Sunday morning, for the last time, I swept the faux parquet floors of the apartment we’ve lived in for the last five years:

Our apartment was on the 7th floor — the one where the building has a bit of a setback on both sides, creating terraces. Our terrace was the one to the right. Our apartment is represented by the seven windows on that side of the building, the west side. Our windows face north, overlooking Fulton Street, the South Street Seaport, and the Brooklyn Bridge. I love that view, especially under the first lacy blanket of snow each winter.

This 1969 pop art office tower, converted to residential apartments sometime in the 1990s, was the cutaway image used on The Cosby Show when Claire Huxtable went to work at her law offices. For our entire time in New York it’s been home.

Cleaning up after five years of family life, the moving van having taken all our possessions away earlier in the week — the show over, so to speak — I felt a little like the cartoon version of Carol Burnett with her mop, cleaning up as the credits scroll up the TV screen.

Piles of cat hair, dust bunnies, pennies, stray checkers and chessmen gathered into heaps, debris that had accumulated for half a decade behind bookcases and under kids’ beds. Outside in the cool November air I scraped the fall leaves and windblown garbage out of the corners of the terrace, stuffed the clippings from our old plants into Hefty garbage bags. I pulled the Christmas lights off the railing, removed the remaining flower pot holders, folded up shop.

Here are a few of the things I thought about, breaking that terrace down:

• The goodbye party we threw for Rachel and Missy when they moved to Chicago — one of two enormous parties we threw that summer, never to be matched in terms of the numbers of people packed out there, Kool and the Gang’s “Rated X” blaring from the stereo to announce the arrival of summer.
• Farrell curled up out on the deck in a sleeping bag the morning after some party or another, one that had involved a 5 a.m. ride on the Staten Island Ferry at the end of the night to watch the sun come up.
• An animated conversation with Lane that climaxed in him accidentally kicking a flipflop over the edge of the building and the two of us running down to retrieve it, hoping it hadn’t landed on a pedestrian.
• Innumerable surprising objects falling on us from the high-rise apartments above us, everything from Hustler paper airplanes to underwear to hundreds of cigarette butts. (Today I found a bikini top that had fallen in a corner years ago. Covered with dirt and leaves and moss, it had partially decomposed.)
• Stella and Lisa dancing to Roxy Music.
• Trixie’s first time meeting the extended friendship circle, which included Pandora down from Boston for the weekend.
• Easter dinner last year with Jason and Nicole and other new friends from the neighborhood.
• Listening to The Microphones’ The Glow, Part 2 for the first time. Jeremy had brought it from L.A. and paired it with a lovely bottle of single malt scotch.
• Any number of friends lounging contentedly in the hammock, staring up at the rest of the building that unfolded above you like a magic road, disappearing into the distance. Sometimes it looked like you could walk right up it.

Saturday night (before dinner, which was followed by a delightful little evening watching Johnny Marr play guitar for Modest Mouse at Bowery Ballroom) we gathered on the terrace with those friends who happened to be around for toasts to the end of an era. Among other things, we toasted to terrace stories that could and couldn’t be repeated in public. In that spirit I acknowledge here the sort of stories I can’t write about, along with those that would simply take up too much space. Thank you, friends, for many good times on that terrace.

When we found out a couple months ago that we might have the opportunity to move to an apartment in SoHo — one better suited to our growing daughters and one that involved an exciting innovation in the University’s program for residential education — we jumped at the chance. As the weeks passed and the move came closer and closer to realization, we grew increasingly conscious of what we’d be giving up.

Our view of the Bridge, for starters:

One of our neighbors took this photo from his terrace at midnight; at one o’clock in the morning they kill the lights on the cables and you only see the illuminated walkway. Every room in our apartment had views of the Bridge, as did the terrace. The towers came to feel like sentinels, like friends. Our daughters watched them at night as they fell asleep, counting cars.

We’ll miss that damn outside space, to be sure. I remember at some party an acquaintance of ours stepping out onto it for the first time. She inhaled a gallon of air through her nose, exhaled through her mouth, then said, “I love the great outdoors.” Sitting on the terrace in the dull white noise hum of other buildings’ ventilation systems, you did get the sense that you were at the bottom of an urban canyon.

We’ll miss the proximity to the seaport as well, though we’re reassured by the fact that the new apartment is only a 20-minute walk from Fresh Salt. Our neighborhood friends, our sails on the Pioneer, my relationship with the Seaport Museum’s staff, the walking tours I love to lead for students and family members — these things will remain a significant part of our lives. I’m not sure we’d have been able to move, otherwise.

Five years is as long as we’ve stayed in any one apartment. We lived for five years in our dingy semi-basement apartment in Cambridge, redeemed only by the side yard and garden to which we had exclusive access and by the short walk we enjoyed to Harvard Square.

Five years on Water Street saw us integrate more fully into a neighborhood than we did in Cambridge; it gave our kids a sense of community at a fabulous public school in Tribeca; it allowed us to retain a sense of the natural history of Manhattan — a knowledge that we lived on an island; it gave us front-row seats for the last days of the Fulton Fish Market and any number of nights when we’d stumble down to Melville’s birthplace with other pilgrims before we made our way back to bed. It gave us all a firm sense of ourselves as downtowners and East Siders: identities we’re happy to take with us.

Cleaning up the corners of our first five years in New York gave me occasion (as Slade did here a few weeks ago) to think about home — to recognize the delicious accidents and opportunities and hard, hard work that go into our continual efforts at self-fashioning. I don’t regret not living in an ancestral center, a homeland. I love being part of the ongoing story of migration, transformation, and renewal that’s gone on in lower Manhattan for the last four hundred years or more. I particularly enjoy the ways in which home for us has less to do with owning private property than with having the good fortune to occupy space we’re able to open to our friends (though if a couple million bucks dropped on our front door I wouldn’t turn down the chance to own New York real estate).

And so we welcome our move uptown, grateful that “uptown” for us is still downtown. We welcome an expansion of neighborhoods: our new digs stand at the intersection of SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy, and Nolita. (Everyone, lurkers included, please feel free to use the comments section to give us tips on where to eat, shop, and do other fun things in our new location.) We’re within walking distance of our old seaport haunts as well as the East Village and Lower East Side. I can walk to work in 15 minutes. Both kids can walk to school.

We welcome new views, like the one from the windows of our new bedroom, which overlook a building that will help us maintain our fantasy of living inside a postcard:

It’s a great building, don’t you think? It was Police Headquarters beginning in the late nineteenth century; since the mid 1980s it’s been divvied up into condos. Apparently Moby lives there, but I’ve also heard that Calvin Klein owns about half its square footage.

From the street it looks like this:

In bed in the morning, looking out at that dome, you feel like you’re waking up in some European capital. It’s an unusual building for New York. But at night, looking southward, we’re comforted by some of the same architecture we could see from our old bedroom, including the Borough’s municipal building. We can even see our Bridge twinkling in the distance.

When our friends Mark and Pandora moved from Boston to Chicago some years ago, their older son, Alex, introduced himself to his new 8th grade classmates with an essay he called “200 Water Street, Downtown.” We were honored, of course, that he used our address as a metonym for the specific type of adult community he aimed to celebrate. Here’s how his essay finishes, with a description of our parties:

Then when the friends start arriving and I smell alcohol I know it is time for me to take turns spending time with the kids and with the adults. I peek my head out and they are either crowded around in a group conversation or they are separately conversing in the tiny living room. I grab a chip and salsa or maybe some other little appetizer Stephanie has prepared. By this time, I have found someone to talk to. It always starts out with “how’s school?” Then the conversation escalates into more and more as we sit there talking. I feel so adult, I hear the words and I feel the words. I am so interested. Sometimes I go into the kids’ room and maybe I emerge instantly to put on a play with them, maybe I come out myself, maybe I stay there for a bit wanting to be a kid again before I go back out and become an adult. The night wanes and people leave. I always find myself curled up in the sofa while my mom and dad are still in a discussion with Bryan and Stephanie and whoever is left. Once in a while I put in a little comment here and there. Eventually I go off to sleep I am disappointed the savored moments are over, and tomorrow I have to leave right after one of Stephanie’s delicious German pancakes. I had a taste of two worlds that I’m right in the middle of, at 200 Water Street.

It’s a quintessential downtown moment; he captures perfectly, to my mind, the kind of community we’ve worked so hard for so many years to create — a place where intelligent kids can engage in conversation with reasonably interesting adults, where those adults can push each others’ boundaries and still emerge friends, and where an endless supply of German pancakes always hovers around the corner. We’ll take that with us too, I hope.

I wouldn’t trade them for all the boiled eggs at Balthazar.