I do not *heart* New York

In fact, I hate it.

I reached this conclusion after seeing my seventh apartment yesterday, in the third neighborhood I'd walked around.

1. Tudor City. $1700 gets you 250 square feet of space. It's charming, yes, but you could practically touch both sides of the apartment with your arms spread out. Dorm living is so 2006. And there's a large complex being built to the west, right outside the building. Anyway, there were no studios or one-bedrooms available in October.

2. Meet broker from Citi Habitats on the street and sign a contract. On the street. Classay! Then to a place on 45th St., Hell's Kitchen. $1625 gets you a studio on the second floor looking out over a construction site, plus roach traps under the sinks. Gross.

3. Onto 47th St. $2010 will get you a one-bedroom on the fourth floor, across the street from a school. Not bad, but no laundry in the building.

4. Another place on 47th St. $1895 gets you a second floor walk-up that's not as nice as the one down the street.

5. Walk 10 blocks with broker to 57th St. A wood-paneled lobby belies the leaking faucet in the bath and the roach traps in the kitchen and bathroom. Ew.

6. That's all from the broker. I continue on alone and decide to check out the Upper East Side, which is now supposedly the bargain neighborhood for yuppies. I walk along Central Park South and spot Giada DeLaurentis, from the Food Network. She has perfect hair and appears to be shopping with a friend. She's cute.

I check out an Eberhart one-bedroom on E. 82nd. $2400 gets you a small but well-constructed apartment across the street from P.S. 200. The "bedroom" is a kind of a joke. There's one closet. And there's roach traps under the kitchen sink. God.

7. My Halstead broker, whom I kind of love, calls with a last-minute apartment in the East Village. I call Joiner to join me (ha ha), and we walk around the block. It's on 13th St., a few minutes' walk from Union Square. The building faces an empty, overgrown lot (at first I thought it was a crack lot, but my broker says NYU just bought it). $2100 gets you a basement apartment that's been newly renovated, with a private garden in the back. It's also right next to the recycling room. Pest potential very high. I sneeze about 4 times and start getting a headache while I'm in the place. It has great potential, but I can't see putting the time in to make it what it could be.

I realize I hate New York and don't want to live here.