For 42-year-old Kieran Culkin, visiting the building in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood where he spent the first eight years of his life brings back unusual memories. “I remember my mom baking a cake and it would come out slanted because the whole apartment was on a slant,” he said. “We used to put cars on one end of the kitchen and let go and see them roll!
“We lived in a tight space where it was just seven of us running around. It was like a sort of little wolf-pack mentality,” he said.
His father “Kit,” himself a former actor, and mother Patricia, a telephone operator, raised their seven kids in a four-room apartment. Kieran came fourth in the birth order. “Whenever the door would open to let the kids in, I used to stand aside and make sure, and I used to count to make sure all six of them got in before I got in,” he said. “That’s how I remember growing up, too, was I couldn’t fall asleep until they all fell asleep. Like, I only existed because they did around me.”