The "Lifestyle" Magazine for Your Average Schlump

When my pal Mike got his own apartment at the tender age of 19 his girlfriend wisely bought him a subscription to Apartment Life, the now defunct magazine which catered to the type of people you'd find in NYC: short on space, short on cash but long on creativity. Mike got so tired of my reading his issues that he bought me a subscription, even though I lived with my parents.

AL was rather like a hip Family Circle for young, mostly single people just starting out. The articles covered stuff like how to stir fry vegetables; negotiating a lease and decorative lighting using clamp-on lamps. It was a welcome contrast to the hokey "family" oriented magazines or the always slightly arrogant New York. I kept my back issues for years. My favorite was a special issue devoted to when John Belushi asked the editors to help him design a soundproof party room for his Greenwich Village townhouse. Years later I went into a professional rehearsal studio and recognized that AL's designers had followed the same principles as top sound engineers.

Sadly, the editors at AL decided that there was more money to be made writing for the 'upscale' market, and sometime in the late Seventies they released a special issue entitled "The New Classics," which resembled Architectural Digest. This was not the same magazine that taught so many of us how to make a bookcase! Soon afterwards they changed their name to Metropolitan Home.