Where It All Goes Down
An Apartment in a New York City Ghetto
The setting is Black's apartment, in one of the poorer areas of New York City, during the present day. His tenement is populated by drug addicts and other desperate people, and he lets them crash on his couch and tries to help them, but they often end up stealing his stuff. White finds it to all absolutely awful—"It's a horrible place. Full of horrible people" (40), he says—but Black seems less disturbed. He's seen all this before, been through prison, and managed to live on despite all these desperate situations.
Aside from the general atmosphere of squalor that exists outside the apartment, though, we don't get to see much of New York. We also don't know all that much about White and Black's relationship with the city, like where White teaches (Columbia? NYU?) or where Black works. It's all very vague.
As for the apartment, it's extremely simple. Black's door is well-secured—with "a bizarre collection of locks and bars" (3)—and he wants to get a good lock for his bedroom, so he can get something to play music with and not have the junkies be able to steal it. Other than that, we get to see the kitchen where Black fixes their dinner, and the table where they're sitting. That's it, at least physically.
But we'd be wrong if we didn't mention the importance of time. The Professor sees our current era as one of decay and imminent doom—he's fairly sure that humans will annihilate each other in the near future. He also believes that the 20th century, with its various wars and atrocities, has made culture meaningless. (Not to rain on his sad parade, but you could've claimed the same thing when Genghis Khan was killing millions of people hundreds years ago).