A seat from the old Polo Grounds (Michael Sofronski)
Mystery writer S.J. Rozan knew instantly — after more than a year of searching — that she’d found the perfect apartment.
“The first thing was the light. It was noon on a December day, and the light poured in,” Rozan recalls of that day back in 1981. “Then, I saw the fireplace, and I thought, ‘Wow!’ Next, the woman who was showing me the apartment said: ‘Would you like to see the other room?’ I’d thought it was a studio. I said, ‘There’s another room?’ And then I saw the built-in bookcases and I knew: ‘This is perfect.’”
Rozan (the S.J. stands for Shira Judith) wasn’t fazed by the fact that the entire far West Village pad — the kitchen/living room, the mini-hallway (which, with its built-in bookcases, allows her to call it her library), the bathroom and the bedroom — only totaled 425 square feet. What mattered was the beauty of the 1925 building and the original details like the working fireplace, the green glass doorknobs, the pebble glass on the bathroom door and those bookcases.
“The building had recently gone co-op with an eviction plan,” Rozan says. “The woman who lived there had an insider price of $30,000, and she wanted $75,000. That way, she’d make a quick $40,000 profit just because she’d lived there.
“At that time, mortgage prices were 18.5 percent and nobody could afford to move. I called my father and told him I really wanted it. He agreed to lend me the money. So, he became my bank and gave me a mortgage at 3.5 percent. That’s what he bought his house at, and he said that’s what a mortgage should be.
“I paid the $75,000, and it’s now worth nine times that. It was the only smart financial decision I’ve ever made in my entire life.”
She paid off the mortgage in 20 years. “The maintenance is now about $750, but it’s gone above $500 only in the last five years,” she says.
Rozan settled into the apartment in January 1982, and all she did at first was paint. Later, she replaced the kitchen cabinets and built a divider between the kitchen and the living room. She enlarged the “itty-bitty” kitchen — it had been a galley with a wall of cabinets, a stove, a sink and a refrigerator — into a 20-square-foot room. She also redid the bathroom.
In the bedroom, she placed the bed on a 2-foot-high platform. That gives her space for storage, mostly for her books and basketballs. (At 62, and 5 feet tall, Rozan plays in two basketball leagues.)
The living room includes hand-painted photos she found at a flea market, an original seat from New York’s old Polo Grounds baseball stadium (her mother bought the seat and then ruined its value by painting it brown over its original blue), a Chinese table from 1868, a 100-year-old secretary, a sewing machine with a TV on top, an antique rocking chair, a desk and filing cabinets.
Rozan’s written 13 books here. She’s won two Edgar Awards, a Nero Wolfe and a Shamus, among others. Oprah Winfrey just put Rozan’s “The Shanghai Moon” on her list of Nine Mysteries Every Thinking Woman Should Read. Rozan’s most recent novel is “Ghost Hero,” a Detective Lydia Chin book set in the world of Chinese art.
“I was a practicing architect,” Rozan says, “but I always wanted to write. This little voice in the back of my head kept saying, ‘Let’s write a book.’ ”