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June 28, 2008
Nowhere is my home. The three plus year battle of the Economakis family (or parasitic, exploitative real estate clan, depending on where you side in the battle) to convert 47 E. Third Street, an unremarkable tenement, into a 'single' family unit (single in quotes because they have indicated it will also serve to provide guest space for their extended family) has reached the stage of real estate battle where stasis becomes the story itself (akin to the Windermere on 57th).
I'm not going to detail the various claims and counter-claims; conveniently, everyone involved has a website. And this isn't a post about rent control, though that is germane to the continuance of the dispute.
What struck me most about the story was how starkly it underscores one of the more pernicious effects of the real estate boom in Manhattan. Even though on a per square foot basis real estate grows more dear every day, and people seem to have no limit for irrational mismatches between absolute dollars and relative scale (million-dollar studios et al), there is still a noticeable creep upward in the size of premium property, and certainly in trophy properties.
There have been a few notable conversions of this nature recently, including one only a few blocks away, in which the Bouwerie Lane Theater was basically erased to make way for a mansion and 'respectable' retail. And the contingents that find fault with the Gilded Age aura that encompasses these stories seem less troubled by similarly outsized footprints under the control of artists -- even though that hasn't proved to make them any less susceptible to market development.
There isn't an immediate corollary to real estate prices beyond Manhattan, since the wealth driving this is detached from any rational or practical notion of economy, like other compressed, hyper-inflated districts (Ile Saint-Louis, et al). There is an ancillary effect, but only some of it is a permanent shift, slightly upwards, of baseline prices in some areas, likely already established (the near neighborhoods of Brooklyn), and a retreat is as likely as not for everywhere else, since the most egregious overbuilding is in areas that don't attract the strata of untouchable wealth that Manhattan does. What is more acute, across the board, is what cultural effects that may result from a loss of density.
Density is the lifeblood of most of the elements of New York that stand out as unique: class and ethic mixing, artistic foment, intellectual and economic innovation. From the salons of Greenwich Village to the light industrial inventors in Brooklyn (it seems like everything from Barbicide to Steinway Pianos were invented in a bathtub there), to say nothing of massive cultural and intellectual edifices ranging from Abstract Expressionism to Broadway and the New School started because like minded people could find each other and still commingle with a panoply of others.
The Economakis' are removing from housing stock inventory which could easily house up up to 30 distinct lives, based on habitation patterns of just the past two decades (go back four or six, and it would easily be double), housing the city has no good plan for replacing. The Bloomberg administration was reelected with a plan for new housing that did not better those of his opponents, and is likely falling well short of his goals.
The calculus that drew a large percentage of people who don't prioritize financial gain as the end all of human endeavor is that the trade off of lower standards of living and less certainty in the traditional trappings of security (health care, retirement, affordable housing -- affordable anything) was worth the struggle in hopes of having accomplishment within fields where laurels were not accompanied by sums that could even place you in the most modest of market rate apartments. Barring that, simply rubbing elbows and trying might be its own reward, and the city always needs good waiters and dog walkers.
But the math is breaking down. People at the absolute lowest rungs are not living a bohemian dream; rather, they are saddled with economic requirements that force long commutes and extended works schedules that chip away in quite literal terms from the time required in the struggle to create cultural works, gradually diluting the pool of the willing.
As someone who loves a good class war, let's also look outside the glory of art, where the idea that hard work and a willingness to forgo extravagance in return for a solid, if unspectacular existence is dashed as well. Teachers, nurses, cab drivers, civil service, no one living here a generation ago would encourage a child to take this path with the same confidence. Think about every time you've had an interaction with someone, a mundane transaction that all of a suddenly shifts when you understand everyone here is a crank and a know-it-all, or a preening self important fool willing to share an opinion at the drop of a hat; afterward you walk away, perversely proud of your town, because a cab driver would never lecture you on cheese in Topeka.
The argument that the hordes of American tourists and locals that invade the East and West Villages are here to see the latest show at the New Museum doesn't hold. Those people aren't understanding of or pursuing cultural consumption past finding where Magnolia Bakery is. But the cheap, sanitized version of New York that results in glossy expensive lounges and restaurants that can barely be filled now is a reasonably new phenomena (at least at its current scale) and I doubt it has any longevity. The winding path of downtown culture over the past century that set that stage for it is in hasty retreat. Or, at least, it grows more diffuse, and the difference between those two eventualities may not make a difference in twenty years.
No doubt that some of the people the Economakis' want to displace haven't done much of anything with their good fortune. In the end, most of use won't. Because it's a numbers game. When you reduce the numbers, you are slimming the odds. And in this case the house is as bland, corporate and unyielding its best known shill.
*As a matter of perverse disclosure, I just found out I may have been a tenant of Granite (the management company the Economakis family controls). One of the properties listed in Manhattan was a former apartment. But my checks always went to an individual. And he was a shitty landlord. Over the course of three years he refused to give us information on where or when we should dispose of our trash (among other failures).
Found always via this Permanent Link.
June 18, 2008
A very simple message: support Paul Newell. I'm going to try and make this short. I hear blog readers want bullet lists and such, so let me hit the high points quickly, and then the three of you that read for, you know, style, can continue south. One: Vote for Paul Newell, who is the first person to challenge Sheldon Silver for the 64th Assembly District of New York State since 1985, this September 9, in the Democratic Primary. Two: if you are inclined to do more, come to M1-5 (52 Walker Street, between Church & Broadway) next Tuesday, June 24, and toss some dollars in the pot. I'll be there, if that's any appeal.
I've been a constituent of Sheldon Silver for most of my time in New York. What Sheldon Silver has actually done, for me, as a constituent, I'd have a hard time enumerating. As much as I admired his (nonetheless) dirt dealing quashing of the Jets Stadium (a project I showered less than no love for), it affected mostly my abstract principles about urban development. On the ground, things like congestion pricing, rent stabilization, and the commuter tax, he's been an absent landlord at best, offering obfuscation about his reasoning that at best sounds like 'we know what's better for you'. And I gotta tell you Shelly, paying well over two grand for a tenement pad feels great. Thank you.
When you live in New York, you can be forgiven for not seeing the gradated differences in what we loosely call progressive politics. Give the Speaker some face time with just about any national politician, and he will play the way we expect: somewhere left of Emma Goldman, and we can all pat ourselves on the back for the symbolism of unrepentant liberal idealism.
But, you know, when the proverbial rubber hits the road, Silver comes up more than a little short. The oft used excuse for his lack of constituent service is the larger problem of holding down the fort against Joe Bruno. But you know, the Democratic majority in the Assembly is overwhelming, and we are creeping up on the Senate. So every craven accommodation and compromise, is suspect. Considering how drastic the impact of some of those issues has been (the commuter tax and luxury decontrol, to name two), trading that to protect upstate assemblymen who sell us down the river for a stoplight, even when our tax dollars subsidize the entire state, is a bit rich.
Paul Newell has a very simple point. For everything else Silver is, he still represents a discrete district. He has an obligation to those people, to act in their interests, with transparency and honestly, two qualities that he is distinctly lacking around the largest issues. Smaller issues, like funding security in public housing, developing the few remaining viable lots in lower Manhattan for affordable housing, things that can directly effect the people he ostensibly serves, get caught up in these supposed larger battles. But those battles often look like they all center on one struggle: sustaining Silver as one of the "three men in a room."
The Democrats are poised to retake the Senate. Their control of the Assembly is seemingly unyeilding. We have a Democratic governor. That we have to go hat in hand to try and get Silver off the dime of business as usual is an insult to the progressive ideals that people often point to as a defining feature of this city. And it is particularly galling to those he was elected to serve. People like me. I'm more than ready for Change. We are on the verge of the possibility of an historic change. At all levels.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
June 16, 2008
Did you miss me? Wait, don't answer that. Reading the Robb Report is like subscribing to Playboy. The narrowness of the fetish and the finite boundaries mean that incremental shifts of style get outsized attention as new, or sexier versions of the old. A good Ferrari only comes along once a generation, but that doesn't stop gallons of ink from being spilled about the latest and greatest. And the airbrushed equipment in Playboy? We would be so lucky for progress even on that timetable.
But that doesn't stop the mindless repetition, the manic attempt to convince both the arbiters and the suckers that the senseless production has intrinsic value, nor the urgent avocation of the greed necessary to enable the consumption (see Marxist Rant, First Year College Dorm for the remainder of this paragraph).
Any lifestyle section of the Times (Styles, Fashion, Home, et al) pretty much suffers this problem, leavened slightly by the larger cultural purview of the target demo, meaning we have a wider array of objects to valorize, even though they have no more utiility (and much of the time you find yourself wishing it was a simple as fast boats and bountiful décolletage). Pushing out to the boundaries to shelter porn press we encounter the inane embrace of intentional esoterica (tribal art! funny fruit!), delivered via whatever Tyler Brule is pimping at the present moment. At the apex of any particular zeitgeist, you do see a spectacular culture document flame out. Spy in the late eighties, Nest in the late nineties. We've only got a couple years left, so I hope someone is planning something interesting and insightful. Sorry, Cabinet, I don't think you will qualify.
Since when did this become a magazine blog? It hasn't -- but nor has it been much of a blog of any kind for some time. The Napoleon of acerbicity marched on the Moneyed Empire of Manhattan and came back, defeated by the long, cold winter of affluent indifference. I think it was the Muji Store. Or maybe CB2.
Sure, there are glimmers of hope. The respective Yards from Hell projects are fracturing under the ponderous weight of bureaucracy. But even with the implosion of BearStearns and impending doom of Lehman, it's hardly enough. I'm sure that when Drexel was finally cut down like a financial Charles Whitman, I doubt it gave much solace to the likes of David Wojnarowicz.
The proverbial friend of a friend once told me sagely that living here when the real estate market was in the tank (early nineties edition for for him) really sucked, because there wasn't money anywhere for anyone or anything. But he was telling me that in a large rent stabilized apartment he found and held though the lean years, and was preaching to me over drinks he bought with AT&T stock that had been showered upon him as a result of a bizarre chain of failed music label to failed Internet music startup. That the path ended with him as failed day trader, and managing a furniture warehouse in Buffalo gives me hope that his argument was wrong and that this town might still expel enough of the mindless FIRE drones like fleas from a dog and Manhattan might be an interesting place to live once again.
I did find myself staring longingly at depressed stock prices and staring with more intent than usual at Curbed's state of the market reports, hoping for the four horsemen to finally appear. Rather than swallow the middle class aspiration tripe they sell at the Economist, which is just a more articulate version of the 'old black man walking hand-in-hand with a little white girl down a country road' motif you will find in just about any financial services commercial -- you know, the one where they tell you to prepare carefully for the future while extracting usurious management fees that fund Richard Meier condos -- maybe the lapping iceberg waters and peak oil should free us to be more cavalier about our declining years. Just imagine the kind of glory a squat at 40 Bond would entail.
This is not a future found in the McKibbon Street lofts or at the kickball league in McCarren Park. No, those people are the effluvia of the worst of the excesses, believing that they inhabit some brave new world where theremin-based bands, eating clubs, their 'art' and a down payment on a Greenpoint condo, courtesy their parents, is somehow the latter day equivalent of the Beats. That's not to say the city is bereft of cultural exploration and innovation, just a warning that hitching yourself to the wrong wagon can be deleterious. No one should ever mention they are collaborating on a film with "someone from their kickball team."
Why is this relevant to me? As things have ground down here, it was in no small part a response to the seemingly implacable march of the above. But possible cracks in the unified front of Thrillist party tips, mega scaled MePa loungs and pillow fight enthusiasts make it seem like there is the whiff of incremental change (or I'm just looking harder). I told anyone who would ask (and that wasn't many) that this was never intended to be an architecture blog. The buildings in this city are too consistently dull or developer-driven to ever sustain a publication that doesn't simply yell "Sucks! Sucks! Sucks!" over and over (which, admittedly, I do). And befriending the prissy GSD grads that blanket the professional landscape so I could parrot their badly wrought lit-crit justifications of houses they shat out for friends of their parents is even less appealing.
What drew me to the city, and many others I suspect, is that the unique geography, overlaid with an actually vibrant culture based in intellectual and artistic rigor, created fascinating spaces (some of which grew out of intentional effort and design, and others purely coincidental). If all the solipsistic theories drummed into our heads during studio had any use it might be that the building as text could possibly be situated in writing like this, and that might be part of a cycle of sustaining and growing that culture. But it might not always require Roarkian genius for the physical manifestation.
The challenge has always been a notion that reporting would limn this effort with a modicum of legitimacy. Why I felt the need to prove myself to the likes of the Observer Real Estate section was something I never quite got a handle on. I guess my lack of credentials and failure to attend one of the handful of schools whose alumnae dominate large swaths of our society stuck in my crawl and exacerbated my frustration that in the few instances where criticism seemed to be in practice, the exclusion there was a sharp as trying to qualify for a mortgage on Perry St., albeit a result of a different hierarchy.
But doing original reporting while, you know, working, proved to be a tall order -- at least on any semblance of a regular schedule. The tools have improved considerably, but in a town with enough advertising dollars to fund more than a couple handfuls of real estate beats, it's a race I'm unlikely to even see the back of the pack of any time soon.
So I'm using the fast approach of the solstice as a marker to make things a little less dim around here, and to insert the caveat that things will become more -- idiosyncratic. Partly the exigencies of admitting I just can't find the time to do 'reporting' the way I would prefer, and partly because that I didn't set out for that as an end goal. There's still a city here somewhere. As a friend observed the other day about a new 'blogging service' "is it another one those things where people are typing instead of living?" the only way to collapse that gap is to shift focus. It won't do much for my profile as an architecture blogger, but perhaps it will for me as a writer. I do hope you will find favor in it. I might be a crank and curmudgeon, but for those of you who have taken the time to share your appreciation of what has been wrought to date, many thanks. I'm hanging out the shingle once again in large part because of that.