But beneath this vintage look was a morbid vibe. A fractured skull of some horned animal hung from the wall — could have been a deer, but I’m no zoologist. A porcelain hand on a shelf grasped upward, suggesting a drowning man. The dark iron overhead light with its squirrel-cage filament bulbs screamed torture chamber. A window into our host’s soul, or perhaps just the passing fashion.

Williamsburg is set against a backdrop of exposed brick. The shops go overboard with individual touches, yet somehow they all look the same; the residents seem similarly afflicted. With some neighborhoods you wish you could stay longer, but a month here was sufficient — long enough to do a field study of hipster subspecies, to discover gems like Best Pizza (which really does have the best pizza) and to realize that having been born in the late 1970s, we were too old for this party.

As the taxi pulled up to our next address, Hamsterdam of “The Wire” came to mind. We were in an edgy part of Gowanus, an industrial strip in Brooklyn on the early side of transitional, centered on a canal so polluted it won a mention on the Superfund National Priorities List.

There was no key inside the designated black shoe so, as instructed by our host, we used a credit card on the lock (accidentally jimmying the neighbor’s lock first — without success, thank goodness) and found the previous occupant’s suitcases still there, open. The central heating had apparently been broken for years and the weather forecast predicted a blizzard.

When dealing with the frustrations of city living, it’s nice to have folks on speed dial incentivized to help. Airbnb went beyond its 24-hour policy of issuing a refund for substandard accommodation, sending us by taxi to a swanky hotel in Times Square for the night, all expenses paid. It suggested some alternative listings, but we ended up finding a new place ourselves, and by the next day, we were on our way to the border of East Harlem and the Upper East Side.

Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell. Here, the heat blasted unbidden, from which we escaped by opening the windows to winter’s coldest month. That first night, on the way to the corner store to get some food, we dodged mice scurrying between bags of trash. Back in the kitchen, Elaine fired up the stove by the bath towels, but when the pasta from the corner store hit the boiling water, a few little worms floated to the top. I skipped dinner that night.