NEW York City was my unlikely first home when I married in the early 1960s. My husband had to stay a full three months in New York for some exposure to the company he joined, and we found a reasonable enough (nothing cheap by way of rentals even then) one-bedroom apartment in the Chelsea district on West 23rd Street near 8th Avenue. It was then a Puerto Rican district and Spanish was prominently heard, and there was sayote for sale in the grocery. It also had the famous Chelsea Hotel, famous for harboring writers and artists.
I did note heavy piling work right next to our building where the noise of pounding into the New York granite base was something we had to live with during working hours. Years later (about five), when we made a visit to New York, we went to our old digs on 23rd and 8th, and it had gentrified. A huge apartment complex stood where the pounding had happened, our building had either disappeared or was unrecognizable. Midtown had moved downtown.
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