Stacy Horn

I’m not sure if I’ve told the story of how I got the stove pictured below. When I first moved into my apartment (around 1985) the apartment next door to me was empty and it remained empty for years. After a while I started using the door to the unused apartment as an art project. I’d put up signs like “Office of the InterGalactic Fabulous Losers League.” Once I dressed it up as if it was a crime scene, with yellow tape and keep out signs. I’d change the signs from time to time until one day someone started pounding on my door and screaming. I couldn’t understand a lot of what she was saying, but she was pounding so hard and savagely I almost called the police.

“OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR!” Right. Eventually she pulled herself together enough to tell me she lived in that apartment and to stop putting signs on her door. But I’ve lived here for years, I yelled back through the door, “and in all the time I’ve been here no one has ever gone into that apartment.”

Turned out she was warehousing the place, (paying rent on it but not living there). The apartment is rent stabilized and you’re not allowed to warehouse rent stabilized apartments. She was mad because my signs were drawing attention to the fact that no one was really living there. I didn’t know what her story was, so I promised to stop.

Not long after, someone told me this story about the apartment, and I have no idea how much, if any, is true: A young family lived there, a cop, his wife and their infant daughter. Sometime in the 1950’s or 1960’s the cop was killed in the line of duty. His wife picked up their daughter and fled the apartment, leaving behind most of their belongings. She never returned. Apparently she held onto the place and continued to pay rent every month, year after year, decade after decade, and the person pounding on my door was their now grown daughter.

A few years later I heard the super frantically trying to get into the apartment. Something was leaking inside and flooding the apartment below and he was desperate to get inside and fix it. He managed to break the lock and we both entered the apartment. It was like a scene out of Great Expectations and the home of Miss Havisham.

It looked exactly like you’d expect if the stories were true. We stepped back in time, to an apartment from the fifties, except someone had allowed it to slowly decay and fall apart. The wall paper was coming off in great big strips, everything was crumbling and falling to pieces, the mattress in the bedroom looked like it would disappear into dust if I touched it. I have to say though, it did look like someone must have come in every few years to clean it. There was dirt and cobwebs, but not as bad as I think it would have been had it been absolutely and completely abandoned for thirty or so years.

In the kitchen was this beautiful stove. It was love at first sight for me. “If you can move it, you can have it,” the super told me. I called my then boyfriend who knew what he was doing. He capped off the gas connection and the two of us lugged it next door into my apartment. I have cherished it ever since.

Also, it was obvious that the apartment was being warehoused, so whoever was holding onto it lost it, alas. But another young family moved in, a very nice family, and their now grown son continues to live there today!

The following quote is from Alyn Shipton’s book, Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter. Percussionist Ray Cooper is describing Harry Nilsson’s voice. Imagine having a voice like this:

“The voice was extraordinary and clear, a boy’s choir voice in a man. Absolutely beautiful – a surgical instrument because it would heal you. You felt an overwhelming wave of warmth … that voice would come through and you almost couldn’t play, it was so beautiful, seriously beautiful.”

Sigh. If I can’t have a voice like that, I wouldn’t mind a next door neighbor who sang like that, someone I could listen to from time to time. Also, Ray Cooper is an extremely articulate, poetic man. Such an evocative description.

A quick snapshot from choir rehearsal on Tuesday. We have a lot of new singers this year. John, our director, said 60 people auditioned! I think around 12 or so made it in. We must be up to a billion singers by now.

It’s funny, but in radio interviews I kept talking about a video people should watch to see the powerful effect of music. This is the one I was talking about, it’s of a man in a nursing home hearing music from his youth. I totally forgot it’s part of a project I contributed to called Alive Inside. I’m very proud to have helped get this project off the ground (well, soon to be off the ground).

You have to watch this video, to see the before and after effects of music, it’s incredibly moving. I picked the pledge where they deliver an iPod to an elder who needs it, after a “consultation to set up their playlists with the songs that touch them the most.” Because who wouldn’t want to give that kind of gift to someone after watching what happens when you do??

Last weekend in Union Square everyone was going around with turbans on their heads because these guys were showing them all how to put them on and wear them. I loved seeing everyone so fashionably coordinated.

I come home, put my key in the lock, but my door is already unlocked. This happened to me once before and it was unlocked because my apartment had been robbed and of course the burglars hadn’t bothered (and had no way to) lock the apartment when they were done. Then I hear voices inside! I run to my neighbor’s and call 911.

I’m all panicked. You can see inside my apartment from my neighbor’s kitchen window and I keep looking and looking. The police come. “Just stay where you are …” We wait anxiously. Nothing. I hadn’t been robbed. My apartment is now full of police, who climbed five flights for nothing. AND, it smells a little because the cats did the smellier one while I was out and if I don’t scoop that out right away there’s a problem.

“I’m so sorry! Ugh! I’m sorry,” I kept saying. They were all so nice about it. “This is what you pay your taxes for.” They told me to put bars or gates on my windows and left. Bottom line: I had left my apartment unlocked! So not good.

Mannequin heads in an alley. I passed these by on my way downtown yesterday. They are so artfully placed I wonder if someone put them there on purpose, maybe for some sort of photo shoot? I shot them through a fence.

Every September 11, I walk down to St. Paul’s Chapel where I was a volunteer. (I just learned today that I am classified as a “responder,” and I need to register in a key database by October 3, or lose out on future help should I need it.)

It was a pretty horrendous walk today because it’s a billion degrees out, but I wanted to do it. I always take the same route. I walk down the highway, passing by the corner where I held up signs saying “thank you” to the rescue workers. Some people return each year to hold up signs. I wonder how many drivers know the back story.

This is where I turn off to get to St. Paul’s. It’s a big subway stop/hub, whatever it’s called, it’s also right by where the WTC workers go in and out of the site.

I’m almost there. That’s the graveyard of St. Paul’s Chapel up there on the right, and the site is behind me now. As you can see, tons of news people are there, getting their story.

Inside St. Paul’s Chapel was a table and a punch of post-it pads. People were invited to leave messages. It reminded of the days when we’d cover the fence around St. Paul’s with brown paper and people would fill it up with their messages. We kept replacing the paper and replacing the paper, bringing the rolled up remains to a storage facility nearby. There must have been thousands of them!

A closer look. I wish I knew what the Egyptian one says. Most of the messages were in other languages. It’s one of my favorite things about NYC, visitors from all over the world all the time. You walk down the street and often will hear a half a dozen different languages in the span of one block. I googled Paul Poston, the one towards the bottom, and found a bittersweet tribute video made by his family. That was the saddest moment of my day. I guess because his death was recent. And there were chihuahuas in the video who must miss him.