At 14th and 5th: A Chase bank is opening soon right across the street from...another Chase bank! You can't have too many, can you?
And you can't have too many Rite Aids, either: "Drugstore shoppers in Sunnyside are seeing double these days... Two Rite Aid pharmacies have set up shop right next to one another at 46-12 and 46-02 Greenpoint Ave., with a third store just three blocks away." [NYDN]
"Well-heeled" yunnies are sucking the marrow out of the bones of the Lower East Side. But that's not news, now is it? [Gawker]
Is it happening? The bodega on 4th Ave. and 10th St. looks like it's being demolished--the big yellow Dumpster has arrived. Does this mean the East Village's latest luxe hotel is on its way--or am I still just spreading scary rumors?
This Elizabeth Currid sounds like she's written a good book. I'll let her words answer the many who like to tell me to give up on Manhattan because art and culture are just thriving like crazy in the outer boroughs:
"Part of what makes art and culture work so effectively in New York is that art and culture thrive in a very dense environment... Also the fact that, historically, creative people tend to like to live in the same neighborhoods... They can’t do that anymore, now they end up at best scattered in some far out place in Queens. And they’re not actually having an artistic community...these neighborhoods are so rapidly gentrifying that the minute an artistic community gets its own space, it’s quickly usurped by Starbucks and investment bankers. Places like Williamsburg are already no longer artistic communities for young artists in the way we hoped they would be." [Gothamist]
can anyone actually name an important artist who comes from williamsburg, even before it was gentrified? hasn't the place always been home for purposefully shabby wannabes who learned how to be creative for 30k per year at bard, sara lawrence, and pratt?
ReplyDeleteWithout driving past this intersection again, I recall that the sign for the existing Chase bank at 14th and Fifth is on TOP of a sign for another bank (Commerce?). So that should make three banks for that intersection.
ReplyDeleteIn the heyday of the horseless carriage, the meeting of Terrill Road and Front Street in my neck of central New Jersey boasted four gas stations; the abundance of banks tells us something equally profound, and disturbing, about the age we live in.
The management rats are jumping from the ship as hundreds of Cold Stone locations are now collapsing around the US. Why? Because the "concept" of mixing stuff into ice cream has always been a fad, and the fad is now over. The product isn't that good, is grossly overpriced, and consumers are flocking back to properly formulated ice cream from other chains like Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry's.
ReplyDeleteThe Cold Stones have been largely sold to Yuppies with too much equity in their homes, who jumped into the stores to be "business owners". But since the labor costs are double the competition, and stores are too big and too expensive to run, the number of unprofitable stores is skyrocketing with the results we have here. Sad for the owners who have likely lost a couple hundred thousand dollars EACH.