Eileen O’Connor was a New Yorker for the first 30 years of her life, starting on the Upper East Side and then growing up in Queens. In 1981, her job at a major U.S. airline led her to Texas when the company relocated its headquarters to Fort Worth. She spent the next four decades there.
“I thought, ‘I will give Texas a try and if I don’t like it I will go back to New York,’” she said. “I loved it immediately. And I was able to fly home all the time.”
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She was the company’s head of payroll for flight dispatchers when she met Michael O’Connor, a Philadelphia native, on his first day of work at the airline. “She was charming as could be,” Mr. O’Connor said.
Within a few years, the two were married and eventually settled in a house in Tarrant County, near Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.
Mrs. O’Connor, 74, retired two decades ago and would regularly fly back to New York to visit her elderly parents. Mr. O’Connor, 70, continued working as an air-traffic control coordinator. “It was like jumping on a running horse,” he said. “It was a fabulous job.”
A few years ago, as the couple planned for his retirement, they knew they’d be moving to New York, where many relatives remained. The O’Connors have a property in Ulster County, which Mrs. O’Connor and her two siblings inherited from their parents. Entitled to free flights as airline employees, the couple made numerous scouting trips, using the Ulster place as a home base.
“I maintained my New York roots, and they were calling me back,” Mrs. O’Connor said. “It was just a matter of when.”
After selling their Texas house for $400,000, they aimed for an all-cash purchase with a budget up to $600,000 and looked for a studio or one-bedroom apartment in good condition in an elevator building. Coming from the Texas heat, they wanted a place with central air-conditioning.
The plan was to land on the Upper East Side. “It had memories for me and we had relatives there,” Mrs. O’Connor said. But the buildings they saw seemed old, even if the units had been modernized, and the area was less lively than they expected.
Online, they connected with Kunal Khemlani, a salesperson at the Corcoran Group, who discouraged them from considering studios. “We spent a lot of time in hotel rooms, and that’s what we were used to,” Mrs. O’Connor said. “I thought it was all we could afford.”
One day, the O’Connors went to see a Beatles tribute band at Pier 57 in Chelsea and noticed that the area had not just offices but apartment buildings. “It wasn’t until that day that we realized there were residential areas there we were unaware of,” Mr. O’Connor said. “Fifty years ago, downtown was an industrial wasteland.”
Refocusing their search in Lower Manhattan, they found themselves drawn to Battery Park City, with its relatively new buildings and waterfront location. The neighborhood was filled with restaurants, shops and dogs.
They visited several buildings there, all with doormen, nice lobbies and gyms (though they had little interest in common amenities). Monthly condo fees in Battery Park City are comparatively high, with all 18 residential condominium buildings there holding ground leases with the Battery Park City Authority that are set to expire in 2069.
The O’Connors found the one-bedrooms to be largely uniform — cookie-cutter interiors of approximately 600 square feet, with two boxy rooms, bifold doors on the bedroom closet, a small hallway outside the bathroom and a kitchen off the living room, usually with a pass-through window.
“For two people, these are well laid out and engineered with no dead space,” Mr. O’Connor said.
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