Reclusive novelist Harper Lee, who died at the age of 89 on Friday, was buried in a private ceremony in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama today. The Post has uncovered one interesting Lee/NYC connection that many people likely didn't know about: Lee had long maintained a secret, super cheap Upper East Side apartment.
Lee first moved to Manhattan in 1949, when she worked as an airline reservation agent and lived in a building on York Avenue and 82nd Street. When that place was demolished in 1967, she moved to a one-bedroom first floor apartment at 433 E. 82nd Street, which she kept for the rest of her life. She even renewed her lease for two more years just a few months ago, despite the fact she hadn't been to NYC since she suffered a stroke in 2007.
And even today, she paid less than $1,000/month for the apartment (The Daily Mail puts it at $900/month), even though the landlord was within his legal rights to increase the rent. "She was a personal friend of mine," property manager Steven Austern explained to the Post. Building super Carlos Nieves told the Post that Lee made him promise not to tell any details of her life after she died.
Many of her neighbors had no idea she lived there: "Her radiator leaked earlier this year and made a hole in our ceiling. That’s how we found out she lived there," said Caroline Holden, who lives in a basement apartment. "She was a very Southern and hospitable type of person," added another neighbor.
But among the tidbits they were able to pick up, it seems Lee was a Mets fan; she loved completing the New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle every Sunday; and she was a regular at Ottomanelli Bros. butcher shop on York Avenue.
For more on the famed author, The New Yorker has a very nice piece on Lee, and Associated Press writer Allen Breed looks back on the time Lee very politely rejected his request for an interview: "It was, without a doubt, the nicest rejection of my journalistic career."
