Apartment Therapy on Warren St. John

Do-it-just. We read Warren St. John's piece, New Hope for the Unhandy, in The Times yesterday and couldn't disagree more. Sir St. John asserts that the real difference between NYC and the rest of the country is not a red state/blue state division but a do-it-yourself/do-it-for-me division. And Home Depot shows this trend clearly, hence the doormen.

New Yorkers are lazy, unskilled and unwilling to fix up their own homes? Hey, sure there are many who will says things such as:

"We're city people," she said. "Most of the stuff, we don't do ourselves. I can do very little myself. Except spend the money."

But what about the rest of us, who are building footholds of self improvement in this city, one rung at a time? Do-it-yourself is alive and well in NYC, and just because St. John, in his mild celebrity and foppish reporting on imagined cultural trends has lost touch with the gritty convert-that-parking-sign-to-a-coffee-table ethic, does not mean that it isn't thriving.

We suspect St. John has not recently worried about sofa placement or shelf hanging in his (has he bought his own loft yet?) apartment. Perhaps he is now more comfortable in the do-it-for-me camp. That's all well and good, but he should be sure not to outsource the hard reporting. Best not to confuse our new and bloated Home Depot -- a corporate fantasy dreamed up in Atlanta -- as emblematic in any way of NYC..... HOP

Comments (2)

I was a little annoyed by this article too. There are always going to be people who don't bother doing things for themselves, but then there's the rest of us who fix our own toilets, do our own weatherproofing and install our own shelves, just to name a few things I've done to my apartment in the last year or so. Granted, I don't make my own cabinets and I haven't installed that enormous deck out my window, but most people at suburban Home Depots are there to pick up some lumber or paint or maybe a new faucet, just like urbanites. Just because I live in a city doesn't mean I want to burden my super with minor fix-it stuff. I'm proud of my newly fixed toilet, and I can't imagine how useless someone must be to not be able to install a new toilet seat.

I like that the HD in the city is clean and well lit, and the desk in the front means I can always find someone for a question -- both are major improvements over the HDs in Queens and Brooklyn. Otherwise, the store itself assumes a lot about the New York market but hasn't really figured us out. Why does that store have a space dedicated to enormous grills, but no two burner cooktops and not one half-sized fridge with a freezer? Then there's this one sentance that sums up how far a gulf they have to go...

"...the store also expects to serve small contractors and do-it-yourself commuters, who might need to pick up, say, a chain saw on the way home."

...and I just imagined some guy carrying a ridiculously heavy chain saw box home on the subway or dragging the thing onto the LIRR.

I live in a small Brooklyn building (2 units) with an incompetent super - of course I do everything myself! The only drag is that boiler/water shutoff/etc/etc is in the basement, under lock and key.

Also, I make a point of going to my local hardware store first.