Ashley Dupre On Tiger Woods' Babes: "At Least I Kept My Mouth Shut"
Same-Sex Marriage Blame Game Aims at Paterson, Addabbo
Wife Tries To Abort And Poison Husband's Lovechild
Man Injured By Tree Limb Files Suit Against City
Rihanna's Random Airport Search
The New York Times has an interesting story today on Sion Misrahi and the Lower East Side he helped transform. If you've walked down Rivington St. a few times, you've probably noticed the Misrahi Realty storefront business. Its owner is Sion Misrahi, who sold pants for his father in the neighborhood when he was fourteen. When it began to gentrify, he worked to classify the old bargain-shopping district as a landmark area. Then he decided to start marketing real estate in the neighborhood to nightlife businesses. The Times separates the changes into four parts: "shmattes to hipsters to bulldozers to tourists."
People should cut this article out of the paper today and save it, because it's pretty much a textbook example of how New York neighborhoods have evolved over the last 20 years, and will likely continue to change. The details and complaints of neighbors about nightlife, rising rents, and rising skylines are echoed all across New York City. Instead of the instantly mandated sweeping change of a Robert Moses, there is a creeping mandated change of a desire for cool and the inevitability of wealth. Misrahi differentiates residents as creators and nitpickers––those who work to change their neighborhood, and those who sit back and criticize.
When we walk down Rivington St. and wonder how a $400-a-night hotel managed to be erected across the street from Economy Candy, we feel nostalgic for the dingier, more exotic Lower East Side, the one that is no longer affordable to most New Yorkers, including myself. And then we remember we are heading towards a favored bar or a show at Piano's and realize that if it's anyone's fault this happened, it's ours.
(Lower East Side, by Betty Blade at flickr)
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
These good times we live in will not last. It is an unfortunate truth. A friend lives in a studio that was created when a luxury hotel room from the 1920's was cleaved into four parts during the depression. Feast now, the dingier everything is just around the corner.
any mention of how the Essex market is becoming smaller and smaller every year with less vendors?
any mention of who used to be the customers of the market and where are they now?
sorry but the area is still dingier.
The dam broke when the longtime Lower East Side artist space Collective Unconscious was forced to leave Ludlow Street three years ago. There is a noticeable "before" and "after."
It seems that the LES is two seperate entities. You have your super-rich whites and your super-poor hispanics occupying the same stretch of land. It's really bewildering to see such unbelievable decadence and delapidation sitting shoulder to shoulder with one another. It's like super williamsburg.
Only thing is, the hispanics and the poor live in housing projects all along the LES. You don't see many poor living in the tenements proper of the LES anymore. The tenements of immigrants and of historic nature.
I remember hanging out in the roofs of those tenements dropping M80's down the shaftway. should of seen the look of the transplants from the next building look at us.
can't do nuthin because my friend was on the job.
Wow...thanks for this.
I remember a girlfriend of mine who had an apartment on Rivington...tons of roaches, scary halls, and scary streets downstairs. But it was only $94 a month. This was 1977 or so.
Pianos used to sell pianos. Children played in the streets and there was credit at the bodegas. I knew my neighbors (3 were at my wedding). Regular Tactical Narcotics Team busts. My aprtment had been a shooting gallery one tenant before me. I could afford it and no one ever made me feel unwelcome. Ludlow Street was my first adult home. Little hipster shits ruined it all to have an alcoholic theme park.
Uh, you guys missed the point. "Little hipster shits" can't move mountains; they're too drunk, anyway. Place your blame on the building owners who sell their buildings to Misrahi or luxury developers, because they love money more than anything. The drunks and meatheads are merely the symptom. The cause is GREED.
Speaking of greed--the Astroland people? They could've said "no." Really.
Read this, and tell me that someone can't simply say "no" when having millions dangled in front of their face:
www.nzherald.co.nz/section/3/story.cfm?c_id=3&ObjectID=10403945
Point taken - I am just tired of drunk hipster shits and no - no one can say no to the stupid amount of $$$. No one owns real estate for altruistic purposes. Who are these people who buy these things? How can I get one of the jobs that pays me for my million dollar condo on Delancey St.? Oh, I forgot - it's their parents $$$
So that's the Misrahi of Misrahi Realty who's signs I see all over the place.
wow, col. kurtz, TNT that's a blast from the eighties. Any Asians still live on Ludlow Street?
Seward Park High School was the zone school.
I think the juxtaposition term changed to the income gap. Like it's a small gap, we are all equal.
eyo im like mad how all these condos and shxt are rising and mad white ppl (no offense) are like thinkin they all cool and shxt cause they livin in the LES. they should try living in the REAL LES: the pjs.
storefront: yes, some Asians still live on Ludlow, but not many (same with Orchard). My building on lower Allen Street used to be 100% Chinese; now it's just 25% Chinese (I am not part of that percentage). The thing is, the building I live in is pretty crappy - and yet my rent has gone up $300 in the last three years.
I would like to buy a place in the next 2 years or so, but even though "BelDel" is primarily lower-middle-class (due to the tenements, the housing projects and general lack of amenities), I won't be able to buy down here because it's either rental properties or newly-built luxury condos and co-ops. Again, it's greedy property owners who are to blame for that (and no, I am not a newly-arrived hipster adding to the problem).
that hotel is completely out of sync with that particular street
you'd have to see it to understand how ghastly that thing is.
I don't know how anyone allowed it to be built- it defies logic.
ahem. you hear NO ONE going "oh yeah i live ON the LES.."
the LES is a neighborhood that is named after where it is, on the lower east side of Manhattan.
how about if you went I live ON the East Village, ON UES, ON Harlem, etc..
NO BITCH. you're wrong. and who the hell are you calling me a faker, cunt ass mothafuckka imma slit yo throat bitch