Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women
“My landlord thought I was great, ‘you are intelligent,’ he said. Fine! And after 16 years he said one day: ‘Why don’t you buy the house? You can have it cheap!’ No one from his family wanted to take it over. Thus, in 1979, I bought the red house in the East Village, the old immigrant house built in 1898, for $40,000. At the time this was about 160,000 Swiss francs. I had discussed it with my parents who helped.” Linda is enthusiastic about her neighbourhood. “Then the East Village was not as elegant as it is today. It was more of an alternative district with many hippies, but very informal and friendly. And New York was not yet the city of global business. The [World Trade Center] towers were just being planned. South of 14th street there were still cobblestone streets. It was only later that prosperity arrived here too – that entire big bubble which now has burst.”
Little by little Linda remodeled the apartments, the old-fashioned “railroad flats” in which one room leads into the next. “In the meantime the apartments have arrived in the 21st century, except my own. The Swiss TV series Lüthi and Blanc unfortunately stopped one year too early. I had invested the money I earned from this role in the renovations. Now I have to save again, and thus the four-footed tub still sits in the last room.”