A ‘Luxury Hotel’ for the Price of a Manhattan Walk-Up

Dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers suffer some culture shock when they uproot and move to Tucson. We were no different.

After all, there’re no subways, no delis, no seasons (at least as New Yorkers know them): things which define life in New York.

But after you’ve spent some time in Tucson, you begin to appreciate certain things.

Like:

• The warmth of a t-shirt while barbequing on a November night.
• Actually getting somewhere in 15 minutes by car
• Sunsets like you’ve never seen back East
• Seeing the stars
• Buying a 4,000 square foot home in the Foothills for the price of a walk-up in Manhattan

In fact, when our East Coast friends and colleagues saw the home we bought in Alta Vista, they were astonished that ours was a single-family home. Judging from the pictures, one friend thought we’d bought a “small luxury hotel.”

Twin 80-foot balconies offer commanding views of downtown Tucson and the magnificent Santa Catalina Mountains. To the southwest, mountain views extend all the way to Mexico.

Swap our Foothills home for a place in Manhattan and you’d get a walk-up apartment in Chelsea, Murray Hill or the Upper West Side. Two bedrooms, around 1,200 square feet and maybe a view.

But try matching the view and features in Manhattan and you’d have to multiply eight-to ten-fold in dollars to come even close.

I’ll take the Foothills thank you very much.

By the way, we still preserve a feeling of New York in our home thanks to an elevator. On discovering this, our latest New York guest suggested we hire a uniformed elevator man to shuttle guests between our two floors.