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Global Update: Who's Where and Doing What - March 2011
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Tea and Uncertainty For a Busy Family
Paul Kogan, the vice president of an online computer gaming company, is pouring Assam black tea into white mugs emblazoned with photographs of three smiling children. These same children — Jacob, 14; Sasha, 12; and Leo, 3 — wander in and out as their mother, Deborah Copaken Kogan, a k a “Shutterbabe,” the title of her 2001 memoir about her experiences as a war photographer, calmly folds laundry. Splashes of color come from the vase of red tulips on the dining room table, which is made of old Indian railroad ties, and a bowl of clementines on a coffee table made of French tiles.Except for the piles of socks and T-shirts, it looks like the ultimate Kodak moment. But the journey that led to this cozy domestic scene could not have been bumpier. And that journey involved seemingly every hot-button issue that arises when New Yorkers play the real estate game — sputtering careers (made tougher to navigate by the recession), the location and costs of schools, and fiercely held opinions about the appeal of various neighborhoods. Add to the list the demands of a three-child family, a parent who works at home (Ms. Kogan, a writer as well as a photographer, is completing her fourth book), and a few spectacularly wrongheaded real estate decisions, and you have the recipe for a quintessentially New York crisis.
“At one point, money was so tight that a couple of our friends sent us $10,000 checks, which made us feel both incredibly grateful and slightly pathetic,” Mr. Kogan said as he peeled a clementine. “It was truly our annus horribilis.”
The saga started in 1992. After various adventures around the globe, the Kogans, now both 43, rented a small, run-down apartment on West End Avenue for $950 a month. In 1995, married and expecting their first child, they bought a two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive for $225,000. “First floor, dark, bus fumes,” Ms. Kogan recalled. “We vowed, never again.”
In 2001, by then with two children, the couple made what Ms. Kogan described as “the dumbest real estate mistake ever,” moving to a three-bedroom apartment at 94th Street and Broadway for which the monthly rent was $7,100. “It was like buying a small Korean car every month,” Mr. Kogan said.
The year 2002 found the family in a Classic 6 on West 96th Street. It was perfect in every respect, except for a third child on the way, Mr. Kogan’s losing his job, private school tuition for Jacob, a puppy who was methodically destroying the place, and a need for office space for Ms. Kogan. Add to the list a rent of $4,200 that eventually climbed to $4,600 and was headed for $5,000.
That period was shadowed by the illness and ultimate death of Ms. Kogan’s father, whose final words to his daughter were, “Promise me you won’t move those kids to Brooklyn.”
At this point in her life, Ms. Kogan had seen Harlem only through the windows of a Town Car. But she trolled Craigslist, met a few local residents, and in June of 2009, the family moved to the top three floors of the town house on St. Nicholas Avenue.
Their quarters, for which they pay $3,500 in rent, are rich with the trappings of a peripatetic life. There are posters from France, where the couple met, along with kitsch from Mr. Kogan’s native Russia, including an image of Lenin on a red velvet wall-hanging. In one bedroom is a wooden mask from the couple’s honeymoon in Bali; in another is the blanket Ms. Kogan slept on when she worked in Afghanistan.
Evidence of creativity abounds.
Though just a teenager, Jacob has a flourishing career as an actor, and in the family room hangs a poster for the 2007 psychological thriller “Joshua,” in which he plays the psychopathic title character. Jacob’s four guitars are stashed in a corner of his bedroom, and on a wall of the bedroom that Sasha shares with Leo hang examples of her artwork, including a moody image of a woman painted when she was 7.
Lining a long hallway are Ms. Kogan’s glossy black-and-white photographs of her family, interspersed with a few haunting images of her husband as a child.
The total effect looks lively and effortless. But in fact, the décor was largely achieved on a strict budget. Ms. Kogan did much of the carpentry herself; she attributes her skills to the fact that a great-grandfather was a carpenter in Kiev. News from nytimes.com
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