For close to three years in the early 90s I lived in Northern NJ. My girlfriend at the time lived at the McAlpin House (Herald Square, 34th & 6th, catty corner (kitty -korner?) from Macy's.
We would often walk the 1 1/4 mile or so down through Chelsea to the Village. I probably spent more time in Greenwich Village than any other part of Manhattan during that those years. And for good reason. There are few places on earth I'd rather be than in Greenwich Village on a warm spring day.
But we have to honestly admit there's a price to be paid for keeping Greenwich Village the cute, adorable pet that it is. All those big developments that were slated for Greenwich Village a generation or more ago? It's not as if they went poof and disappeared.....they just went elsewhere.
Another part of Manhattan I liked was Hell's Kitchen...again, a reasonable jaunt from 34th Street. I liked it mostly because for block after block it hadn't changed much from the days of the Roosevelt administration (Teddy, not Franklin). It was gritty, and a bit shady in spots, but at that time it hadn't captured so much as a whiff of gentrification. I was last in New York this past May, and could not believe how much that area had changed. Several new high rises poking up....and more in the pipeline, apparently. Sadly it's not so much "gentrification" as "urban renewal", by any other name. You can gentrify a Civil War-era three-story brownstone. But not nearly so easy to gentrify an 1890s six-story walk-up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire
I do admire Jane Jacobs, but no amount of wishing for a diverse population is going to save a given city's aging infrastructure, even if civic reformers such as Moses and those who went after Bunker Hill, are chased off. It takes money to keep ever-older buildings standing, and lots of it. I've lived in Greenwich Village for nearly 35 years; it's now the Upper East Side, and, while I might dislike the overgentrification, it has saved many hundreds of 150+-year-old buildings...and I'm not going to be foolish enough to complain that the value of the apartment I bought in 1986 is now worth six times what I paid for it. The bones of an historic neighborhood have been saved, and it's the money of the newly homogenized population that has done it. We'll see if what Jacobs predicted comes true--that eventually even the rich will get bored with luxury and move on--but I don't know why, being human, they would. I see no signs of it yet, anyway.
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