Rich Mintz  

One of the things I miss most living in the Northeast is the way Western houses are open to the outside. You can’t build that way in a place where it snows, and so much glass isn’t advisable in extreme climates of any kind, but the in moderate climate of coastal Southern California, it rarely gets too hot or too cold, and you can live with your windows and doors open pretty much all the time.

These houses make me covetous — not because Rudolph Schindler is a Famous Architect, but because I want to live in them! They aren’t very big, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug — you don’t need a huge house if you can expand into the outside whenever you like.

I’ve been in Penn Station, what, a hundred times by now? Two hundred? And yet when the train from Boston pulled in tonight, and I hustled onto the platform and up the nearest stairway, I ended up in some subterranean hole I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It constantly amazes me how Byzantine everything in New York is. (Even after more than eight months living right on top of it, I still sometimes get disoriented inside of Fulton Street station.)

So I walked down a short corridor filled with Long Islanders and their Long Island ways, followed a cryptic sign reading “C-E Downtown Street” up an unpromising-looking back stairway, and there I was standing in front of a subway turnstile as the downtown-bound E pulled in. What luck! Not only that, I’m at the front of the train, at the closest exit to my house.

I’m guessing I was on some mid-level north-south cross-corridor on the Eighth Avenue side, somewhere near the 31st Street corner. But God knows I’ll never find it again. Maybe next time, it won’t even be there anymore.