Visiting Hudson Yards

For its opening weekend, Hudson Yards, aka Dubai on the Hudson, is crammed with people. They walk the glistening floors of the luxury shopping mall and climb The Vessel, aka The Giant Shawarma (h/t Eater). They stand in line for free ice cream and ransack a refrigerator full of foul-tasting beverages that may or may not be free. They pose for Instagrammable photos with the mega-development's corporate logo and pay $28 to visit Snark Park, an "art theme park" where the creators have seized an opportunity to "literally control and curate everything," which pretty much sums up everything about Hudson Yards.



In my 2017 book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul, I predicted that Hudson Yards would be: "A dreamworld of exclusion...one of those places Mike Davis describes in Evil Paradises: 'where the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.' It will be what Norwegian urbanist Jonny Aspen calls zombie urbanism, a neat and tedious stage set, regurgitating global clichés about modern urban life, 'in which there is no room for irregularity and the unexpected.'"

Now the taxpayer-backed mega-development has met its major critics and the verdict is in.

New York magazine called it "a billionaire's fantasy city" as Justin Davidson reported that it feels like a faux New York: "Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed." At the Times, Michael Kimmelman said the place "glorifies a kind of surface spectacle -- as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism."



Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the gilded room that hawks the Residences at Hudson Yards. Just outside, in the hall of the mall, a massive video screen shows scenes from the lifestyles of the super-rich to a captive audience of tired parents and tourists beached on benches.

Inside, behind 3-D renderings of the towers, visitors watch a film about the love story between Marcus, "the titan of industry," and Viv, "the fashion mogul." They are affluent, glaringly white, and well seasoned, sweeping around their tower while sucking down lattes and green smoothies. In the background plays I'm back in the "New York Groove," which Hudson Yards is decidedly not.

Among the viewers in the real world, a woman asks her friend, "Is this a parody?" The question could be asked again and again while walking through the mall.



For example, when a worker hands out Hudson Yards temporary tattoos so you can brand your body with the corporate logo. Or when a piece of video art, curated by a luxury boutique, praises itself for including "gender nonconforming artists."

Or at the Avant Gallery, showing "art for the new New York" in a show called, no kidding, "There Goes the Neighborhood," filled with riffs on luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, mixed with images of homeless people and downtown artists.



Is it parody when a crowd crashes the unguarded refrigerators of the Hudson Yards Drug Store and grabs every bottle in sight, swigging down concoctions containing charcoal, rose petal, and turmeric? People gag on the drinks, re-cap the bottles, and leave them on the floor.

Someone says, "It tastes awful."

Someone says, "I don't think these are really free."



Then there's the schedule for The Shed, Hudson Yards' hotly awaited performance space, bringing a lefty radicalism incongruent with the one-percenter playground. The opening season includes "a women-centered celebration of radical art," a work about "the relationship between art and the politics of space," and a lecture on Art and Civil Disobedience by Boots Riley, the African-American Communist behind the film Sorry to Bother You. (It's part of their DIS OBEY program.)

Will young communists soon fill this billionaire fantasy anti-city--and will they be disobedient?

Finally, there's The Vessel, that walkable "stairway to nowhere" that the billionaire developer of Hudson Yards called "the social climber." To walk it, you'll have to agree to an acknowledgment of risks that "may include, for example, slipping, being knocked off balance, falling, exposure to heights (which may cause vertigo, nausea, or discomfort), exposure to flashing or intermittent special effects or lighting, personal injury, or death." One other risk: If you appear in any photos, including your own, you sign away "the unrestricted, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual right and license (with the right to transfer or sublicense) to use my name, likeness, voice, and all other aspects of my persona."



The Vessel's hornet's nest logo is on everything, but nowhere does its silhouette most excite me than when it accidentally appears on the side of a nearby food truck--The Giant Shawarma mirrored by an actual shawarma.

As I escape Hudson Yards, I point out the similarity to the vendor inside the truck. "Yes," he calls out, seeing the joke, "the same! It is the same!" And he has a good laugh. In the end, it all seems like one big joke.


Read all my Hudson Yards coverage here

Hudson Yards Holdouts

A few holdouts have left the ever-expanding footprint of the Hudson Yards Luxury Zone. You can't blame them for taking the money and running from the nightmare to come.



Two guys living on 10th Avenue and West 35th just scored $25 million to leave their tenement. We've been following the fate of the two buildings here. They were only left standing because of these holdouts, stubbornly thwarting Tishman's plans for what once was called the "tallest tower in North America," a.k.a. "Hudson Spire," originally rendered at 1,800 feet -- 4 feet taller than One World Trade Center. With the men moved out, and Taxi Parts gone, the buildings are empty and set for demolition. Does this mean the Spire is back on?

A block south, a McDonald's has been acquired by Related--to be demolished and folded into a 3.3 million square foot mixed-use development. (I don't cry for McDonald's, but we're talking about a piece of low-rise property that was a lynch pin for a mega-development going through.)

Little by little, these developers are taking over a huge chunk of Manhattan. Across the street, Veterans Chair Caning (since 1899) and the little flat-fix shop will soon stand alone between multiple luxury developments. As the Hudson Yards Effect keeps steamrolling, what will become of Study Areas A, B, and C? How long will they hold out? And what about the two horse stables just north of here?



Let's face it. Nothing of the old world will be left standing. As the Times just reported, "Virtually all of the businesses that operated in the neighborhood — mostly light industrial and manufacturing shops — have been displaced. In their stead, developers plan to install fancy department stores, boutiques and restaurants."

Take a walk by Hudson Yards. You've never seen so many cranes in your life. They represent hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks--free gifts to developers from former Mayor Bloomberg--all for a glittering city within a city that will not be a welcoming place for most New Yorkers.

Hudson Yards Effect

Like the High Line Effect that flattened west Chelsea, and the Marc Jacobs Effect that transformed western Bleecker Street, we're now seeing the Hudson Yards Effect decimate 10th Avenue in the 30s.

All along the Hudson Yards, buildings are coming down, or getting grabbed up by developers who aim to upscale. Into empty lots and parking lots are going new condos and hotels. Even the Brutalist 450 West 33rd is getting a facelift. In a city where everything must glitter, silvery cool, this brown beast just won't do.



It will be clad in pleated glass and incorporated into Brookfield's "Manhattan West" development, that massive hall of mirrors.



A couple blocks up, two little tenement buildings remain--440 and 442 Tenth Avenue. The buildings were bought by the Silverstone Property Group in 2012. Tenants reached out to Curbed to complain about the subsequent conditions--no gas, no hot water, holes in the ceilings.

Are there any rent-regulated tenants left? Apartments in the two buildings are now renovated and renting ($2500 for a studio) to anyone who won't mind the noise of construction on both sides.



On the north end of the block is rising a $20 million 17-story hotel--owned by a company calling itself Tenth Avenue YYY, LLC.



On the south side, a towering Marriott Hotel is coming. This one's costing $180 million and will have 385 rooms.

It's big and it's bland, just like they like it.



Across the avenue, another pair of tenements stand, surviving for now. But they look vulnerable out there. One houses a Penske truck rental place, the other is home to Taxi Parts, Inc.


This stretch of 10th Avenue, from the 20s through the 30s, used to belong to taxi drivers. It gave them gas stations, flat-fix shops, mechanics, medallion brokers, cheap food, and places like this shop, where you can find everything from tail lights to mud flaps.



Over the past decade, we've watched it all vanish. First by High Line development, and now by the Hudson Yards. Of course, we know the two are connected, one Bloombergian scheme rolled into the other. The whole west side, from below Gansevoort and into the 40s, is being paved in glass.

Soon, it will gobble up the carriage horsemen of the west 30s. (Read here for an in-depth look at what remains of that world.) Along with what remains of the old city a few blocks south, a parcel that Bloomberg's planning department targeted.

Take a walk up 10th and witness a neighborhood vanishing before your eyes.

Legacy Records and Black Branding

In his Times review of a new Hudson Yards restaurant, Pete Wells writes that Legacy Records has "ginned up a history for itself that brings together sloppy research with a superficial tribute to black culture."

I haven't been inside the place, so I'll leave it to Wells, who describes images of black musicians on the walls, stars like Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, who supposedly recorded in a studio on the site. Except they didn't. There was a studio there for a few years in the 2000s, he says, "mostly used by orchestras, Broadway cast recordings and commercials."

There's also a photo by Mickalene Thomas of a black woman with an Afro in a sexy pose.


photo by Gary He

Wells concludes:

"Legacy Records has taken this shred of history and turned it into a fantasy of black American music.

Exhibited in a museum or gallery, Ms. Thomas’s photo might be taken as a comment on the different postures and personas available to black women. Hanging it next to the counter where pastries and coffee are sold by day strips out some of its meaning; it looks like an attempt to buy a personality for a restaurant that doesn’t have one of its own.

If anyone gets to decide who can use black culture for what purposes, it surely isn’t me. But Legacy Records uses it in a gratuitous and offhanded way that made me uncomfortable. Stevie Wonder will always be cool, but a restaurant dreamed up by real estate developers doesn’t automatically become cool by putting him on the wall."


photo: Mo Gelber

What Wells describes is not just cultural appropriation, it is "black branding" for the purposes of commodifying an urban space for the wealthy and mostly white. It is a trend that comes with hyper-gentrifying cities across America.

In his book "Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City,” Derek S. Hyra writes: “Not long ago, an urban community’s association with blackness was mostly perceived as detrimental. But nowadays...neighborhood-based organizations, real estate developers, restaurant owners and urban planners commodify and appropriate aspects of blackness to promote tourism, homeownership, and community redevelopment.”

We saw it most famously at the Summerhill restaurant in Crown Heights, where locals protested the use of supposed bullet holes and Forty Ounce Rosé.

Black branding is happening in hyper-gentrified cities where actual black people are being removed. With hyper-gentrification, New York City is getting whiter. And, as we've seen in many recent news reports, as middle and upper-class whites move into black and brown neighborhoods, they call the police on black people--for barbecuing, playing music, and just hanging out. These attacks happen simultaneously with the commodification of blackness.

Lower-income black people are pushed out. Their images and symbols are kept by the race/class victors as trophies and marketing opportunities. It can be seen as a form of revenge.


Barbecue Becky, Oakland, CA

“The rallying cry of the revanchist city,” wrote urbanist and gentrification expert Neil Smith, “might well be: ‘Who lost the city? And on whom is revenge to be exacted?’”

The notion of the lost city, the stolen city, goes back to white flight, a phenomenon engineered by the federal government beginning in the 1930s. Without Jim Crow in the northern United States, the government had to use stealthier methods of segregation. They developed the racist housing practice of redlining to confine black and brown people in disinvested cities, while luring whites away with good deals on houses in whites-only suburbs. This drain of the city’s tax base played a major role in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, which provided the economic excuse for New York’s reorientation away from social democracy and towards neoliberalism, the radical free market, aka "trickle-down economics." And it is from there that hyper-gentrification, as a top-down tactic of state and city government, began.

We cannot talk about hyper-gentrification without also talking about racism. The story of American capital cannot be disentangled from the story of slavery in America. Neoliberalism, while it is an economic approach, was a white supremacist solution. It was, and continues to be, a powerful method to “take back” the city -- and, ultimately, the country—from black and brown people and to re-establish the power of the wealthy white elite. 


Inside Legacy Records, photo: Gary He, via Eater

So it seems appropriate that this restaurant is part of Hudson Yards, the fake city within a city, a curated space for the ultra-elite, and the perfect product of neoliberalized New York -- with all its corporate welfare, Hudson Yards has cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.

As I noted in my book Vanishing New York, Hudson Yards is a "dreamworld of exclusion," one of those places Mike Davis describes in Evil Paradises: “where the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.”

Last of the Urban Horsemen

1. 
Cornelius “Neil” Byrne leans against the stall of a butterscotch horse named Cowboy and gazes out the second-story window of Central Park Carriages on far West 37th Street. Just a few blocks to the south, a crowd of construction cranes stabs the sky above Hudson Yards. They swing slowly back and forth like giant knitting needles stitching together the new mega-development from scratch.

“I keep looking out at those cranes,” Byrne says. “You don’t have to be a real estate expert to see what’s going on here. So much is going to follow those cranes. Unprecedented growth, they say. I know why Bloomberg called this neighborhood the new Gold Coast. That’s change out there. And it’s change that’s eliminating me.”



If Mayor de Blasio’s plan to ban carriage horses goes through, Byrne and the handful of other stable owners in the city will be forced to close, their century-old buildings demolished, and their horses--about 200 of them--scattered to places no one’s exactly sure about. Behind the ban are the pleas of animal rights activists, who see the urban housing and driving of carriage horses as cruelty. But alongside the outcry, complicating the situation, there’s something more—big real estate money and the unstoppable juggernaut of hyper-gentrification.

Roped into the Hudson Yards scheme due to their proximity to the Jacob Javits Center, properties in this area are being grabbed by the city’s most powerful players. The Chetrit Group, the same developer that took over the Chelsea Hotel, spent $26.5 million on the old buildings next to Central Park Carriages.

Numerous reports, from Michael Gross' initial blog post in 2009, to the New York Times, have revealed that a major force behind the ban is de Blasio campaign supporter and real-estate magnate Steve Nislick, who founded the powerful anti-carriage group NYCLASS. With wealth gained from a chain of parking garages, he is lobbying hard to replace the horses with electric cars--he denies that he wants the stable properties.

I walked through three of the west side stables and saw animals that were fed, cleaned, watered, and shod, with cushioned stalls big enough for turning around and lying down. Open windows on all sides of the stables let in fresh air, and the smell is that bracing, healthy aroma of manure and hay, like a brisk day on the farm. Inside, you feel like you’re in another time and place. It’s quiet here, with no traffic noise, just the soft sound of horses moving about the straw.



This is a native environment for Neil Byrne. Born in the rough heart of Hell’s Kitchen, the son of a Hansom cab driver, Byrne bought the building that houses Central Park Carriages in 1979. Today he owns a fleet of 17 horses and carriages, including his father’s 1902 Hansom, painted Brewster green and filled with memories of its days rolling through the city behind a mare named Sunshine Shannon. Hidden in the cab’s seat cushions, Bryne discovered a cache of artifacts, including a ragged souvenir photo of a long-ago dinner party at the famous Leon and Eddie’s, the faces of the tourists washed away by time.

Byrne holds these fragile ghosts salvaged from his father’s Hansom and says, with a rueful laugh, “This is all my father left me. This cab and a lot of bills.” He remembers a childhood spent in poverty, but without self-pity. “Look, nobody started on the top of the mountain here. We’re all guys who struggled for what we’ve got. That’s why we want to hold on to it. This is torture what they’re doing to us. There’s a lot of sleepless nights. It’s tough. Guys keep asking, ‘What’ll I do if I can’t do this?’ And they don’t come up with an answer. Me? I don’t know what I’ll do. I couldn’t even work at McDonald’s.”


2. 
One block north, at West Side Livery on West 38th Street, stable manager Antonino “Tony” Salerno clicks his tongue at a black beauty named Spartacus and the horse plants an oaty kiss on the man’s cheek. Salerno is happy here and the horses appear to be happy with him. They lean out of their open wooden stalls to nuzzle him, and each other, as he walks by.



“I don’t understand,” he says. “We don’t have cruelty here. This type of horse built New York City, working together with the man, building the bridges, the whole city. Now? The horse has an easy job. I can pull the carriage myself! They say they’re gonna rescue the horse? That’s like coming into your house and stealing your kids, saying, ‘We’re rescuing them.’ These horses are my family. They’re gonna take my kids?”



Salerno grew up with horses in his home village in Sicily, where his grandfather drove a carriage. In New York he tried life as a cabinetmaker, but “the mind is in the horse,” so he stopped cabinetmaking and went to work at the livery.

“This stable is like my house,” he says, putting a hand to his heart. “I spent 37 years in this place. If Mr. de Blasio takes my house, what I’m gonna do? I don’t want to drive an electric car. Who wants an electric car? Some tourist is gonna get out of a cab to ride an electric car? I want to stay with the horse. The horse is alive. I know the horse. I take care of him, and he takes care of me. I spend more time with my horse than with my wife.”



There are 36 horses living here, along with one calico cat who dispenses with the mice. Real-estate developers keep badgering the owner, Mrs. Spina, to sell, but she refuses. Salerno says she’s keeping the building in memory of her late husband—and, perhaps, in memory of its long history. On the topmost floor, across a shadowy hay loft filled with golden bales, there’s a room filled with antique harnesses, horse shoes, and carriage lamps, all covered in dust and cobwebs, artifacts from the stable’s century in business, harking back to the days when the streets of New York were filled with horses. To the developers who want this property, and to the activists who want to rid the city of carriage horses, that history belongs in the dust heap of the past.

“They’re all a bunch of liars,” Salerno says, picking up a heavy U-shaped shoe, that old symbol of luck. “Just because they want to build a big building and make lots of money? Physically and mentally, they already started damaging me. When you work and you dream, and they take it away from you, you feel like your whole life was a waste. I feel damaged because I don’t know what’s gonna be my future. My grandchildren were gonna take over, but now? I spent my life with the horse, now what I’m gonna do? I don’t have a future.”




3.
Up on West 52nd Street, far from the Gold Coast of Hudson Yards, the Clinton Park Stables stands already surrounded by encroaching luxury development. As the day begins, the carriage fleet breaks out, rolling like slow-motion chariot racers into the traffic along Eleventh Avenue and branching across side streets to make the 0.9-mile trot to the park. They go past gleaming condos and high-end rentals, including yet another Avalon development, while down the street, the famed Roseland Ballroom readies for its final show, followed by demolition and a new luxury tower.



Stable owner Conor McHugh recalls when the neighborhood was “the wild west,” when the park across the way was filled with crack addicts and the streets were deserted. McHugh supports progress, but says, “We want to be a part of it. We don’t want to be run out of town. We were here when nobody was here.” McHugh got into the business of carriage driving in 1986, soon after his arrival from a small village in County Leitrim, Ireland. The county is still with him, in his green Irish-knit sweater, frayed at the elbows, and in his soft brogue.

“The job of carriage driver,” he says, “is often a starting point for immigrants. Like me. I came from a rural place, and working with horses was something I knew how to do.” The horses helped him and his fellow Irishmen get their bearings in the strange, new city. “When we first came here, we were like wild animals. We knew nothing of the culture, of living in cities. But driving the carriage, it connected you in ways you didn’t realize at the time. It was familiar. Like home.”



With 78 horses and 39 carriages, Clinton Park Stables is the largest carriage stable in town. Originally built to house horses in 1860, it was later used as a cardboard box warehouse, and then turned back into a livery by McHugh. While it harbors remnants of its deep history—like rusted and unused nineteenth-century tie rings from the time when stalls were much smaller--this is a modern facility in many ways.

Each stall has its own water fountain, a bowl with a special spout that the horse can control by pressing with its nose whenever it wants a fresh drink. Ceiling fans are threaded with misting hoses for hot days. And many of the stalls here are larger than regulation requires.



“We feel like the good guys in all this,” says McHugh, “but that’s not how we’re portrayed. Unfortunately, the way to defeat your enemy is to demonize him.”

Stephen Malone and Christina Hansen, drivers and spokespersons for the Horse and Carriage Association, get in on the conversation.

“It’s class warfare,” says Malone, frustration in his voice. “If we were on Polo ponies out in the Hamptons, we’d be great people.”

“But we’re not cocktail party people,” adds Hansen.




4.
Back on West 37th, in the shadow of the Hudson Yards cranes, Neil Byrne stands on the sidewalk, looking up at his building, remembering better days.

“It used to be we were a very welcomed part of New York,” he says. “As a driver, you were a celebrity. Now you’re a goat.” He attributes this change to Steve Nislick and the powerful efforts of NYCLASS. In a 2010 speech to a group of moneyed horse people in Wellington, Florida, a town that the Wall Street Journal has called “Home to billionaires with an equestrian bent” (including Georgina Bloomberg), Nislick referred to the carriage men and women of New York City as “totally random guys” and “bad actors.” It’s a comment that sticks in the craw of every carriage person.

“Nislick called us random people,” says Byrne. “You know what random people means? It means a guy you can just push around, not a tough guy who’s gonna fight back, not a guy with political connections. A random guy you just push out of the way. I felt very insulted to be called random. I’m not random.”

Secure in the good treatment he gives to his animals, Byrne says, “I hope on Judgment Day that my judges are my last three horses, smoking big cigars and deciding which way I go. Heaven or Hell. I’m not worried about where they’ll send me.”



He points to the empty buildings next door, wrapped in scaffolding as they wait for the Chetrit Group to demolish them. Byrne figures that Chetrit wants his and Tony Salerno’s horses out of there, so he can acquire both stables and enlarge whatever he plans to build on the site. He also believes that Chetrit’s silent partner in the deal is the King of Morocco, but he can’t be sure. The idea is not so farfetched—Chetrit bought the Sony building last year for over a billion dollars with backing from sovereign Middle Eastern wealth. In the air around Hudson Yards there’s enough global finance to choke a horse. And then some.

Ironically, the cornerstone of the Hudson Yards development is the sky-high Coach tower, home of the luxury brand with a horse and carriage logo. By the time the tower rises, that logo may be the only reminder that this world ever existed.

Byrne turns and gestures toward a dusty path below the nearby overpass, to Amtrak’s Empire Line railroad cut where it runs through a large exposed outcrop of Manhattan schist. He says that’s where a pedestrian walkway will be one day, with all the air rights transferred to neighboring sites for high-rise development, just like the city did with the High Line.

Change is coming in as fast as a freight train, barreling down the tracks for the Number 7 extension.



“When that train comes,” says Byrne, “this neighborhood’s going to be in full bloom. All these people will be coming right through here. And that’s why they want my property. We’re in the way. I don’t want to leave New York. This is my New York, too."

"If things were right, if there was no eminent domain and big money and all that, I’d be in the strongest position. I could relocate. But no. They gotta screw you. Who’s running New York? That’s what I want to know. Is de Blasio running New York, or is it Nislick?”


In January 2014, Steve Nislick responded to claims that he is interested in obtaining the real estate on which the stables stand. He stated, "No one at NYCLASS, including me, has any interest in these properties." Read his full statement here.

Veterans Chair Caning

Veterans Chair Caning opened for business in New York City in 1899. Since the High Line opened and the Hudson Yards monstrosity began to rise across the street, I've worried about the modest little shop, located on the first floor of a tenement building on 10th Avenue and West 35th.

When I saw their building had sold and would soon be sandwiched between two glassy hotel towers, thanks to the Hudson Yards Effect, I figured it was time to check in.



Veterans is hidden behind construction scaffolding. They look closed, but they're open--and very busy.

I talked to Sean Bausert, the shop's fourth-generation owner/manager. When I told him I write a blog called Vanishing New York, he said, "That was almost us. We just came this close to vanishing."

He explained how the new owners wanted to knock down the building, along with its twin next door, but the tenements are full of rent-regulated tenants--and they're not budging. "They're fighters," Sean said. "Holdouts. They helped us tremendously."

By refusing to vacate, the holdouts have kept the buildings standing--and their two small businesses in business.



Veterans has managed to negotiate a few more years on their lease. After that, who knows? All you have to do is look at the luxury towers rising on all sides to know that their time here is limited.

The shop has been in this space for 20 years and was around the corner for another 30 or 40 before that. They're a neighborhood fixture, hand-weaving cane for chairs new and old, some antiques dating back to the sixteen and seventeen-hundreds.

But the neighborhood is changing at a breakneck pace, and even a venerable 116-year-old small business doesn't stand a chance. The city offers no protections. Veterans can be denied a new lease or have their rent quintupled. (Which is why we need to #SaveNYC.) At that point, they could move to Brooklyn or Queens, but would their customers follow?

As Sean put it, "Well-to-do people on the Upper East Side want nothing to do with Brooklyn or Queens. For them, crossing the bridge is like going to Jupiter."



The dramatic changes to the neighborhood "all started with the High Line," Sean told me, a sentiment he shares with many small businesspeople in west Chelsea.

"Once I saw the High Line coming in, I knew it wasn't going to be good. Over the last ten years, all the little guys are gone. The shoemakers, the bakeries. The past five years have gotten even worse."





Like Veterans, the Downtown Tire Shop next door managed to get a few more years on their lease. But that's no long-time guarantee, and they are the last of their kind in the neighborhood. All the rest have been driven out of what had once been a bustling strip that efficiently served the needs of city taxi drivers.

Now, "Cabs, cops, firemen, even regular joes," they all line up next door, because "where else are you gonna get your tires fixed?"



Across the street, another pair of tenements inexplicably remain, with a taxi supply shop on one ground floor. They're only standing because of a holdout upstairs tenant, said Sean. If not for him, they'd be gone.

Sean said, "They wanted to knock down those buildings and put up the tallest tower in North America. Right there? On 10th and 35th? Come on."



Sean sometimes thinks of going up on the High Line, after work, when the weather is nice. But he won't do it.

"I boycott the High Line," he said. "I'll never go on it. After I've seen what it's done--and what it almost did to us."


See Also:
The Hudson Yards Effect
La Lunchonette
Brownfeld Auto
Last of the Urban Horsemen
Blue-Collar High Line

La Lunchonette

VANISHING

When Melva Max and her husband Jean-François Fraysse moved their restaurant La Lunchonette from the Lower East Side to the remote corner of 10th Avenue and 18th Street in far west Chelsea in 1988, it was a different world. The Meatpacking District was the domain of transgender sex workers, queer sex clubs, and meatpacking plants. The High Line was a derelict rail bed covered in weeds. Gun shots cracked through the night air. Now, 26 years later, this is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City, filled with luxury chain stores and luxury high rises. The sweeping change happened recently, in the blink of an eye—and it is forcing La Lunchonette to shutter.

“The neighborhood is so gross now,” Melva says. “It’s all tourists coming for the High Line. People always say, ‘But wasn’t it great for you?’ The High Line has been the cause of my demise.”

Since the pricey park opened, Melva’s landlord’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing, and it’s always a real-estate developer on the other end. “My landlord’s not a bad guy, but how you can you say no to offers of $30 million?” He’s giving her until June 2015 and then she’s out of business.

[A shorter version of this essay appears in today's Metro NY]



When the High Line opened its first phase in 2009, critics raved as neighboring small business people looked on uncertainly, hoping the park would be a rising tide to lift all boats. That didn’t happen. By the time the High Line’s second phase opened in 2011, small businesses in its shadow were dropping like flies (mostly blue-collar businesses), making room for massive, high-rise development exclusively for the global super-rich.

What most New Yorkers do not know is that the luxury mega-development scheme was baked right in to the High Line preservation plan.

In the book High Line, the park’s co-founders Joshua David and Robert Hammond explain how, in order to preserve the train trestle, the air rights above it would be sold off to developers to build a new neighborhood filled with soaring towers. David recalls saying to Hammond at the time, “If the result of doing the High Line is that you end up with all these tall buildings that you wouldn’t have had otherwise, I don’t want to be a part of it.” Gradually, however, David came around--“my perspective changed,” he wrote. As Joseph Rose, chairman of the New York City Planning Commission, told them, “The High Line had been an impediment for so many years. You and your group changed it into a catalyst.”

Still, what the High Line had catalyzed was unfathomable at the time. Glistening towers rising 20, 30, 40 stories into the air, pressed tightly together, casting cold shadows and blotting out the sky, all along the length of the park? Condos with their own personal swimming pools? Russian oligarchs stashing investment money in glittering vertical ghost towns? Who could believe this claustrophobic dystopian vision would ever be permitted?

In 2011, in a love letter to the High Line, Philip Lopate wrote, “Much of the High Line's present magic stems from its passing though an historic industrial cityscape roughly the same age as the viaduct, supplemented by private tenement backyards and the poetic grunge of taxi garages. It would make a huge difference if High Line walkers were to feel trapped in a canyon of spanking new high-rise condos, providing antlike visual entertainment for one’s financial betters lolling on balconies.”

That vision has come true—and more so every day, now that the High Line’s final phase has opened, a ribbon wrapping a bow around what will be the Hudson Yards billionaire city within a city. The poetic grunge has gone with the exiled taxi garages. And the tenements, like the one containing La Lunchonette, have been pulverized to dust as new towers rise in every remaining open space.



“People aren’t going to like me for saying this,” Melva says, “but it feels like Disneyland around here now. Everyone’s fighting the crowd to get to the next ride. People on the High Line look like lemmings, like they’re walking on a treadmill. They’re not even looking at the plants. They should sell t-shirts up there that say, ‘I Did the High Line.’”

But shouldn’t tourists be good for the local economy? Melva explains that, even though there’s a High Line staircase right outside her building, most tourists don’t come down.

“They get off their big tour bus down at Gansevoort, walk to the end of the High Line, and then the bus picks them up again. Most of them never get off the High Line.”

Those who do venture down the stairs aren’t interested in eating a meal. They’re interested in Melva’s bathroom. “People come down to use my toilet. I get 20 – 30 people a day who just want to use my toilet.” She lets pregnant women, elderly people, and children use her bathroom; the rest she turns away. “They yell at me! Like it’s my job to provide them with a toilet.”



Melva is a warm and generous person. She calls all her customers “Honey” and touches them gently on the shoulder as she quietly glides up to ask if they need anything else, more water, another glass of wine. She makes you feel welcome and well cared for. A reviewer at New York magazine once said that walking into La Lunchonette is “like having someone put two warm hands on your cheeks.” Those are Melva’s hands.

But she’s also angry. Her anger at the High Line, the tourists, and the hyper-gentrification that has decimated Chelsea is shared by many New Yorkers, people who are tired of their neighborhoods changing into pleasure-domes for the rich, amusement parks for tourists, Anywhere USA’s filled with suburban chain stores.

Still, Melva says, "I love the High Line," specifically the views, the sunsets, and the air, all things that are being destroyed by overdevelopment. Even the rich are starting to complain, she says, upset about tourist buses idling in front of their condos, belching black exhaust fumes into the air. Even the rich are talking of leaving.

“What people don’t understand,” Melva explains, “is that it could have been a nice park. The zoning could’ve stayed so it didn’t attract all this grotesque development. It could have been done in a more creative way. And I’d still have my business.”

She adds, “The High Line was a Trojan horse for the real-estate people. All that glitters is not gold.”



Back in 2005, with Dan Doctoroff and Amanda Burden leading the charge, and with support from the Friends of the High Line, the Bloomberg Administration rezoned several blocks of West Chelsea--all “with the High Line at its center,” recalled Hammond in High Line.

In the city’s zoning resolution, they wrote out the explicit purposes of creating this special district. Aside from encouraging development and promoting the “most desirable” use of land (already in use), one purpose was “to facilitate the restoration and reuse of the High Line” as a public space, through, in part, “High Line improvement bonuses and the transfer of development rights from the High Line Transfer Corridor.” Bonuses along the corridor meant that if a luxury developer provided improvements to the High Line itself, that developer would be given permission to build their condo towers even bigger. And they did.

Another purpose of the West Chelsea rezoning, according to the city’s resolution, was to “create and provide a transition to the Hudson Yards area to the north.” In essence, Special West Chelsea was zoned to provide a link between the glamorous Meatpacking District below and the glittering new neighborhood above, all with the High Line running through, like a conveyor belt ferrying tourists and money up and down. To the developers of Hudson Yards, Bloomberg gave millions of dollars in tax breaks, including approximately $510 million to the Related Companies.

On their marketing materials, Related calls Hudson Yards “The New Heart of New York.”



I ask Melva how she might respond to charges that her restaurant helped usher in gentrification back in 1988. She says, “I have to concede that the galleries came, in part, because we were here. But our prices have always been fair, and our clientele is not all rich people. It’s a middle-class place, but there’s no room left for the middle class here. It’s a matter of degrees.” We talk about gentrification versus hyper-gentrification, how today’s changes are being created by the city government in collusion with corporations.

The catastrophically rising cost of Chelsea has pushed many of La Lunchonette’s regulars out of the neighborhood. And for the newcomers who fetishize the flashy and new, La Lunchonette’s “low-key” and “divey charm,” as Zagat puts it, is not their cup of tea.

It’s really too bad because dining at La Lunchonette is an absolute pleasure—and a rare experience. The music is soft--Miles Davis, Edith Piaf--and the rooms are cozy. The food is good—I had the lamb sausages and carrot-pumpkin soup. And then there are Melva’s warm hands and her kind voice asking, “How’re you doin’ Honey?” as she refills your glass. In a city increasingly populated with iZombies, at La Lunchonette you feel like you’ve rejoined humanity, and it feels good.

Melva hopes that by letting her customers know about the closure well ahead of time, they’ll have the chance to come say goodbye and enjoy a last meal. She hopes more people will try La Lunchonette, so she can close next spring without too much debt. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next. With crippling taxes and a draconian Health Department levying Kafkaesque citations and fines, the city makes it very hard to run a small restaurant.

“This place has been my whole life,” Melva says. “I didn’t think it would end like this. This is not the New York that I love. All my customers say the same thing. And no one’s doing anything about it.”



Previously:
Disney World on the Hudson
Brownfeld Auto
Meatpacking Before & After 
J. Crew for the High Line
Special West Chelsea

Taxi Parts

Recently, a store called Taxi Parts, Inc., moved in to the East Village. It had been up on Tenth Avenue for the past 25 years, on the ground floor of an old tenement building near Hudson Yards.



But it had to leave that spot. "The buildings are coming down," a man at Taxi Parts told me the other day.

The buildings sit alone on the corner of 10th and 35th. Earlier this year, Sean at the 116-year-old Veterans Chair Caning shop, across the street, told me that those tenements were still standing thanks to a holdout, a man who lived upstairs. Who knows what happened to him? (Looks like someone tried but failed to prove last year that the building was rent-stabilized.)

And so the Hudson Yards Effect claims more victims -- and takes more space for its bloated glass construction.



Sean told me that developers want "to knock down those buildings and put up the tallest tower in North America."

That would be the gluttonous "Hudson Spire."

Last year, when it was more or less theoretical, the Hudson Spire was rendered at 1,800 feet -- 4 feet taller than One World Trade Center. Now, with the holdout removed, the businesses relocated, and these little tenements soon to be turned to rubble, there will be plenty of room for a colossal monstrosity to rise on the spot.

Special West Chelsea

In June of this year, the Department of City Planning, under Amanda Burden, released a quiet little report entitled "Study for the potential expansion of the Special West Chelsea District."



If you've never heard of the Special West Chelsea District, that's because it didn't exist until 2005, when Burden and Bloomberg created it, rezoning the neighborhood around the upper High Line with the purpose of encouraging real estate development and supporting the growth of the luxury park (which also encourages development).

The city surely wanted to claim this chunk of Chelsea for the rich because it connects the fashionable Meatpacking District with the glittering neighborhood of the future--Hudson Yards. It was a vital piece of their ever-expanding map.

Immediately after rezoning, this long untouched part of town was evicted, demolished, scraped, and slammed with massive new condo towers.



Construction, manufacturing, and warehousing businesses have almost completely vanished from this area, while food, retail, real estate, and technology companies have flooded in, as shown in a chart provided in the study. But that's not enough for the City. In their 2005 rezoning, they left out a couple of pieces--and now they want to take them over.



In the June report, they praise the 2005 rezoning, crediting it for the influx of new, high-end office, hotel, and residential space, and they look at three "Study Areas," called A, B, and C.

In A & B, the southern study areas close to 14th Street, they recommend no change, except for the demolition of Prince Lumber (they got their wish) and its neighboring buildings for commercial re-development.

Study Area C is another story. 



Located to the north, this area contains a few valuable chunks that the city believes are being improperly utilized. The tone of the study is dripping with such paternalism--they know better and have ways of getting what they want.

The first chunk of Area C is the block framed by 11th and 12th Avenues, and 25th and 24th Streets. It contains the US Postal Service's Vehicle Repair Facility, built in 1988. The USPS, notes the study, "has expressed no intention to relocate the facility." However, the study also notes that the USPS is struggling financially these days and probably won't be able to stay much longer.

"It is prudent" to develop a plan for this site, especially because it's between a nice park and "valuable residential developments." Plus, the USPS site offers "unobstructed views of the Hudson River." God forbid those views should be wasted on postal workers.

How long before the USPS is made an offer it can't refuse?



Area C also contains the city-owned Department of Sanitation Repair Shop. They don't want to move either, "citing the considerable difficulty in finding manufacturing districts to locate such operations." The study says, in essence, let's leave it alone (for now).



Next up, some older buildings such as the Starrett-Lehigh and the Terminal Stores, are deemed to contain "vital commercial uses," "high-profile design companies" and "creative firms." Some of the Starrett-Lehigh's tenants include Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger.

No mention is made of them refusing to relocate, probably because they weren't even asked to do so. The city has decided to let them be--because their tenants provide vital services, unlike delivering the mail and picking up the garbage.



Further north, the City also has their eyes on the block between 11th and 12th Avenues, and 30th and 29th Streets.

This block is under mixed ownership, including a gas station, a mechanic's garage, a parking lot, a loft building, and more. According to the report, this section is "underbuilt and underutilized," bogged down by properties that are "constrained by legal agreements that will terminate in the next decade."

Well, there's always eminent domain--let's see if the City can wait 10 years.



With the "High Line across the street to the north," says the report, "new residential development on Eleventh Avenue to the east, landmark buildings to the south and the Hudson River to the west, this block requires a structured approach to planning its future." In other words, bye-bye!



These aren't pretty blocks with pretty businesses on them, but they weren't meant to be. Before Bloomberg, this whole part of town was at the edge of nowhere. For decades, from the Meatpacking District up through Hudson Yards, it's where the undesirables went to do their business, chopping meat, fixing cars, pumping gas, parking trains. Out of sight and out of mind.

But Manifest Destiny moves ever outward. The towers will not be stopped. The High Line must have its views unsmudged by grime and grease. Only the pretty can stay.