The idea of this blog post has been sitting in my brain since September of 2024 (the early version of this post has been in my draft folder almost just as long). That’s when my husband Joe and I moved to New York City from Cincinnati!

This is something we had been seriously toying with for probably six years before taking the leap. Living in New York City is one of those things you always dream of in the back of your mind, or at least I always have. I’ve considered myself a city girl my entire life and have always felt so energized in city centers. Plus, I’ve spent much of my life in front of a screen watching shows that only strengthened my urge to live in the big city (thank you Sex and the City, Hey Arnold, Friends, and even Seinfeld).

I didn’t take my first trip to New York City until 2014. Joe and I were still somewhat recent college grads living in separate cities, he in Cleveland and I in Cincinnati. I drove to Cleveland to pick him up, and we were off to NYC. We parked at a friend’s place in New Jersey and took the train to Manhattan. I kid you not, the first person I locked eyes with when I emerged at street level was then Million Dollar Listing star Ryan Serhant. He was tall and well-dressed, and we made eye contact while he was on what I assume to be a very important business call (because that’s what city people do). As a longtime Bravo watcher, I took this brief, wordless, yet powerful interaction as a good omen.

That was ten years ago. Moving here at that time felt so out of reach and unrealistic. I was a girl in her early 20s who was one year into a real estate career she fell into. I was also two years into this blog, which brought me so much joy and opened up my world by forcing me outside of my comfort zone. I was in a daily tug of war, not knowing the path I wanted to take.

Joe eventually moved to Cincinnati, and we bought and renovated a gorgeous condo. It had floor-to-ceiling windows and incredible views of downtown Cincinnati, Kentucky, and the Ohio River. I put my heart and soul into decorating that place. The condo was in a sad state of affairs when we got it, and it was a dream to transform it into what it became. Even though we loved our condo, there was always a nagging feeling that it wasn’t our final destination. I achieved my dream of feeling like a city girl by living in a high-rise within city limits. It was amazing. The dream of moving to NYC never left me, but I kept it filed away, in the ‘not possible’ section of my brain.

Gradually, Joe and I started having serious talks about moving. This conversation went on for years. Thankfully, it was an idea we were both intrigued by, but it didn’t make it any less terrifying. Our family and close friends knew about our possibly, maybe thinking about eventually moving to NYC discussions. We started keeping it under wraps because we were worried people were thinking, ‘what the hell are these indecisive people gonna do?’

Then Covid happened. Then we postponed our wedding a year. Then I started experiencing a list of health issues that rivaled the length of a CVS receipt. I would spend the next four sleepless years shelling out tens of thousands of dollars on every doctor, test, medication, and supplement you’ve never even heard of. (This is another blog post that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for years.) The New York City dream felt like it was slipping away, along with my hope of ever feeling good again.

Fast forward to the summer of 2024, and a job that was exactly what Joe was looking for opened up in the New York City office. It was a perfect mix of exciting and terrifying. This was the golden opportunity, but it also quickly made this years-long dream very very real. We knew this was a now-or-never moment, so we charged forward.

Joe got the job (!), which quickly triggered a stressful chain reaction that happens when you move. The farthest I’d ever moved in my life was to Dayton, Ohio, a 45-minute drive from Cincinnati, for college. We also had a condo we needed to rent out, clean out, and figure out what would go in storage.

We flew to New York one weekend to do an apartment touring blitz with our realtor. It was stressful. I had many moments where I thought What the hell are we doing? These thoughts were likely exacerbated by my choice to wear cute yet impractical jelly sandals as we trekked miles across Brooklyn on a scorching summer day. (I developed blisters that covered both heels and took months to heal.) I looked like the antithesis of a New Yorker.

Brooklyn

Speaking of Brooklyn, this borough is magic. We first ventured over here during a long weekend trip in 2023. It was during our “will we or won’t we move” era, and we hadn’t been to New York City since before COVID. We stayed in Manhattan, and I realized how much COVID made being isolated feel so normal. I was enjoying being back in the city, but I wondered if I could picture myself living there full-time.

Then we took the subway over to Brooklyn. The moment we ascended from those subway steps, we both felt an immediate sense of peace. While 20-something me loved the idea of living in Manhattan, 30-something me felt an instant connection with the slower pace of Brooklyn. We were in Cobble Hill and immediately started working our way through every street, in awe of the charm and architecture.

At some point, unbeknownst to us at the time, we crossed over into Brooklyn Heights. We walked around Brooklyn Bridge Park and up the cobblestone-paved Joralemon into the heart of the neighborhood. I’m a big believer in intuition and energies, and I felt a strong intuition when we were exploring Brooklyn Heights. If we ever made the move to New York City, this was where we needed to be.

We stumbled upon the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which offers the best views of lower Manhattan and the Financial District, the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and even the Statue of Liberty. Yes, you can see all of these things at once from the Promenade! It was a beautiful but hot day, and I think all the excitement caused me to become overheated. We found refuge (and air conditioning) in Dellarocco’s, a cute pizza restaurant in the neighborhood, and had a great meal.

I could go on and on about the timeline from then to now. We went back to Cincinnati and continued to contemplate until we made it official, as I mentioned above.

Finding a Home

Once we knew we were moving here, finding a place to live was an experience even I, a licensed realtor for 11 years, found overwhelming. I found an apartment in Fort Greene that we fell in love with. It was a condo in a mid-rise building that was built in 2008. It had a huge bedroom, a walk-in closet (!), and an open floor plan.

Our friend went to the open house for us, and I had multiple phone calls with the listing agent. The agent told me I should work with her when we moved, and I thought we were becoming besties, until she got flaky on me and eventually said the owners chose a couple who had a “referral” from inside the building. I’ve done tons of rentals over my career, and I’d never heard of a referral letter for a rental. We quickly realized we were swimming in shark-infested apartment-hunting waters. If only that would be the only curveball we’d encounter during our search…

Joe’s company set us up with a realtor. A few days before we flew to NYC, I found a unicorn of a rental that had only been listed for five minutes. This was a garden-level apartment in charming Boerum Hill. The wild part was that this row of townhomes had been built in 2020, and they were designed to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the neighborhood. This basically new apartment also had a large finished basement, making the whole space 1,000 square feet. That probably sounds small, but in New York, that sounds palatial.

We dropped our luggage at the hotel and bolted to the open house for this Boerum Hill beauty. We got there early and saw more and more people showing up for the tour. We loved it and walked to a coffee shop with our realtor to fill out the application. She suggested we offer over the asking price, which, after understanding the rental market here, made sense. I had helped many buyers and sellers in Cincinnati navigate the chaos of the Covid-era real estate market, so offers over asking price were not new to me. Bidding wars on a rental, though, that was a new phenomenon. The thing is, these rentals are already so expensive. You’re already trying to rationalize the advertised price, but that’s merely a starting point. These bidding wars mean you could be paying an additional $500 a month on already pricy rent.

Don’t quote me, but I think we bid $400 over asking. We felt good about it, and we even wrote a cute little bio about us, telling them that we owned a place in Cincinnati and were landlords ourselves. We also said we’d be willing to bid higher if it came to that. Well, the realtor must’ve gotten a pretty juicy offer because we never got a chance to bid higher. It got rented, but it wasn’t to us. Joe was pretty bummed about this one, and I was too, but previously losing the Fort Greene apartment really hardened my spirits. This isn’t dramatic at all, but I felt a gut punch when we lost the Fort Greene place. Mentally, I had already moved in and was living my cute Brooklyn life. At this point, I was a cynic. I was just waiting for my sweet husband to catch up.

We looked at tons of apartments that weekend. I think it was July, so it was hot! And on the first day of touring, I wore the aforementioned jelly sandals. Big mistake. Huge! By weekend’s end, my spirits and feet were losing hope. We were flying back to Cincinnati without securing an apartment. The highlight of our brief trip was a meal at Harry’s, a longtime steakhouse in the Financial District that we fell in love with. (Harry’s has become a favorite, and we take my family whenever they visit!)

Back in Cincinnati, we packed our lives up and took care of pressing moving-related business. I would scour listings all day long and had so many StreetEasy alerts set up. This went on for a while, and nothing looked promising. At this point, Joe was a few weeks out from moving to NYC since he had a set date for work. It was crunch time.

Because of my health issues, we had mostly been looking at apartments that had central air. In New York, that’s like finding a needle in a skyscraper (I’ve yet to see a haystack here). We quickly realized a lot of our options were concentrated to massive high-rise buildings that weren’t appealing to us. Most of these also had windows you can’t open. The only redeeming aspect was the central air, but we really weren’t feeling these places. (I always reminded our realtor that I wasn’t some aloof small-town girl who comes to the city wanting a 3-bedroom home for $1,000 a month. I’ve seen so many of these tropes online that it’s ingrained into my brain.) Our condo in Cincinnati is in a high-rise, but on a lower floor. Growing up, I always dreamed of high-rise city living, and I feel like I experienced that in Cincinnati. The thought of doing it again in NYC didn’t sound great.

It was officially crunch time (aka ‘we have to give the moving company an address to drop our stuff at and you start work in a couple weeks’ time). It was desperate. I threw up the realtor’s version of a Hail Mary and removed all my previous search parameters on StreetEasy. I unchecked that frustrating little box indicating we only wanted central A/C (I saw so many listings that pretended to have central air and didn’t!) to see what was out there.

Suddenly, a plethora of options appeared. I scanned a few, and then dragged my mouse over to Brooklyn Heights on the StreetEasy map. My hopes weren’t high. I had previously looked in Brooklyn Heights, but knew there wouldn’t be many options as it’s a very historic neighborhood (also known as America’s first suburb!).

That’s when I found it. The perfect apartment in our dream neighborhood! I inspected the listing because surely something was wrong for this to still be available. It had been listed for 30 days and they had just lowered the price a comical $50 that day. It was completely renovated, had normal windows that open and close, and was very strangely a similar layout to our condo in Cincinnati. Our realtor ventured there immediately and did a FaceTime tour with us. I never thought we’d rent something we hadn’t physically seen in person, but here we were. We immediately sent a deposit, which helped us beat out other groups that were touring it that night. The next day it was confirmed that it was ours!

It truly felt like we had to go through all this stress and heartbreak to end up with the perfect place for us. Once we moved in, I realized we had walked past our building on our first trip to Brooklyn in 2023! If only we knew then, in our constant state of uncertainty about moving, that we would end up in this exact spot! It felt very serendipitous, and I still think about it frequently. This is exactly where we were meant to be.

The Big Move to The Big Apple

This story has ended up being unfathomably longer than I ever planned. I’ll spare the details between securing our apartment and moving, save for a couple of parts of the story.

First, in the thick of packing up our life in Cincinnati, I found out I was nominated for an award! I have another blog post I’ve been working on, going in-depth about some career changes (my poor draft folder) that I’ll share soon. Long story short, I was nominated for Best Short Screenplay at the Cindependent Film Festival. Again, more details in a future post, but this was a huge and unexpected moment for me! I didn’t get to celebrate it as much as I would’ve liked because of the move, but it felt so exciting to be recognized for my work. The festival took place the weekend I was moving (Joe had already moved), and I really didn’t want to miss it.

Thankfully, there was a live table read of my script on the first day of the festival. My mom, dad, and I attended it, and I am so glad I did! It was an out-of-body experience. My script is a comedy about Skyline Chili, and everyone loved it. That felt like the perfect note to send me off on this new journey, leaving the only city I’ve ever known with accolades of my tales of its polarizing local delicacy. Also, spoiler alert: I won!

That was long… again. Apologies. The second detail I’ll share about moving day is that it was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had. My eyes are filling with tears as I write this. It’s crazy how even reflecting on it still makes me emotional!

My brother had a real estate event in NYC the same weekend I was moving, so he, my mom, and I decided to drive my belongings up. On moving day, I stood in my bedroom at my parents’ house and took it all in. I did the same with the entire house. I had already bid adieu to my condo, and it physically hurt to see it so empty. At least my parents’ house still looked the same. I then said goodbye to my dad. As we were backing out of the driveway, I started bawling. I tried to hide it, but weeping usually produces crying sounds you can’t conceal. For the next five minutes, I was full-body sobbing. This move was the scariest thing I’ve ever done, and now, after years of dreaming, it was real. I knew this was what we needed to do, but I also felt so jolted by actually doing it.

As someone who is extremely sensitive, reflective, and close with my family, it all felt like a shockwave going through my body. Two hours later, we were in Columbus. We stopped at a Skyline (appropriate), and I was happy to have gotten that emotional release out of my system. I don’t really like thinking about the move, or at least those final days in Cincinnati and then getting to New York. I’m so grateful to be settled in here almost a year later, but the act of leaving there and coming here really affected me. I’m glad to be on the other side of it, and the fact that writing this and recounting that time makes me emotional confirms that I’m glad it’s in the rear view.

Well, another long-winded story has been told. This is why I like writing scripts. You have to keep things short and sweet. When left to my own devices on my blog, I end up with this drivel that probably nobody is still reading.

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Moving to New York City, and specifically Brooklyn, has been an incredible experience. I always knew we’d regret not doing this, and now that we’ve been here nearly a year, it’s hard to imagine the alternative.

We sold both of our cars before the move, and although I do miss driving sometimes, I love the walkability here. Our neighborhood feels like the set of a rom-com, and there’s an energy here you can’t get anywhere else. We’ve had so many great experiences in our short time here, and I’m sure I’ll share more as it happens.

Cincinnati will always be home, and I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to get back probably five or six times since moving. It’s a short flight, and I love knowing it’s easy to go back and forth. Brooklyn and the OTR/Pendleton neighborhoods in Cincinnati share so many similarities. I love the Roebling Bridge in Cincinnati, and in Brooklyn, I now get to view its “big sister,” the Brooklyn Bridge, on my daily walks!

I’ve been working on my blog again, but felt like I needed to publish this post before I shared others. When you go away from the internet for a few years, it only feels right to make a ridiculously long post such as this to share what you’ve been up to.

And if you’re still here, thank you for reading!