tiny NYC apartment


So you want to live in New York City just off Central Park? Prepare to cough up a few thousand dollars a month … or find a fabulous little 12-by-7-foot hole in the wall for just seven hundred dollars and learn to live a little differently, as this industrious writer has done.

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In this video, we get a sneak-peak tour of life with Felice Cohen in a place where storage is sacrosanct … but bonking a head on the ceiling when waking is a real risk, and going to the bathroom requires wedging oneself onto the seat sideways.

Building up is critical and as she points out (only half joking) most New Yorkers use the stove as a supplementary closet anyway – conventional cooking is out of the question, so a hot pot and cold eats are standard fare. Still, there is some separation of activities – a work chair versus a desk chair, for instance.

A little refrigerator has to be sufficient, fewer clothes can be owned and book choices become precious decisions when both professional and personal space are in limited supply. This is just a work in progress, though, and a learning process – perhaps the basis for some future writings as well.

“Felice Cohen is an author of 5 books, a professional organizer, motivational speaker and Holocaust educator. You might have seen Felice in that infamous YouTube video of her 90-square-foot Manhattan studio. She moved into that tiny space for one reason: the low rent allowed her to quit her full time job and finish writing her first book, What Papa Told Me, a memoir about her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. She planned to stay only one year, but something happened during that one year. Her life got better. It got larger.”

“When the YouTube video of that teeny space went viral, people around the world asked her for advice on organizing and decluttering, and praised her philosophy about ‘living large’ in a small space. That was the motivation for her second book, 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet (…or more), which tells how living tiny made her life larger, but it also offers lessons on how to live the life you want in any size space.”