[color=#FF0101]NEW: August, 2014: Read my story about the Parc Lincoln at MyFirstApartmentNYC, a new site where you are invited to contribute your story about your first apartment in New York. The Parc Lincoln holds an iconic place in my mind. This is the first place in New York where I had a room to myself for any length of time. I lived here for 8 or 9 months during 1990 and 1991, first landing in Room 1422, then moving down to Room 317. This place was the October of my life. Today I walk long yards of tourism across this city I've known for longer than the occupiers. I had my time in the now-luxurious basement of my youth. The Parc Lincoln is no more by that name. The fundamental transient residence survives. The lobby was subsumed long ago by an upscale restaurant named 'Cesca, where I got to stare at the ceiling whilst slurping wine and waiting for a seafood platter in the same space which once smelled of urine and more obscure stenches. While dining at 'Cesca I stared at the ceiling and remembered the cockroaches climbing over my face in Room 317, the clucking pigeons that woke me up at all hours, the gushing rivers of perspiration that could have drowned a man of less nimble sleep. The Parc Lincoln is iconic in my mind, but maybe with only self-gratifying reasons. Was it that bad? (O, it was) But I remember a point of laziness where I felt I could live like that forever. Laziness. Life's slumber. I stared at the 'Cesca ceiling and imagined the lives passing 15 feet above my face. One of those lives was mine. How do we live like this? Stacked like cordwood, the poor and the lazy just 15 feet away from the fat and the old, the stereotypically aloof Manhattanites with their thorn-rimmed glasses and their almost-beautiful daughters blabbing into the secret air of the isolated, blabbing that the hard times are coming soon, the difficulties unknown since oblivion are soon to be discussed, revered, wandered upon. The 'Cesca dining room was nearly empty. The front desk of the Parc Lincoln hotel is now filled by a bar. The space for the phone booths is now filled by a wine closet.