"People have bought homes" on Bedford Street and they don't want Chumley's ruining it for them. [DNA]
Gentrification as an end-game and the rise of "sub-urbanity." [NG]
Check out this film about Marsha P. Johnson--"Stonewall instigator, Andy Warhol model, drag queen, sex worker, starving actress, Saint." [youtube]
Tomorrow, take the No 7-11 Bodega Tour of the East Village. [DNA]
The Pearl Diner may be making a comeback. [EVG]
Grand Central grandeur in the Village. [GVSHP]
"This small shop on a treeless, cheerless stretch of Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, not far from the Greenwood Cemetery, is more than a pizzeria: it is a social parlor where co-owner Giovanni Lanzo holds court." [PC]
Library closings in Brooklyn. [OMFS]
Burlesque birthday for good old Ray. [NEV]
What have we come to? Cupcake tours. [AMZ]
8 comments:
I remember the tenure of Koch as mayor. Back during his first term, I was a kid with a life expectancy of about 14 or so. Landlords were setting their apartments ablaze to claim the insurance whether their tenants were still occupying them or not. As such, I slept with my shoes on in the fear I had to run out of the house at 3am. Drugs were rampant enough that you could set your clocks to when gunfire broke out among rival gangs. My playgrounds were vacant lots full of broken glass, jagged rusty scraps of metal and the occasional dead body. I kept my head down and never stayed in one place for more than a couple of minutes, which is a shame for a seven year old.
Koch, love him or hate him, did what needed to be done to bring New York's outer boroughs away from depleted war-zone status. His last term certainly was bad, but if anyone tells me Dinkins did better, I'd call them out.
My opinion back then was that he was a mayor for tough-skinned, hardy bad-asses, not for trust-funded Me-Generation yuppies with their field-kit cellphones and Miami-Vice outfits (which Manhattan became lousy with). As such his time came and went, but he did good things in that time. He made me laugh with his quick wit and razored tongue.
I hereby declare a fatwa on cupcakes.
I get that Chumley's is old school but "drunk and loud tourists/patrons talking and smoking" are the exact same complaints that people in the East Village have when a bar wants to open. So if the bar has closed and wants to reopen you should side with the bar because it's old?
I agree with everything in that gentrification article except for this one bit:
"Enter, then, the volitional push of attracting as many creative class gentry as possible into the confines of a place, with real estate gimmicks—such as Mayor Bloomberg’s recent microapartment push—aimed at further squeezing blood from areas with far more density than available space."
This suggests that there is not any more room to build a truly significant amount new housing in NYC. If that is true, then the city is doomed. Housing costs will never, ever come down as long as the vacancy rate remains ~1%. Affordable cities have vacancy rate closer to 5%-10%, which is why they are affordable.
There is, in fact, plenty of room to build new housing in the city. The problem is that all that gets built is ultra-high-end luxury housing, which does nothing to alleviate housing costs because 1) a lot of it is bought up by rich foreigners who don't even live here and 2) most of the rest attracts people who would never move to the city in the first place if such housing weren't built for them.
The city needs to prioritize the construction of a huge amount of new AFFORDABLE housing. It has done so in the past and can do so again.
I always think of Giuliani as the mayor that started hyper-gentrification. His administration is the one that relaxed the no-big-box rule and allowed the first Home Depot to open in Queens.
This was a link from the "Gentrification as an end-game and the rise of "sub-urbanity" article.
http://narrative.ly/2013/01/the-ins-and-the-outs/
The last 10 or so paragraphs for me is the cleanest explanation of "Hypergentrification" that I've ever read.
That is truly, in my mind, a tremendous piece of journalism.
I used to live by Luigi's! Really great white pizza, and Giovanni is so friendly.
to Anon@11:17
The same for me. I will always see Giuliani as the man who opened the floodgates to hell. Not only rescinding the no-big-box rule, but also eliminating rent-control, which paved the way for the skyrocketing increases unless you were grandfathered in. And even that needed a song-and-dance routine to keep your rent control.
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