Coming Home to a New Upper West Side, Which Apartment Did She Choose?

A year ago, Marilyn Alterman found herself trapped in her Seattle home by a snowstorm, fearing she would slip on the ice. “They had to reroute the buses because they couldn’t get up the hill,” said Ms. Alterman, a born-and-raised New Yorker from the Bronx. “In New York, even if we have a blizzard, I can always get outside.” Before heading west in the early 1990s, she spent years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her co-op limited sublets to two years, so she had to sell the apartment “when New York was on the down,” she said. “The snow was the clincher.” For slightly less than she was paying in Seattle, she thought, she could get a much smaller apartment in New York: “I knew I would have to trade down and give something up.” Ms. Alterman — who spent her career in sales and marketing, but most recently worked in the facilities department of a child-welfare agency — retired and went on the hunt for a one-bedroom in a prewar elevator building in her beloved former neighborhood, the Upper West Side.