Last week, Andy and I encountered our own version of the Ghost of Christmas Past when we attended Bob and Effie Zimmerman’s annual holiday party.

Bob and Effie Zimmerman were our sort-of New York parents. A pioneer in his field of research, Bob was Andy’s med school professor and mentor. Bob was the one who got Andy interested in neurology, and got him his current job.

Effie was an Upper West Side doyenne. Passionate and fiercely literate, she had no actual profession. Her job was being up on everything. She read a large number of books, as well as all the wordier publications – The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books – anything with “New York” in the title, except maybe New York magazine.

When not reading, she roamed the neighborhood in caftans, procuring goods from Fairway, Citarella, and Zabar’s. The countermen all knew her by name, as did most of the neighborhood’s longer-term residents. That’s because Bob and Effie had lived in their West End Avenue apartment since the early 1970s. And, in that uniquely New York way, they were inexorably linked with their apartment.

It was sprawling and large. Located in a 14-story pre-war elevator building, which housed only 27 other apartments, it was the kind of place where the elevator door opens right into the living room.

But, unlike what you might expect to find in such a building, when the elevator door opened to Bob and Effie’s apartment, you found a charmingly rundown, lived-in place with worn Oriental rugs whimsically unframed paintings and a kitchen that had not been renovated, it seemed, since the Carter administration. Bookcases lined the walls, and there was always some interesting visitor – a poet they’d met on safari in South Africa, a cousin from somewhere working on his dissertation – in whose honor some large party was being thrown.

Bob and Effie Zimmerman were the kind of people I grew up in suburban Washington thinking New York was made of, an impression formed by multiple readings of Salinger (the Glass family books, not “Catcher in the Rye”) and endless viewings of Woody Allen movies (“Annie Hall,” not “Bananas”). They were, in short, the kind of people I’d moved to New York to become.

The first time we went there, for a holiday party almost 10 years ago now, I turned to Andy and said, “Can we live in an apartment just like this?” and he said, “It’s not like it’s Park Avenue. I don’t see why not.”

Now we know different. The elevator doors opened and Bob was standing there, giving Dan and I hugs and directing us to the “famous” eggnog. “And, as always, Max’s room is the coat closet,” he said. “You guys know the way.”

Indeed we did. As we walked down the long kilim-filled hall, I remembered that Max, Bob and Effie’s son, a documentary filmmaker a few years our junior, was living right near us in Brooklyn. “We should ask Max if he wants a ride home,” I said to Andy as we approached the bedroom. We’d found a spot around the corner.

“Good idea,” said Andy as we entered the room. It was still very much a childhood bedroom, with comic books and figurines mingling with Monty Python and Bob Dylan posters. It could have been a suburban room, but it was actually much bigger. Max’s current Cobble Hill apartment might well have been this size.

We hung our coats on one of the wheeled racks positioned in front of the dresser, then headed back to the action.

The party was a sea of corduroy and crushed velvet. There were guests of all ages and ethnicities, but the bulk of them seemed to be in their late 50s, early 60s – like Bob and Effie. The women dressed in the turtleneck, ethnic jewelry, and long opened blouse/jacket style that Andy and I referred to as “therapist chic.” The men wore tweed jackets and Wallabees, but unironically. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald sang duets on the stereo, children in holiday sweaters chased each other from living room, to dining room and peals of laughter rang out to the hall.

After a while of socializing around the amply stocked buffet table, I left Andy to chat with a friend from med school and went to find Effie in the kitchen.

“Eve! There you are,” she said, shutting the oven as she placed a tray of pigs in blankets on the stove. “Come here my dear girl! It’s been too long!”

I crossed the black-and-white checkered floor to embrace her. She was, of course, wearing a caftan and not a stitch of makeup. Her frizzy black hair had more gray in it than when I’d seen her last.

“You look great,” I said, meaning it. I respected Effie’s style. It was more than just her trademark; it seemed to me that to live in New York and turn such a blind eye to fashion took real balls. “Can I help with anything?” I offered.

“Dijon mustard,” she said, dipping a spoon into some kind of sauce. I nodded and made for the refrigerator, thinking how nice it was to be in a kitchen like this – huge, with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, the one nod to extravagance its professional quality stove.

“So how’s Brooklyn treating you?” Effie asked when I gave her the mustard.

“It’s great,” I said, and though I meant it, the same thing that always gnawed at me at Bob and Effie Zimmerman’s gnawed at me now. I would actually rather live a life like theirs, in their West End Apartment, only people my age don’t live that life now.

The city itself has made it impossible. In “Annie Hall,” Alvie Singer pegs his first wife Allison as a “Central Park West, socialist summer camps, very strike-oriented father with the Ben Shahn drawings” type. Does anyone on Central Park West send a kid to socialist summer camp now?

“Like I told Max,” Effie was saying, “if I were your age, I’d live in Brooklyn now.”

Easy for her to say. Time and again, she’d told me how she and Bob had bought this apartment for $70,000 in the 1970s. Everyone thought it was crazy expensive at the time. Of course, the city was crime-ridden and bankrupt. The fact that those things made Manhattan a place for cheap housing – and the Bob and Effie Zimmermans and their rent controlled friends – made graffiti and mace seem romantic now.

But mace and cheap apartments aside, that was then and this is now. So, I told Effie what I really thought, “Me too. I can’t see myself anywhere but Brooklyn.”