NYC is not the city it once was. Up through the mid 80's I'd guess it was pretty low rent in areas and accessible to everyone who wanted to take a stab at success there. Good place and affordable with do many amazing places to go! Then it changed, real estate started to get out of hand and soon everyone but the elite could even afford to live there! I hear that's changing. When I was last in NYC in 2005 I was disappointed by all the changes I saw since the 70's. It was so generic. Like many cities I've visited over the years, they had lost their uniqueness, what made them who they were warts and all. Sad. I love NYC! Timely read.

Really enjoyed the memoir his view of life his apartment I loved visiting the cafes the upper west side.A book I really enjoyed.#netgalley#seventyseventhstreet press

The View From Apartment Four: On Loving and Leaving New York by Skip Rozin is a pleasant enough book, especially if a piece of your heart has a place in NYC; however, it's not as New York centric as its title would lead one to believe. Yes, it centers around the author's time as a tenet in this specific apartment in NYC, but the reader ends up feeling as though they missed a bit of the city during his autobiographical storytelling as he tells more about his life during those years rather than a lifetime's worth of explorations and nuances of the heart and soul of NYC. There certainly is some of that but not as much as one might hope for.

We get to know exactly where the apartment is and the feel of its place within the building and neighborhood. We also get a little bit of an idea of some of the other residents within the building. We also get to know more about Skip, his desires and frustrations of becoming a writer in NYC. Eventually, a wife and kids enter the picture which has its own drama. The apartment has its part to play in the story but less and less of it actually involves NYC as the story is told. Still important but getting lost along the way.

The pieces I liked best were when I got the feeling that I just happened to meet Skip in some NYC café where we struck up a conversation with each other and I learned that he was a writer with things to say. Once we drained our coffee cups, we decided to move on to get a drink in some local watering hole where he continues to regale me with stories of his quest to have his stories published while writing in his uptown apartment. Strolling along, peeking in shop windows and discussing tidbits about some of the buildings and areas we pass by, we reach the subway to go our separate ways and thank each other for a wonderful evening of many in the city that never sleeps. That flavor of NYC is what sometimes made this an enjoyable read. Unfortunately, there weren't enough of these. Maybe it was the title that had me expecting more.

The one section I could have done without was when he elaborated on being a sports writer. Of course, I don't care for sports, so that left me cold, but it left me feeling that it didn't really belong. At least, not as detailed as it was.

As mentioned, it was an enjoyable enough book but not quite the thrill that I was hoping for.


Thanks to NetGalley for a copy of the eBook for a fair and honest review.

I thought this was going to be more about New York in its heyday. It's much more of a memoir than I realized and the author doesn't really seem to connect with life in NYC. It was also repetitive but maybe because it's stories that are strung together. I didn't get a real feel for the author or the city.

I have not finished this book and am giving it an interim rating of three stars. I look forward to seeing what the book has to offer.

I didn’t finish this book. I gave it 20% so I feel I can’t truly review it. I was initially attracted to this book because New York and having briefly lived on the UWS, but the detail about the struggling writers life wasn’t what I was hoping for. I loved the NYC content but found the narrator hard to like.

All Skip Rozin ever wanted to do was make a living at writing, and to him, that meant writing fiction. But that wasn't to be his fate. What he has managed to do is carve out a living doing freelance for many respected magazines, including Audubon Magazine. He's also written some well received books on various aspects of sport, although it wasn't what he'd set out to do. But, as they say, life is what happens when you're making other plans, and now in his 70's, he's written his memoir, a virtual love letter to his upper west side (UWS in today's parlance) rent-controlled apartment that he held on to for 46 years before getting the dreaded eviction notice plastered to his door. Although I've never lived in New York, I've visited it enough times to be familiar with some of the idiosyncrasies such as alternate side of the street parking regulations. I've also found when in the City, it's easy to have short term friendships, a which Rozin identifies as being an urban phenomenon. The thing is, the issues he experienced in NYC are prevalent everywhere, most notably in cities that are almost unrecognizable from what they were 20 or 30 years ago. (I live in the Bay Area, so ... ). But he writes in a punchy style and generously shares his life with the reader.

I could not get interested in this book. It is marketed as a New York Story, yet it really is the story of one man's life, his adoration of the NYC of the 70s and 80s, his move to Cape Cod. There were a few nostalgic anecdotes about old New York living (Automat, subway graffiti, stores that used to be) but not enough to incorporate the author's life if one didn't know who he was already.