Best strollers for NYC walk-up apartments
UPDATE: This post gets a lot of traffic via search, and I wanted to update this after nearly 2 years with our first child. IMO, the best stroller for a NYC walk-up apartment IS A CARRIER—until your baby is old enough to ride in a lightweight umbrella stroller. That is just my opinion. Seriously, if you don’t have an elevator, it is a pain carrying anything larger than an umbrella stroller up and down the stairs, especially if you’re doing it with a baby in tow. In which case, you should probably be putting the baby in a carrier or sling anyway, so you don’t drop him/her. —2014-05-26
Note: It looks like a lot of people are finding this post through Google searches for “strollers for walk-up apartments.” Here’s the TL;DR for you: I didn’t test all the strollers mentioned below. Just checked them out in-store and feature-comparisoned them via spreadsheet. We wanted a full-feature stroller that my wife could still lug up and down stairs. We narrowed it down to the Baby Jogger City Mini and the Bugaboo Bee. We would have gone with the City Mini (best value, universally stellar reviews) but some friends gave us their old Bugaboo Bee.
The one baby item I spent the most time researching was the stroller. I think it’s a guy thing (even though I’m usually loath to trot out mindless gender-normative stereotypes). If it involves gear—especially if that gear involves wheels—then guys are there, crunching numbers, analyzing minutiae, planning how they’re going to trick it out.
My wife and I (and now Margot) live on the third floor of a walk-up building in Queens. We don’t have a doorman. We don’t have space in the lobby to park a stroller. So we HAVE to carry it up and down when we want to use it. And that’s the real reason I tell myself I spent hours watching stroller demo videos on YouTube (where I learned that the fold is the money shot of stroller-review videos). Continue reading “Best strollers for NYC walk-up apartments”