School of Business

Location Chelsea
Rent $2,735
Square feet 700 [one-bedroom apartment in 2002 80/20 building]
Occupants Bryan Sloane [futures trader]; Leslie Fuchs [assistant to the president, Gourmet Advisory Services]

How did you come to be here?[Leslie] I moved in in July. [Bryan] I used to have a roommate. [Leslie] I spent 99 percent of my nights here. [Bryan] I graduated from NYU in 2002. It was no-man's-land here. The only place around was Whole Foods. [Leslie] Restaurants are finally catching up.

What was here before?[Bryan] A parking lot. Rockrose was the developer.

What did your roommate do?[Leslie] They both were from the Stern School of Business. [Bryan] He and I looked all over. We looked on Lex. I refused to live there because there was dog poop all over the street. We also looked on 21st between Seventh and Eighth. There was . . .

Yes, got it.It's the broken-windows theory. If there's dog poop today, there's dog poop tomorrow.

How did you meet?It was the fall of 2002. [Leslie] He didn't have cable hooked up yet. My landlord gave us a free black box. All of a sudden we were stealing cable. My friend from college came over and said he was bringing a friend. He came to watch The Sopranos and he never left. It was an L-shaped sofa. When you'd sit here on . . .

You're diagramming this on your tabletop made of . . . Stainless steel. When you'd sit here, on the end, the view was awful. As the months went on, he kind of moved up on the couch. We're going to Brooklyn this afternoon to pick up . . . [Bryan] We've been great at buying distressed Internet assets. These chairs we're on sell for $250 apiece. I offered the people $150 for all four. We find people who have to sell. They have to move.

You've got a lot of boxes still unpacked.We've been so busy. [Leslie] Work and life. Today we're getting a brushed-steel lateral file cabinet. [Bryan] Let me tell her the events of last week. [Leslie] I do event planning. [Bryan] We are very busy. [Leslie] When I was growing up, I was going to be a lawyer, and my best friend was going to be a finance person. We were going to liberate women from their awful marriages. My friend's mother said, I do divorce and I do real estate. When I do divorce, it's so painful. When you do real estate, it's happy.

Always? [We think quietly.] [Bryan] Now she does 40-foot towers of seafood for bar mitzvahs. Part of the reason we like this apartment so much is the deck. [Leslie] It's gorgeous. [Bryan] We'd looked at Avalon Chrystie Place. [Leslie] Before it was open—we loved it. [Bryan] You want to live on Houston—then you go on a tour. You realize they have these special noise-proof windows. There are horns blaring 24 hours. [Leslie] It was about $1,000 more a month. [Bryan] Our friends who just got married . . .

Yes? [Bryan] They moved to Hell's Kitchen and they're paying $2,350. Their floors are not level so you get vertigo. [Leslie] They have one circuit. [Bryan] You can't run the air conditioner with the toaster. [Leslie] I am not such a walk-up-the-stairs girl. Of course they had all their wedding gifts sent here because we have the doorman. [Bryan] Since I trade energy products, I'm acutely aware of the energy that goes into electricity. Last week after the hurricane, we cut back on air-conditioning. [Leslie] Natural gas was up 25 percent. What else can we tell you? [ Bryan] We got these lamps for 50 bucks. Seaman's was going out of business.

I forgot to talk about New Orleans. It's been on all our minds.[We discuss.] [Bryan] We have a go-bag. [Leslie] Where is it? [Bryan] That's a good question.

Why do you have so many umbrellas?When we moved, we didn't think we had any.