“We were all living up here,” said Ms. Gitti, 48, a fashion designer and the owner of Matta NY, a clothing company, referring to the top level of their three-unit brownstone. After the divorce, she continued to live on the top floor. Her ex-husband, Mr. Bologna, 50, the founder and creative director of Mucca Design and muccaTypo, moved to the garden level; the middle unit is rented out. “At first, I didn’t know when it was O.K. to go downstairs,” Ms. Gitti said. “I think we threw some coins down the stairwell as the signal. It worked out fine.”
While some might say this way of living is unconventional, it’s actually very New York. And in a way, New Yorkers are great models of divorce done right. For one thing, fewer are divorced than one would expect. Nationally, the 2014 American Community Survey found 11 percent of Americans over age 15 to be divorced, while in New York City, it was a much more amicable 8 percent, according to an analysis of census data by Susan Weber-Stoger, a researcher in the sociology department at Queens College.
And when city couples do choose to split, some stay close, residing in the same neighborhoods, the same apartment buildings and even the same houses for the sake of their children and, as it often turns out, for themselves.
“The benefits are that we do not need to pick up or drop off the girls, they just use the stairs from one apartment to the other,” Mr. Bologna said. “They don’t need to carry bags in between the apartments, except for their school backpacks. In the morning, if one parent has some work emergency, the other can pick up the slack and take the girls to school instead. And if they forgot one of their precious Monster High Dolls at Mom’s house, all they have to do is just call upstairs and ask for permission to go and pick up the toy.”
This calling-ahead-to-the-parent-not-on-duty provision was specified in the divorce agreement.
“I think that it was very organic,” Ms. Gitti said. “There wasn’t an act of rebellion. I imagine that if the girls had been older at the time, it would have been harder.” The couple’s daughters, Olivia Bologna Gitti, 11, and Sofia Bologna Gitti, 8, were 8 and 4 at the time of the split.
“It was pretty easy, considering our fortunate setting,” Ms. Gitti said. “The main concern was to create and live in a peaceful environment for our kids as we were moving on with our lives. We had a couple of meetings with a therapist. She helped us figure out how to manage the new living situation, and we came up with rules to preserve our privacy as newly single parents.”
Olivia, their elder daughter, said she didn’t understand at first what was happening. “I just knew that my parents weren’t going to live together anymore, so I burst into tears,” she said. “But then when the new routine actually started happening I was like: ‘This isn’t that bad. This is normal.’ I like routines.”