Christian did not leave New York City because he stopped loving it. He left because remaining there increasingly required him to accept conditions that no longer made financial sense. He lived on West 118th Street near Riverside Drive in Harlem, a prime Manhattan location where access to Riverside Park, transit, restaurants and the broader energy of the city helped justify compromises inside the apartment. He was paying about $3,500 a month for a one-bedroom in a pre-war building, where the appliances were old, the elevator was frequently out of order and what was technically an elevator building regularly became a walk-up. Mice became enough of a problem that he plugged openings around the oven and air-conditioning unit to keep them from entering the apartment. None of those conditions stopped his landlord from raising the rent three separate times during his tenancy. For a while, the location made those compromises easier to rationalize because much of the value of living in New York existed outside his front door. Eventually, however, the price of staying overtook the value of the experience, and moving became less of a lifestyle choice than a financial necessity.