'Ally McBeal' Got Jane Krakowski Evicted From Her NYC Apartment

Rent is too damn high! That phrase breathes hallowed air in NYC. Rents have skyrocketed over the decades. Unless you make six figures, living in the quote-unquote greatest city in the world can be impossible. This forces lower-class citizens, who keep the city running, to find a residence in surrounding towns or so deep in the boroughs they need two trains and a shuttle bus to get to work. There is one way around ever-rising rent prices: finding a rent-stabilized apartment.

Rent-stabilized apartments can offer relief to people with low-income jobs. They provide tenants protection from uncertainty. You can tell that rent stabilization is good, because it is constantly under attack from landlords and outside interests. People who control the rent are always trying to jack them up. They want to charge whatever they want and will take any route they can to do that. Jane Krakowski found that out the hard way.

Krakowski has been a working actor for decades. Even before a breakout role in the hit show Ally McBeal, the 30 Rock star had a consistent presence on stage and screen. While appearing on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast, Dinner’s On Me, Jane reflected on her time on the show and with visiting her family on the East Coast. “I remember the first time I came back to the East Coast after Ally McBeal aired because my parents were still here. I’m very close to my family, and I would come back on hiatuses and go see everything I could on Broadway too, you know, see everybody,” she told Ferguson.

Unfortunately, the fame brought on by Ally McBeal cost her a rent-stabilized apartment in NYC. “I literally got evicted because I was on Hollywood Field. I had, like, a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side,” she recalled. “I tried to keep it the whole first year, and as Ally McBeal got more and more known, I got, like, a certified letter from my landlord’s lawyer saying, ‘We know you don’t live here. We know you’re not living here. You need to evict the premises,’ ” Krakowski said. “And I was like, ‘What? How could this even happen?’ “

It all worked out in the end, and the actor looks back on her time on the show fondly. “There was a little bit of trust of what we were, you know, getting into, but it was so funny and so original and so different. I have such a clear memory of the first screening that we watched the pilot,” she remembered. Still, a rent-stabilized apartment in the Upper West Side sounds pretty damn nice!