For years after moving from New York to Connecticut, Roz Chast dreamed of her beloved post-college apartment on West 73rd Street. The plot and setting of these dreams varied, but she was always on the street where she had lived.
“There were things like: I walked into the building and the lobby was a newsstand,” said Ms. Chast, 68, whose face you may recognize from her famous cartoons in “The New Yorker” — she has contributed to it and has been a member since 1978 magazine – and her latest book, the graphic novel “I Must Be Dreaming,” is out this week. “Or the building had been converted into a hotel. Or there was a marble staircase. Or I had an apartment that had this huge hole in the middle through which I could see into the apartment below. Or the floor was crooked. Or my apartment had a balcony, but then I went out on the balcony and knew I wasn’t in New York anymore.”
She added: “I remember a dream when I walked out the back door of the building and there was something like a goat farm.”
Ms. Chast and her husband, Bill Franzen, a writer, left New York City in 1990 and moved to a four-bedroom colonial house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, when their first child was a toddler and a second baby was on the way.
“I work at home, and my husband works at home, and we would have two children,” said Ms. Chast, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. “We were looking for Brooklyn and just couldn’t afford the space we needed. To put it bluntly, the house cost less than a two-bedroom house in Park Slope.”
They chose Ridgefield because it had good schools and was within their budget. The house, built in 1940, had the decisive advantage of being close to the city. “I said, ‘I’m not going to live in a place where I can’t just walk to the library or the pharmacy or wherever.’ “That’s not happening,” recalls Ms. Chast, who didn’t drive at the time and, frankly, still prefers not to.
Rose Chast, 68
Profession: Cartoonist, illustrator, author
The size is important: “My husband told me that I like our house because it’s like an apartment in a way. The rooms aren’t huge, but they all have their place – like there’s a dining room, a living room and a kitchen.”
Mr. Franzen conducted a preliminary survey of the area and narrowed down the options to three properties. “And I knew right away that this was going to be the right one, I think in part because of the built-in bookshelves,” Ms. Chast said. “There was something welcoming about them. It was like, ‘You’ve got books, you’ve got trash – put your books and your crap here.'”
There’s room for everything: the glasses of Charles Addams cartoons on the mantel; the fez plucked from a bin at a Goodwill outpost in Maine (“My head is screaming for a fez,” Ms. Chast said); the plates and ashtrays illustrated with New Yorker cartoons; the worktable for making pysanky eggs, a decoration method using melted wax and dye. But there isn’t so much space that it could cause stress for a particular homeowner who is already prone to anxiety.
“I didn’t want a huge house where the ceilings are like 15 feet high for no reason and there’s a room for wrapping presents or a creepy bonus room. I didn’t want any of that crap,” Ms. Chast said. “I wanted a standard room.”
Shortly after the couple moved in, Ms. Chast’s mother-in-law, a kitchen designer, drew up plans to knock down a wall and connect the kitchen and dining room. New glass fronts painted light purple were installed. Later, the screened porch was replaced with a computer room. “It just wasn’t us,” Ms. Chast said. “Not the porch. Not the screens. None of that was us.”
Of course everyone for themselves. Although there was actually a living room, to Ms. Chast’s endless amazement, the previous owners routinely gathered in a small, nondescript room off the kitchen. It is now home to the parrots Eli, an African gray parrot, and Jacky, a caique.
“You know how they used to reserve the actual living room for company? I don’t know, maybe the boss came for dinner and I cooked a roast and we pulled the covers off the couch,” said Ms. Chast, whose native language is ironic.
When her children moved out on their own, she ended up replacing the living room furniture with an innocuous new blue-gray sofa and matching chairs.
Ms Chast explained the reasons for the delay. She’s bad at making decisions about things like this: “Do I want modern?” Do I want old-fashioned? Do I want country music?” Furthermore, furniture is “kind of expensive”. And finally, she admitted that she was “terribly bad at decorating.”
More specifically, maybe it’s just not a priority. Ms. Chast’s focus is on art that is diverse. Here is a model by Baxter Koziol; there a sculpture of a pigeon by Pat McCarthy. Paintings and photographs hang on the gallery walls in the kitchen. Framed cartoons by Gahan Wilson, Jules Feiffer, Frank Modell and Liana Finck, many traded in for their own cartoons, line the walls of the downstairs bathroom. Elsewhere there is a Gary Panter and a pair of Helen Hokinsons.
A source of particular joy for Ms. Chast is her scarf collection, designed in the 1940s and 1950s by New York cartoonists including Mr. Addams, James Thurber, Otto Soglow, Sam Cobean and Anatol Kovarsky. They should be worn; Mrs. Chast doesn’t wear them. She had them framed.
Eight years ago, she rented a pied-à-terre — or, as a friend calls it, a pomme de terre — in Manhattan, a studio apartment that happens to be close to her old apartment on West 73rd Street. “The place where I really feel most comfortable is still the Upper West Side,” Ms. Chast said somewhat ruefully. “It’s strange because I’ve lived in Ridgefield longer than anywhere else.”
“And I love it,” she continued. “I love our house. I love the city. But there is one aspect – and I think a lot of it has to do with driving – that will never make me feel at home the way I feel at home in New York.”
For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here.