Sex in a city studio

My husband and I know we need to have the Big Talk with our preschool-age daughter eventually. In the meantime, we don’t want her first foray into sex ed to be an X-rated demo...starring us. Parents everywhere worry about their progeny walking in on them during the act, but in the city—especially Manhattan, where space is exceptionally tight—sometimes there’s not even a door for kids to walk through.

My daughter slept in our room until she was three. As an infant who could sleep through anything, she didn’t put a damper on our sex life. But by the time she’d turned two, we felt very self-conscious. Pretty much the only way we could be intimate was to ask my mom to come over and take our girl to the park.

According to a 2005 NYC Housing and Vacancy survey, 40 percent of Big Apple citizens live in one-bedrooms or studios. While there’s no breakdown of how many of those dwellings house kids, anecdotal evidence indicates that a lot of families are making do—and making whoopee—in uncomfortably close quarters.

Paola, a mom who works in the financial industry, says living in a one-bedroom in the Meatpacking District with her boyfriend and four-year-old son was, in a word, hard. “We put a divider between our beds, but my son was still there,” she says. “So we’d spend a lot of time in the living room and the kitchen, which had this nice marble counter. But it was so friggin’ cold! It wasn’t sexy like in the movies.”

Rosie Lanziero, founder of the Sweet Soul Movement dance school, lives in a Nolita one-bedroom with her husband and six-year-old daughter—where they all sleep in the same bed. “People do find it a bit odd,” she admits. “But our lives are on a schedule from the minute we wake up until the minute we go to bed, so we schedule time for intimacy, too. She goes on sleepovers once or twice a month so we can have some alone time.”

Celia, a freelance writer, and her husband once lived in a Bleecker Street one-bedroom with all three of their children. “We had the infant in a little basket by the bed, turned our closet into a nursery and built a trundle bed for the eldest,” she recalls. “Getting them to sleep through the night was key. It was the only way we could prioritize our marital relationship. Then we used the living room sofa. That’s where our daughter was conceived.”

These tales are not anomalies. “I once sold a studio where four people ended up living,” recalls Janice Silver, sales manager of Bellmarc Realty’s East Side office. “It’s always the same story: A single person buys or rents a small apartment. They get married, then pregnant. The plan is to move, but then they realize how expensive things are, and they’re stuck.”

Roseanne, an at-home mom in Morningside Heights, sleeps in the same bedroom with her husband, four-year-old son and four-month-old daughter, whom she dubs the Noggin baby: “If it weren’t for TV, we would never have conceived her.” She admits the arrangement is rough on romance, but she balks at the alternatives. “Financially, we can’t leave our rent-stabilized place, so what else can we do? Move to the burbs?” Then she laughs—because that’s ridiculous.

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