NYC?
I'm a native. Born at Lenox Hill Hospital. So: Growing up: Jackson Heights; Kew Gardens Hills (not to be confused with the much tonier Kew Gardens); Forest Hills; (all in Queens); then, post college: the Bowery; West 92nd St (with a relative); West 10th Street (bathtub in kitchen); West 84th St (worst crack block in the city), Water Street, (above a bar—no one else lived there in 1969); Sullivan St; Westbeth—artists' housing, mercifully subsidized, on Bethune Street; Warren Street (in Tribeca, my first "adult" home, a loft bought in late 1979); East 10th Street (a studio on the block of divorcees); East 84th Street, in an old pushcart stable, and now, in a brownstone one block further west. My maternal grandparents immigrated to Yorkville in the late 1880s, and my mother grew up and went to school two blocks from my house.

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