I click my heels three times.  There’s no place like home.

New York is an electric mess of metal and concrete, noise and people. Slick and buzzing, a thin layer of ice covers a worn grid etched over a tiny island.  An emerald city is dying inside the snowy mist and grime. It erodes by the water, wheezing.  It’s called The Cherokee.  This is my building and I was entirely unaware of its unique history when I moved in about 6 months ago.

The Cherokee – a hidden oddity beyond the freezing rain-soaked streets – below York Avenue, squats over an entire block.  The building is painted like an emerald inside the city.  It’s a historical relic and one of the city’s most natural, hidden museums.  This summer when I answered an ad on Craigslist, I sprinted over in the crippling heat and humidity to see the place.  Ornate green arches greeted me.  The building itself, felt steeped in another time, like a Parisian Belle Epoque.  It’s sepia-toned and splashed with layers of green – green doors, emerald banisters and railing. The walls arch and creak over an outdoor staircase.

Immediately after I saw the façade of the building, I applied to live there.  I don’t know why I was inexplicably drawn to this fossilized landmark building, but soon after I moved in, I started googling its history.

The Cherokee was erected in 1909, funded by the Vanderbilts.  Originally referred to as “The Shively Tenements” (named for Dr. Shively, the man who dreamed the place up), the massive building consumes the entire block.  It once served as medical housing for poverty-stricken New Yorkers with tuberculosis. The project was scrapped after four years and the building became a cooperative by 1924. Decaying along the riverside, the Cherokee is a stalwart emerald city within the city, aging under collecting layers of paint.  Unchanging and magnificently faded, it reaches to the river, eroding under the city’s artificial light.