I get the appeal of living in Manhattan.  I don't agree with it, but I understand it.  It has a lot of fancy restaurants and bars.  It has art museums filled with paintings of overweight white pasty-skinned crossdressing Europeans, as well as paintings that are inscrutable collections of horizontal or vertical lines that are truly brilliant.  It has many plays where actors, playing heterosexual characters, yell their lines and speak in unrealistic ways.  It has a lot of theaters with foreign films made in incomprehensible languages that are slow and ponderous but very artistic.  These things are hard to find elsewhere.  I get it.

But the cost is very high.  In a recent article, I talked about not only how expensive such apartments are, but how small they've become.

And now comes another article detailing how many New Yorkers live in apartments with little or no natural sunlight:

On floor plans, the pair of air shafts running down the middle of 1664 Third Avenue in Manhattan look like inconsequential rectangles, barely bigger than a phone booth.

For Caroline Cromelin and her husband, Paul Williams, and their two children, they are passageways to the sunshine and the seasons.

“I really liked it when the snow was coming down,” said George Williams, 11, who shares a bedroom with his twin sister, Virginia, where the only window is onto one of the shafts. “It was like having our own snow globes.”

This child is growing up with the view that the outdoors is a view of an airshaft.  But wait, it gets even worse/better:

Five years ago, the building’s owner covered the top of the shafts to stop leaks that had begun to make the walls crumble.

The article goes on to discuss the legal fight between the landlord and the tenants to reopen the shaft.  That isn't the interesting part.  The interesting part is where the tenants, the married couple with different last names, describe how much they enjoy living in an apartment that, even before the shaft was sealed, had no natural light.  All they had was the shadow of the light on the airshaft!  And they loved it!

Ms. Cromelin immediately fell in love with Apartment 4N.

Ms. Cromelin?  If she's married to Paul Williams, shouldn't she be Mrs. Cromelin?  Or if she keeps her male father's name to assert her feminist credentials, does that mean she's still a Ms.?

 There were built-in cabinets, pocket doors and that pair of windows encased in rosette molding on each air shaft. “You’ve got this bowling alley of an apartment, but those windows, you just feel like you’re in Le Marais in Paris,” she said.

So, there's no natural sunlight, but there's nice molding on the air shaft, which makes it worth it.  Isn't this really twisted thinking?  And thousands of middle-class New Yorkers live in apartments like this, where they have no sunlight and the window faces a wall a few feet away.  It's worse than the view from prison.  It just shows that for liberals, they will willingly live like maximum-security convicts all for the privilege of living on the island of radical chic.

Pedro Gonzales is the editor of Newsmachete.com, the conservative news site.