In The Press

To avoid confusion, their families refer to Emily Brown and Emily Carter as E. B. and E. C. The two — and their parents — have been close since the Emilys met in day care. Both women were living in their hometown, Stamford, Conn., when they decided to move to New York City, so it only made sense for them to become roommates. Ms. Brown was relieved to give up a lengthy commute; Ms. Carter didn’t mind starting one. Ms. Brown, 28, was more familiar with the city, having attended graduate school and lived with assorted roommates in Manhattan. By last fall, she was working as a psychiatric social worker at Mount Sinai Medical Center and living with her parents in Stamford. Her commute involved a wake-up time of 6:05 a.m., a 20-minute drive to the Stamford train station, a trip on the Metro-North Railroad, a subway ride and a walk. “I was so haggard,” she said. “I was exhausted. I didn’t call friends as much because I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

Ms. Carter, 27, a seventh-grade math teacher in Greenwich, has always lived in Connecticut. She roomed with two other teachers in a Stamford house, paying $700 a month.For decades, the Emilys’ parents have been meeting on Fridays at a local Italian restaurant, Frascati’s. “Whenever both of us are in town and not doing anything, we go out with the parents,” Ms. Carter said. “It is always good for a free dinner.” Over pasta last fall, Ms. Brown complained that she was “bummed out because I missed the city,” but needed a suitable roommate there. “I will live with you!” Ms. Carter declared.

“For a while, Emily was nervous that I would change my mind,” Ms. Carter said. “I had a great situation where I was. Why would I be changing it? There is no good answer. I wanted a change in my life. If I didn’t do it now, I never would.” The hunt began in the winter, when Ms. Carter notified her roommates of her pending departure. The Emilys planned to spend around $1,000 each for a two-bedroom rental. They chose the Upper East Side. It was blessedly close to Mount Sinai, with easy highway access and street parking for Ms. Carter’s car. “I can’t afford a garage and can’t afford to get parking tickets,” Ms. Carter said. She looked into the Metro-North schedule, but the once-an-hour train would deposit her at school in Greenwich just too late or much too early.The two called several agents with promising listings, and waited to see who responded. After a brusque agent showed them a small apartment with no living room for $2,500 a month, “we were devastated,” Ms. Brown said.“It was completely not what we were expecting for that much money,” she said. “It made us think we were not going to get what we were envisioning. We were so upset we went for drinks.”

Another call came from Limor Eliyahu of the Broadway Group. “They came with a face like something terrible happened to them,” Ms. Eliyahu said. “I said, ‘Guys, how much will you pay for a good thing?’ One of the Emilys said, ‘We came with a budget of $2,000, but we will stretch it out if we really need to.’ ”They declined a Madison Avenue apartment for $2,250, with one bedroom much smaller than the other. But at an East 96th Street apartment for $2,150, the living room “was warm and inviting,” Ms. Brown said. Ms. Carter wanted to rent it right then, but Ms. Brown panicked. One closet was in the living room, and one bedroom seemed small. “I just couldn’t do it,” Ms. Brown said. “I stopped in my tracks. I just wasn’t sure.”They continued hunting, annoyed when an agent at a big brokerage had them fill out paperwork before saying there was nothing to show them, and disturbed that an affordable $1,900 apartment was so unconscionably small. THEY regretted not taking the 96th Street apartment. But Ms. Eliyahu had another two-bedroom vacancy on East 97th Street, for $2,200. She didn’t have access to the apartment, but had done so many rentals in the building she knew most of the tenants. She showed them an identical apartment on a different floor. The two male roommates kept the place immaculate.

“We were barging into the bedrooms and looking in their closets — we were just so manic — but they were very friendly and said it was a great building,” Ms. Brown said.When they asked another neighbor about parking, he told them he’d never had to park more than four blocks away or circle the block for more than half an hour, and that was on the very worst days. They called their parents. “My father was the voice of reason and said you cannot take the place without seeing the actual apartment,” Ms. Carter said. When they did see it a few days later, they found a mess so sprawling they could barely see the floor. “The people had overrun this place with tchotchkes,” Ms. Brown said. “There was so much stuff in there, tons of extraneous furniture. Thank goodness we had seen the other apartment.”

The two signed a one-year lease, negotiating the monthly rent down to $2,100 and the broker’s fee down to 12 percent from 15 percent of a year’s rent, and moved in early this month. The only downside to rooming together? At night, “we want to chat and hang out,” Ms. Carter said. “The sleeping issue has been an adjustment. We say goodnight and then keep talking.”Ms. Brown can sleep in and walk the few minutes to work. “I feel like a new person,” she said. “I am nice again.” But Ms. Carter must arise extra-early: 5:15 a.m. In Stamford, her teacher roommates awakened her if she overslept. No more. She prepares her clothes and lunch the night before “so I can just grab and go,” and heads east into the rising sun.Ms. Brown is solicitous of her early-rising friend. “E. B. was very concerned not to have the commute be a miserable part of my life,” Ms. Carter said. “Every day, she asks how was the commute and if I say there was traffic, she winces.”

On her first New York morning, she tried to buy coffee before her trip to work. “E. B. talked up this great coffee place right around the block,” she said. It wasn’t yet open.