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DEATH OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY NewNew YorkYork andand thethe Urban Crisis of Aff uence

AS THE SOUTH GOES, SO GOES THE NATION

REPORT

THE DEATH OF A ONCE GREAT CITY The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affuence By Kevin Baker

ew York has been my home tan, its core—is happening in every any way, with what came before. So let for more than forty years, affuent American city. San Francisco me make one thing perfectly clear, as Nfrom the year after the city’s is overrun by tech conjurers who are that old New Yorker Dick Nixon used supposed nadir in 1975, when it near- rapidly annihilating its remarkable di- to say, and list right now all the things ly went bankrupt. I have seen all the versity; they swarm in and out of the I hated about the New York of the periods of boom and bust since, almost metropolis in specially chartered buses Seventies: crime, dirt, days-old gar- all of them related to the “paper econ- to work in Silicon Valley, using the city bage left on the street, cockroaches, omy” of fnance and real estate specu- itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. the Bronx burning, homelessness, dis- lation that took over the city long Boston, which used to be a city of a carded hypodermic needles on my before it did the rest of the nation. But thousand nooks and crannies, back- building’s stoop, discarded crack I have never seen what is going on alley restaurants and shops, dive bars vials—and packs of burned-out now: the systematic, wholesale trans- and ice cream parlors hidden under its matches—on my building’s stoop, formation of New York into a reserve elevated, is now one long, monotonous cockroaches that scattered everywhere of the obscenely wealthy and the wall of modern skyscraper. In Washing- when you turned on the light, entire barely here—a place increasingly de- ton, an army of cranes has transformed Brooklyn neighborhoods looking like void of the idiosyncrasy, the complex- the city in recent years, smoothing out a bombed-out Dresden, subway cars on ity, the opportunity, and the roiling all that was real and organic into a which only one door—or no door— excitement that make a city great. town of mausoleums for the Trump opened when the train came in, sub- As New York enters the third de- crowd to revel in. way cars cooled in summer rush hours cade of the twenty-frst century, it is By trying to improve our cities, we only by a single fan that swung slowly in imminent danger of becoming have only succeeded in making them around and around, deindustrializa- something it has never been before: empty simulacra of what was. To bring tion, those really big cockroaches that unremarkable. It is approaching a state this about we have signed on to political we called water bugs for some reason where it is no longer a signifcant cul- scams and mindless development and that crunched under your feet. tural entity but the world’s largest schemes that are so exclusive they are New York today—in the aggregate— gated community, with a few cupcake more destructive than all they were sup- is probably a wealthier, healthier, clean- shops here and there. For the frst time posed to improve. The urban crisis of er, safer, less corrupt, and better-run city in its history, New York is, well, boring. affuence exemplifes our wider crisis: we than it has ever been. The same can be This is not some new phenomenon now live in an America where we be- said for most of those other cities seen but a cancer that’s been metastasizing lieve that we no longer have any ability as recent urban success stories, from on the city for decades now. And what’s to control the systems we live under. Los Angeles to Philadelphia, Atlanta happening to New York now—what’s to Portland, Oregon. But we don’t live already happened to most of Manhat- hose of us who have been in in the aggregate. For all of New York’s New York for any amount of shiny new skin and shiny new numbers, Kevin Baker is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His most recent essay Ttime are immediately suspect- what’s most amazing is how little of its for the magazine, “21st Century Limited,” ed of nostalgia if we dare to compare social dysfunction the city has man- appeared in the July 2014 issue. our shiny city of today unfavorably, in aged to eliminate over the past four

Aerial photograph of the Empire State Building lit up in red for the US Travel Association’s National Travel and Tourism Week, New York City, May 8, 2018 (detail), by Fred R. Conrad REPORT 25 decades. Homelessness is at or near increased to 15 percent, a fgure lower it, according to the real estate database record levels. The Bronx, poster child than it has ever been since then. StreetEasy, with rents rising fastest on for the bleakness of the city in the The immediate cause of the increase the lowest wage earners in the city. Seventies, remains the poorest urban in poverty doesn’t require much inves- The result has been predictable county in the country, with almost tigation. The landlords are killing the enough. Homelessness in the city has 40 percent of the South Bronx, or more town. Long ago, the idea that “rent is reached a level not seen here in de- than a quarter-million people, still liv- too damn high” in New York was so cades, if ever. Today, an average of ing below the poverty line. Bus-stop ads thoroughly inculcated into the city’s 60,000 people are provided shelter ev- all over New York urge everyone to consciousness that it became a one- ery night, in 547 buildings, by the city’s carry the emergency medication nalox- man political party and a Saturday Department of Homeless Services. one so that they can reverse some of Night Live sketch. But the rent is too Most of the newly homeless are not the overdoses that kill nearly four New damn high, and getting higher all the derelicts or the mentally ill. Of these Yorkers every day. time. Whereas the old rule of thumb people 70 percent are families with The average New Yorker now works was that your rent should be one pay- children, and at least one third of the harder than ever, for less and less. Pov- check a month, or about 25 percent of families include a working adult. They erty in the city has lessened somewhat your income, the typical New York were simply priced out of a market that in the past few years, but in 2016 the household now spends at least one seems to have no ceiling, victims of the off cial poverty rate was still 19.5 per- third of its income on rent, and three “ownership society” that is modern cent, or nearly one in every f ve New in ten renter households pay 50 percent New York.1 Whereas most New Yorkers Yorkers. When the “near poverty” or more, according to the latest New used to rent apartments of all sizes, rate—those making up to $47,634 a York Housing and Vacancy Survey. year for a family of four—is thrown in, And the situation is getting rapidly 1 Although New York hosts what is estimated it means that almost half the city is worse. According to the same survey, to be the largest population of homeless people in the United States, it is no coincidence that living what has become a marginal the price New York landlords wanted the other cities in the top ten are also generally existence, just one paycheck away from for vacant apartments from 2014 to seen as “success stories.” Tracking total disaster. By comparison, the city’s pov- 2017 increased by 30 percent, while the numbers of the homeless has never been an erty rate in 1970—in the wake of Lyn- median household income for all rent- exact science, but other cities that have some of the largest homeless populations include don Johnson’s war on poverty—was ing families from 2013 to 2016 went up Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, just 11.5 percent. By 1975, during the by 10 percent. The burden has fallen Washington, San Francisco, Las Vegas, supposed collapse of New York, it had hardest on those who can least afford Boston, and Philadelphia.

26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 Drawing by Steve Mumford more and more of the buildings their by tenants who cannot be evicted or analysis that appeared in last August’s families made home for generations denied a lease renewal without due New York Review of Books. “Today it sells have been either torn down and re- cause, and whose rents cannot be for perhaps thirty or forty times that placed or “converted” to condomini- raised by more than a set amount de- amount, or ten times what the rent roll ums or “cooperative apartments,” termined every year by a government- would be after regulated tenants have which sound like something socialistic appointed panel. This does not mean been dislodged.” but are not. The average condo and the rent doesn’t go up. The rent on the co-op sale prices in Manhattan shot up rent-stabilized apartment that I’ve hat plagues New York, past the $2 million mark for the f rst leased since 1980 has more than tripled though, is not only the as- time ever last year, while a townhouse in that time. Rents can also be raised Wtounding rise in housing will cost you $6.28 million. when apartments are vacated, or when prices, disruptive as that is. It is also One common belief, even in many landlords make improvements to the the wholesale destruction of the public liberal circles, is that the cause of building or to individual apartments. city. Many of the city’s most treasured these outrageous rents and prices is Once the monthly rent hits $2,700, amenities, essential to its middle-class the very government intervention that if an apartment is vacated, or if the character and built up for decades was intended to ameliorate them: rent total household income exceeds through the painstaking labors of so regulation. This notion might have $200,000 for two consecutive years, many dedicated individuals—working some validity if, say, rent regulations the unit can pass out of rent stabiliza- people and philanthropists, labor lead- in New York stif ed construction. But tion. Forever. From 2006 to 2016, at ers and social workers, reformers and they don’t. New buildings in the city least 139,000 apartments were deregu- politicians—have now been torn are not subject to rent control and lated, a number that includes an esti- away. Look at almost any public ser- never have been. More than 40,000 mated one quarter of all apartments vice or space in New York, and you new buildings went up during Michael on the increasingly wealthy Upper will see that it has been diminished, Bloomberg’s twelve years as mayor West Side of Manhattan, where I live. degraded, appropriated. (2002–13), and another 25,000 build- This is due to rising incomes at some The change in their day-to-day lives ings were demolished. The city con- addresses. But driving deregulation as that has probably delighted New York- tinues to furiously tear itself down and well is the fact that private equity funds ers the most over the past forty years build itself back up again. New build- see great possibilities in your neighbor- has been the improvement in the city’s ings are spiked into every available lot, hood. Your landlord is now much less vast subway system. Ridership has ap- and they rise higher than ever before. likely to be a family or an individual who proached record levels in recent years, Far from discouraging new construc- has owned one or two buildings for and on the f rst day of 2017, Governor tion, New York’s housing policies en- years, depending on them for a safe and Andrew Cuomo led a giddy celebra- courage and subsidize it at every turn— steady income, and much more likely to tion to mark the opening of three new and, in doing so, have only made the be a faceless, massively f nanced inter- stations on the fabled Second Avenue city less affordable than ever. New York national f rm that is highly incentivized subway, which f nally became a (par- has had some sort of rent regulation to force you out on the street and keep tial) reality after f rst being proposed continuously since 1943, and today its investors happy. “Not long ago a rent- in 1920. nearly half of its apartments—966,000 stabilized building would sell for ten or The self-congratulations were short- in all, containing around 2.5 million at most twelve times its rent roll—the lived, as service on the remainder of the people—are what is called rent- amount of money, before expenses, that system began to decline precipitously. stabilized; that is, they are in buildings it generates in a year,” wrote journalist An antiquated and misconf gured train- of six or more units, and are occupied Michael Greenberg in a meticulous signaling system—one that, at the rate

“51st St. 6:11 pm,” from the series Platforms, by Natan Dvir © The artist REPORT 27 the Metropolitan Transportation Au- Starting with Central thority is working on it, will be fully Park in 1980, much of replaced sometime in the late 2060s, by New York’s park sys- which time nanobots will likely have tem has been handed been doing the job for a generation— over to privately began causing longer and longer delays, funded “conservan- with both cars and platforms flling up cies,” supposedly sub- with frustrated, angry passengers. The ordinate to the city system’s welcome new electronic sched- government but in uling signs began to report delays of truth all-powerful, such length—next train: 22 and quite determined minutes—that they now produced only to put everything on a Godot-like depression among riders. a paying basis. A visit In one of the many byzantine quirks to the Central Park of how we are governed in New York, Zoo, once free, now the trains and buses are part of the costs $18 per adult, MTA, which is controlled by Governor $13 per child. A “to- Cuomo. But the governor—allegedly a tal experience” ticket Democrat—rejected out of hand a pro- for the world- posal by New York mayor Bill de Blasio renowned Bronx Zoo for a special “millionaires’ tax” to fx costs $36.95 for all the transit system, offering instead a “adults” over the age “genius transit challenge” wherein any- of twelve, $26.95 for younger children, less workers would simply give up and go one who came up with a great idea to and $31.95 for seniors—in a borough away. But before that could happen, make the trains run on time could win where the median yearly household Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district a million dollars. income is $37,525. (Rental of a single- court judge in Manhattan, found the The reasons for the subway’s break- seat stroller at the zoo will cost you $10. business districts guilty of breaking down are legion. But the more telling A wheelchair is free but requires a $20 minimum-wage laws, using their new- lesson here is that a tax on the wealth- deposit, lest you try to scoot off with it.) found source of almost free labor to iest New Yorkers to restore even the Even the streets are no longer fully undercut competition—and handing most vital public good cannot be so under public control. Starting in 1984, the money they made as a result to their much as entertained. New York created seventy-fve “business already well-paid executives. improvement districts,” more than any “You say you’re doing so much for he decline of the subways is just other city in the country—though BIDs the city, but you’re making that mon- the latest diminution of public are now common in nearly every one of ey off the backs of the homeless,” Tlife in New York. Over the past the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Tommy Washington, then a forty-one- few decades, what used to be regarded BIDs are supposed to be self-taxing co- year-old former BID worker and plain- as inviolable public space has been alitions of businesses, often employing tiff pointed out. “You donate lamp- systematically rolled up and surren- the homeless and destitute to pick up posts, fower beds, Bryant Park. How dered to unelected private authorities. trash, prettify the streets, and organize are you going to represent beautify if security patrols. But as the you’re doing ugly behind that?” New York Times reported, Washington’s question goes to the one of the very first New heart of the new New York, whom it’s York BIDs instead “orga- for, and what it means. Everywhere nized the workers into what now, private institutions have largely were called ‘goon squads’ to taken over the neighborhoods around use force to chase homeless them, repurposing them solely to meet people out of bank lobbies their own needs. with A.T.M.s.” Our tax-free universities have been In 2000, the Grand Cen- among the most shameless offenders. tral Partnership and the Cooper Union—a cultural landmark 34th Street Partnership founded in 1859 as a night school of the BIDs fnally settled a seven- arts and sciences for working men and year lawsuit charging that women—abolished its legacy of free they had routinely paid their tuition after clotting the Astor Place employees just $1 an hour to area with disturbing glass boxes and walk security patrols and nearly driving itself into bankruptcy. clean toilets. The BIDs had Fumihiko Maki’s 400,000 square foot, dragged out the suit in the $300 million black monolith at 51 As- hope that their often home- tor Place—nicknamed the Death Star

Left: Queensborough Plaza, oil and spray paint on canvas © Chris DAZE Ellis. Courtesy the artist and P•P•O•W, 28 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 New York City. Right: Pennsylvania Station, 1930s © ClassicStock/akg-images/H. Armstrong Roberts by local residents—may well be the hundreds of millions in public for sure what the fnal public subsidy single worst act of vandalism in New funding—though the chicanery here is fgures will be. The project includes at York since the original Pennsylvania so involved that no one can even say least $100 million forfeited when the Station was torn down more than fifty years before, a looming wall that effective- ly obliterates what was one of the oldest and most vital public places in New York. Cooper Union may be the most egregious defacer of its own neighborhood, but it’s far from the only one. New York University has torn down much of the his- toric West Village, including most of what was the land- mark Provincetown Play- house and a home that Ed- gar Allan Poe once lived in. (NYU partially re-created the facade¸ of the Poe house. Quoth the raven: Fuck you.) Columbia University used (and abused) the power of eminent domain to kick out residents and small businesses at the western end of 125th Street, and is now stuffing that street with the huge, glassy, dreadful buildings of its new Manhattanville cam- pus, courtesy of its own international vandal, sor- ry, starchitect, Renzo Piano. This has become an ac- cepted way of proceeding in New York, even for subsi- dized institutions that are supposed to serve a public purpose. Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards, in down- town Brooklyn, was sold to the public in an elaborate bait-and-switch scheme as part of a spectacular “urban utopia” complex to be de- signed by Frank Gehry. It ended up instead as an are- na with all the charm of your basic bus terminal, home to an unwanted bas- ketball team owned by a Russian oligarch. But then, as with any major New York development today, some form of deception is requi- site. The Atlantic Yards scam was bankrolled with

Photographs by Isaac Diggs and Edward Hillel. Above: View west to the Hudson River from elevated 1 train, 2008, from their book 125th: Time in Harlem, published by IDEH. Below: A Columbia University expansion rises on the same block of 125th Street, 2014 REPORT 29 MTA, which has a subterranean train- Baltimore, and Oakland, California, federal, state, and local government marshaling yard there, sold its lucrative willingly shelling out hundreds of subsidies totaling $1.2 billion. None- aboveground rights to the site to the millions apiece to retain or attract theless, the Yankees reduced the developer Forest City Ratner, which major-league franchises. But New number of seats available to the gen- was the low bidder for them. Hundreds York has taken the practice to sty- eral public by more than 9,000 so of local residents have already been gian depths. The two major-league that the team could make room for relocated, and before the whole cha- stadiums opened in 2009 were far thirty-seven additional luxury suites rade is over, thousands more may be from the frst or the only large public in its ballpark. displaced from their homes, dozens of subsidies the city has given to the It was much the same with the longtime neighborhood businesses will Yankees and the Mets. New York Mets’ new park, out in Flushing’s Wil- have been shuttered, and community had already spent more than lets Point, which hoovered up leaders will have been shamefully com- $100 million building free minor- $614 million in public subsidies but promised with emoluments ranging league parks for both teams’ farm nonetheless reduced the new ball- from a luxury-box giveaway to an on- clubs, in Staten Island and Coney park’s seating capacity from 57,354 to site basketball arena “meditation room.” Island, respectively. The current a mere 41,800 in order to increase its But in a brilliant piece of political leg- Yankee Stadium, erected on the site luxury suites from forty-fve to ffty- erdemain, no elected offcial was forced of what had been two beloved public four. But here the new stadium was to actually vote for the project. parks, cost $2.3 billion, according to intended only as the anchor of a grand Sports stadiums long ago became journalist Neil deMause, making it plan by Michael Bloomberg to trans- a preferred method of legalized graft one of the most expensive stadiums form the entire area around it—one in America, with even such strug- ever built anywhere in the world. terminus of an axis of redevelopment gling cities as Cleveland, Detroit, Construction was helped along with set to run across the entire width of

30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 Photograph of Willets Point, Queens, by Thomas Prior © The artist the city, on a scale that only Robert nate Manhattan have in recent years corporations, while a seven-story shop- Moses might have attempted. jumped the East River. The f rst one, ping mall will include a Neiman Marcus Willets Point, once the site of a mon- a 658-foot Citicorp office building, department store, the likes of Dior and umental municipal dump, the “valley of arrived in Long Island City in 1989. Chanel on the upper f oors, and what ashes” in The Great Gatsby, had evolved For years it stood alone, an awkward they call a “Fifth Avenue mix” of shops into a happy jumble of some 250 small sentinel among the neighborhood’s such as H&M, Zara, and Sephora on the industrial shops, most of them special- eclectic mix of row houses, auto shops, lower f oors. (There will also be “seven izing in auto parts and repairs in an area and manufacturers. As many of those destination restaurants.”) known as the Iron Triangle. There they businesses moved out for parts of the had thrived and prospered for more globe that don’t pay a living wage, hings I liked about that old than eighty years, despite the city’s re- their emptying factory f oors and ware- New York, now vanished? fusal to build them sidewalks, paved houses were at least replaced by droves T My neighbors. roads, or even sewers. Once the Mets of art, movie, and television studios. Most of them are gone or going now, had their new park, though, Bloomberg Then, in 1997, came the f rst residen- after decades in the same visibly slouch- pushed through a $3 billion develop- tial towers, the forty-two-story City- ing, century-old apartment house ment plan, with the Iron Triangle to lights residence, followed nine years where I live. In the apartment below become Willets West, mostly a gigantic later by the f ve apartment buildings of ours, from the day I moved in back in shopping mall with 200 stores and what the East Coast LIC complex. By 2015, 1980 with three friends from college, was planned to be 1.7 million square the land rush was on. Twenty-nine new was Mercedes, an immigrant from the feet of retail space, surrounded by 5,500 buildings were added last year alone, Dominican Republic, with her extend- market-rate and affordable apartments according to New York magazine, with ed family of three generations. When and other amenities. at least twenty-eight more “on tap” for her mother, Anna, a sunny, religious, To facilitate this process, writes the 2018–2020. The tallest building of all and unfailingly kind woman, began to impassioned social advocate Jeremiah was announced last November, a decline with the years, Mercedes tend- Moss in his wrathful howl Vanishing $3 billion project with a luxury condo ed to her devotedly at home, bringing New York: How a Great City Lost Its towering 700 feet high. a hospital bed into their living room. Soul, $1 billion worth of public land Yet even this level of development is But their rent-controlled apartment was transferred, gratis, to two develop- dwarfed by what is going on at the west- was in Anna’s name, and when she ers, including Sterling Equities, con- ern anchor of Bloomberg’s great cross- died, Mercedes and her husband could trolled by Mets owner Fred Wilpon and town axis. Hudson Yards, now ap- no longer afford even the stabilized rent his brother-in-law, Saul Katz. The proaching completion, is a project of and decided to move back to the Do- whole scheme was ultimately blocked staggering size, encompassing some minican Republic. After all those years, in court—it’s illegal to give away public sixty blocks along Manhattan’s West they were just gone, almost overnight. land in New York State without a spe- Side—“the largest private real estate Across the hall from me was Ray- cif c act of the legislature—but the Iron development in the history of the Unit- mond, a self-destructive but amiable Triangle was gone, its shops intimi- ed States and the largest development drunk who fell completely apart when dated into closing by the threat of in New York City since Rockefeller Cen- his mother died. He could not keep up eminent domain, and then demolished ter,” boasts its primary developer, Re- the rent, or himself, and was f nally by the city.2 lated Companies. Its immense glass evicted and then banned from the Queens had long remained un- skyscrapers are overwhelming. From block after several loud arguments with scathed by development on this scale. some angles, they look like battling the super. He came back anyway and More than anyplace else in New York, Transformers; from other perspectives, lay down in the middle of the street one the borough retains some of the f avor they seem, aptly enough, more like the afternoon—a small Irish-Latino man, of what the city was like in the Seven- smokestacks of an impossibly large in his perpetual baseball cap and scrag- ties, minus the crime and the decay. steamship, about to shove off from the gly beard, insisting in his gravelly, Almost one in every two residents is rest of the city altogether. whiskey-soaked voice that they should foreign-born, creating wonderful ethnic The projected f gures are numbing, just go ahead and run him over. Artie mixes in nearly all of its low-lying resi- almost too big to digest. By the time it’s and James, our constant eyes on the dential and industrial neighborhoods. f nished, Hudson Yards will encompass street, who spend much of their time But this cityscape is changing, too. at least sixteen major buildings, with sitting out on the stoop trying to con- Much like the Martian spaceships 18 million square feet of commercial and vince me that the Mets are a major- from The War of the Worlds in both residential space, 1 million square feet of league ball team, waved off the traff c appearance and annihilating intent, retail and “mixed-use space,” a public and persuaded him to get up out of the the glass skyscrapers that now domi- school, at least one major hotel, and a street. Forgiven by the super, Raymond 2 A more human-size new plan, including f ve-acre public plaza. The ninety-two- now comes back to sit on the stoop 1,100 apartments for low-income New story tower at 30 Hudson will, the devel- with his old friends, a living ghost Yorkers, has since been announced by opers say, boast the f rst open-air obser- haunting the block where he was born. Mayor de Blasio, which is a welcome development—but still not one that will vation deck in New York higher than We have been almost a parody of resurrect hundreds of bulldozed family that on the Empire State Building. Its multiculturalism on our little street. businesses. tenants will include a host of major Black and white, Hispanic and Asian;

REPORT 31 straight, gay, and transgender; families went. Over on Amsterdam, between moved into the neighborhood. Then of all kinds—extended, adopted, ar- 97th and 98th Streets, was a whole row it was bought and restored by a ranged by convenience or design. Prot- of enterprises: an excellent f sh store, a repertory-cinema impresario, Dan estant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, pet shop, a Mexican restaurant named Talbot, who renamed it the Metro, Buddhist. I would come home and see for Frida Kahlo, and a laundromat we burnished and restored its elegant the daughters of our Sikh mailman, used to call the St. Launder Center, Art Deco interior, and started show- before they grew up, playing baseball in thanks to how part of its name had ing old movies and then f rst- and the halls. In the evening, I sat at my been torn out of its awning. Then second-run releases. desk in a little space, in this building they were all gone, too, without warn- The Metro was shuttered in 2005. cubbyholed with other little spaces ing. Soon after, I ran into Shirley, (Talbot died late last year, just a month and held together by what was once doughty little Asian abbess of the St. before another of his marvelous recla- described as “a hundred years of spit Launder Center. She said the land- mations, Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, an and dust,” and felt as though I were lord had upped the rent from a hefty Upper West Side institution and still poised over the center of the world. $7,000 a month to $21,000, which is extremely popular, was shuttered for Beneath me I could hear a hive of a hell of a lot of laundry. who-knows-what real estate fast shuf- dinnertime conversations carried on On the corner of 98th and Broadway f e.) Already struggling, the Metro was in half a dozen languages, smell cook- is the shell of what was once RCI, an all but enveloped by an outsized con- ing that came from all over the world, independent appliance store founded in struction project, the Ariel East and hear someone ringing a gong and re- 1934 as Radio Clinic. It was one of the Ariel West, two more multimillion- peating a Buddhist chant. oldest surviving businesses on the Upper dollar condo giants built directly It is through all these interactions, West Side. RCI’s proprietor, Leon Rubin, across Broadway from each other. Ris- multiplied a million times, that a truly left the Pale of Russia after his father was ing to thirty-seven and thirty-one sto- great city is made. The street life—the murdered there during the civil war that ries respectively, they are related in warrens of little shops and businesses followed the revolution, when Leon was size and style to nothing else in the that once sustained our neighborhood just twelve years old. In his shop, he used neighborhood. Their existence was in the sort of “exuberant diversity” that to sit in the front window in a white enabled by the fact that St. Michael’s, Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite for doctor’s smock, pretending to “operate” a charming Episcopal church on the a successful city—is being eradicated as on malfunctioning radios. RCI was corner of 99th Street and Amsterdam well: the botanica on 96th Street that passed down to Leon’s son, Alan, and Avenue, sold its air rights to develop- Susan, my sister-in-law, always visited changed with the times, stocking up on ers. In New York today, survival for to buy her healing herbs when she was appliances and electronics of all sorts. any older, underpatronized institution in town; the Indian spice shop next to Alan’s daughter, Jen, would demonstrate often involves cannibalizing the it, with the protective elephant-headed primitive Atari games in the same win- neighborhood it has pledged to serve. idol of Ganesh mounted outside. dow where her grandfather had f ddled The Metro never reopened. Its gor- These stores, like so many others in with radios. “This was his family’s busi- geous marquee and purple-and-white my neighborhood, have not been re- ness, and my dad wasn’t budging,” Jen terra-cotta tile work depicting the f g- placed. They are simply . . . gone. In an Rubin would recall, in a book she’s writ- ures of comedy and tragedy had been informal survey of Broadway, from ten about the family business. landmarked, but there was no such 93rd Street to 103rd, I recently count- RCI survived being looted and protection for the interior. The devel- ed twenty-four vacant storefronts— vandalized during the blackout riot- opers ripped it all out, gutted it too many of them very large spaces, ing in the summer of 1977, but it quickly for anyone to object. It has enough to account for roughly one couldn’t withstand today’s Manhat- remained empty and moldering for third of the street frontage. Nearly all tan rents. The little shop lost its lease thirteen years now, the letters of its of them have been empty now for in 2014, the business chased off after name and other parts of the facade¸ left months or even years. eighty years in the neighborhood. to slowly drop off, piece by piece, until Almost everything of use has gone. Today, more than three years later, its there will be nothing left to landmark. There was Oppenheimer Meats, a storefront remains empty. Like so Online neighborhood news sites con- butcher shop whose founder had re- many other abandoned spaces along stantly pass on rumors about what the portedly f ed Nazi Germany and, I was Broadway, its doorway has become a Metro is likely to become, but nothing told, brought his business down to our refuge for the homeless and the men- has materialized. neighborhood from Washington tally ill, supposedly purged from our “I was really hoping for another Heights sometime in the Forties. A city streets. bank or chain drug store, or a combi- large, imposing man with a bristling A couple of blocks up Broadway nation bank/chain drug store,” read mustache, he would strut behind his from RCI was the old Metro Theater, one reply to the latest conjecture. counter like a Prussian f eld marshal, originally the Midtown, an aging art but he hired people of every color from house that dated back to 1933 and hese are the choices we are left the neighborhood and left them to run survived long enough to become one with now. If a movie theater the shop when he retired. Then, a few of the oldest cinemas operating in Tyou can duck into in the mid- years ago, according to its new owner, New York. It had fallen on hard times dle of the day was one of the small rap- Oppenheimer’s rent was tripled. Out it and was showing pornos when I f rst tures of the modern urban landscape, all

32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 Opposite page: Photographs of empty storefronts on Broadway, May 2018, by Elizabeth Bick

walk in, there is always the sound of classical music on the radio, and the smell of something very ele- mental and raw, leather and pol- ish, the scent of a real place serv- ing a real purpose. It is almost the only store around that sells anything of use anymore. There are a few small hardware shops left still, some dry cleaners, a large grocery store, and a couple of bodegas. But otherwise, Jane Jacobs’s “intricate ballet” of the streets is being rapidly eradi- cated by a predatory monoculture. Everywhere, that which is univer- sal and uniform prevails. Chain stores, of a type once unknown in New York, now abound. On those same ten blocks of my neighbor- hood where so many stores have been emptied out, I count three pharmacies, six bank branches, seven nail-and-beauty salons, three Starbucks, two Dunkin’ Do- nuts and three 7-Elevens, five phone-and-cable stores, four eye- wear shops. The coming growth industry seems to be in urgent care facilities, of which there are al- ready two, to serve our ridiculous- ly underinsured population. This is not an anomaly; the problem is pervasive. There are so many empty shops now that the issue has even begun to slip out from under the offcial doc- trine that the city has never been better than it is now. In true samizdat style, an informal but growing network of dissi- dent government offcials, jour- nalists, angry and frustrated pri- vate citizens, and even real estate developers began to force the problem into 2017’s general- ly somnolent municipal elec- tions. Last June, the office of Manhattan borough president around us were the same sorts of exis- We worry now in my neighborhood Gale Brewer found 188 vacant store- tential conveniences. Those corner that the cobbler’s shop across Broadway fronts along Broadway from Battery bakeries with the string-wrapped boxes will be the next store priced out of busi- Park to Inwood—this on a main where you could get a respectable layer ness. The proprietor proudly displays commercial avenue in an incredibly cake on the way to someone’s dinner calendar photos of erupting volcanoes wealthy city, in the eighth year of an party. A kosher butcher where you from his native Ecuador in his shop- economic expansion. could pick up the lamb shank you real- windows alongside pictures of his Saddest of all is the planned demo- ized you forgot just minutes before the grandchildren at their confrmations. lition of the Essex Street Market. It family was due for Passover dinner. His grandson used to store his toys and was one of several indoor markets built Decent Chinese food for a Friday night coloring books in the boxes under the by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1940, at home in front of the television. unused shoeshine chairs. When you back when the city endeavored to

34 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 Photographs of scaffolding (this page) and chain stores (opposite page) on Broadway by Elizabeth Bick serve its people instead of just weed them out if they didn’t make enough money. Built to house the myriad Jewish pushcart vendors of the chazzer mark, the legendary outdoor marketplace along Hester Street, it provided them with a safe, sanitary place to peddle their wares, protected from the elements and criminal shakedowns. Over the years, it came to house a wonderfully di- verse collection of food stands, shops, and miniature restaurants, representing many of New York’s different cultures. But it is sched- uled to be razed before this year is out, its vendors grudgingly relo- cated to Essex Crossing—another gigantically ugly “mixed-use devel- opment” going up on a wide stretch of land across Delancey Street, a space that had been kept vacant for decades as part of a corrupt political deal to keep more non-whites out of the neighbor- hood. And so we have come full circle, from a city that tried to help along its poor and embattled striv- ers to one that would rather keep the land barren until only the very richest are available.

he great threat to the New York of the Sixties and TSeventies—and many other cities in the Northeast and Midwest—was considered to be the food of largely unskilled, un- educated African Americans from the South and Hispanics from the islands. “Stop the Puer- to Ricans and the rural blacks from living in the city . . . reverse the role of the city. . . . It can no longer be the place of opportu- nity,” the racist apparatchik Rog- er Starr implored back in the day. “Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and be gentrifiers. But the “peasants” 14 million square feet of off ce space— turning him into an industrial worker. poured in just as the hopeful and the the size of the entire downtown of a Now there are no industrial jobs. Why desperate had always come, though metropolis such as Kansas City or not keep him a peasant?” 3 they encountered, for the f rst time in Pittsburgh—was built in New York This sentiment was articulated, over New York’s history, a city that no longer every year from 1967 to 1970, as Ric and over again, by many of the would- had many entry-level industrial jobs to Burns and James Sanders noted in their offer them. The result was perverse, a history of the city. 3 When he said this, and before he was New York that was home to more than In the success story that New York is rewarded for his outspoken racism with endless magazine assignments and book a million welfare recipients and fea- considered today, the situation is just as contracts, Roger Starr was New York’s tured almost full employment for every- perverse: the rents are driving people housing commissioner. one else; a city where 7 million to and commerce away, but some of the

REPORT 35 tallest residential towers ever built sit New York has always attracted the needs and businesses. They contributed all but empty. The cause is once again wealthy and predatory, dating back at to the city through their building and a food of outsiders, though this time least to our most famous pirate, Captain philanthropy—Rockefeller Center, they are not poor but among the richest Kidd. Coming here was seen as a sort of Carnegie Hall, the Morgan Library, people in the world. They have already arrival, for individuals and businesses and the Frick Collection, to name just proved themselves more destructive to alike. Long a “headquarters town,” as a few examples. the health of the city than the least- early as 1901 New York was home to The new rich infesting the city, by skilled poor, and their depredations will sixty-nine of the nation’s two hundred contrast, are barely here. They keep a do incalculably more damage to New largest corporations. Their owners lined low profle, often for good reason, and York over the decades and even the Fifth Avenue with their fairy-tale rarely stick around. They manufac- centuries ahead. mansions—some of them later con- ture nothing and run nothing, for the In the brutally Darwinian world of verted into museums or elegant stores— most part, but live off fortunes either the poor, they usually got jobs, started or flled luxury apartment houses such made by or purloined from other families, became useful and productive as the Dakota. They hired the most people—sometimes from entire na- citizens, or failed and were pushed renowned architects to erect gigantic tions. The New Yorker noted in 2016 back out of New York—back home or advertisements for their transformative, that there is now a huge swath of to another place—or ended up incar- world-conquering enterprises, including Midtown Manhattan, from Fifth Av- cerated or even dead. The rich, many of the most memorable structures enue to Park Avenue, from 49th though, are with us always, and now ever built in the city: Grand Central Street to 70th Street, where almost for the frst time as a purely rapacious Terminal; the Chrysler, Woolworth, one apartment in three sits empty for force, consuming the city’s most valu- Empire State, and Seagram buildings, at least ten months a year. New York able assets and contributing almost among others. Noxious as the old rob- today is not at home. Instead, it has nothing in return. “If we could get ber barons could be, they at least joined London and Hong Kong as every billionaire around the world to dropped vast amounts of money into one of the most desirable cities in the move here, it would be a godsend,” the local economy in the form of prop- world for “land banking,” where Bloomberg, the city’s billionaire may- erty taxes and purchases in elite shops. wealthy individuals from all over the or, said in a moment of typical frank- They employed people in droves— planet scoop up prime real estate to ness back in 2013. But these are not small armies of domestics, vendors, and hold as an investment, a pied-à-terre, your grandfather’s billionaires. workers at all levels—to service their a bolt-hole, a strongbox.

36 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 Construction on 57th Street, Billionaires’ Row, by Fred R. Conrad For most of a decade now, like lava League, the Russian Tea Room; the gor- the highest towers may knife a mile fowing inexorably from some deadly geous little gem of a bookstore that was into the park on the winter solstice. volcano, the residences of the superrich Rizzoli’s, already a refugee from its old When the journalist Warren St. have moved east from the Time War- stand on Fifth Avenue; the marvelous John protested against these towers ner Center to create Billionaires’ Row, ramble of Coliseum Books. A steamship that block the sun and literally leave the array of buildings on 57th Street company offce, where my wife and I children shivering in the park, he and several adjoining streets and ave- once booked a trip to Europe. A diverse pointed out that the highest supertall nues that is already dominating much array of movie houses, including, once apartments—when they are occupied of the Manhattan skyline. These “su- upon a time, the Bombay Cinema, New at all—house maybe a few hundred pertall” skyscrapers are defned as build- York’s only Hindi-language theater. people, as opposed to the 40 million in- ings taller than 984 feet: One57, at 157 Countless little restaurants, churches, dividuals who use Central Park every West 57th Street (1,004 feet); 432 Park coffee shops, art-supply stores, studios, year. But this seems to be the calcula- Avenue (1,396 feet). Well on their way and galleries. High culture and little tion on which New York now operates. to being built: 53 West 53rd Street hideaways, together they made up a (1,050 feet), 111 West 57th Street (1,428 stretch of Manhattan at its most allur- ven for those who can afford feet), and 217 West 57th Street (1,550 ing, a boulevard that was at one and the the new New York, it is unclear feet). Finished or not, many of the same time touristy and tony, a place to Ehow much they actually like it apartments were—at frst—snapped up browse and to slip inside, both European or maintain any ability to shape it to as soon as they went on the market. and unmistakably New York. their tastes. What is the point, after The Times used to tick off their record- Now the Steinway showroom has all, of paying a fortune to live in a city setting sales in its Sunday real estate been banished to 43rd and 6th. The that is more and more like everywhere section, down to the absurdly exact Coliseum was chased away and died. else? New York is now jammed with dollar and cent: one recent lower-end Rizzoli’s lived to sell books another day, some 62 million tourists every year, example, $47,782,186.53! Nor are the but its irreplaceable store and entire focking to Disneyfed Broadway that records these sales set likely to remain building were demolished. The Art Stu- is a pathetic imitation of what it once for long. A triplex at the forthcoming dents League, where many of America’s was. At the same time, its favorite 220 Central Park South will reportedly fnest visual artists learned and taught, nooks and crannies are being annihi- be sold for $200 million, and a four-story and which proved a refuge for countless lated, even the more upscale ones. Bill apartment at the same address is priced more feeing Europe in the Thirties and Moyers, a longtime local resident, re- to move at $250 million. These would Forties, was bound up like a kidnapped ports the same fate for all of his fami- be the largest home sales ever recorded heiress in protective scaffolding, while ly’s favorite neighborhood eateries, in- anywhere in the United States. the Nordstrom Tower at 225 West 57th cluding Scaletta’s, on West 77th Who spends this sort of money for Street was allowed to build a cantile- Street. Moyers expects “something an apartment? The buyers are listed as vered segment over it, hanging there like upscale and fancy” to replace it, but, hedge fund managers, foreign and do- a permanent sword of Damocles. he laments, “today’s prices can only mestic; Russian oligarchs; Chinese ap- The superexpensive apartments guarantee something worse.” parel and airline magnates. And in- along Billionaires’ Row will include not Perhaps because they have done so creasingly, to use a repeated Times only many of the priciest domiciles ever much to annihilate the New York term, a “mystery buyer,” often shielded purchased in the United States but also around them, every luxury of the new by a limited liability company. the highest places anyone has ever lived buildings is designed to pull its residents This is not the benevolent “gentrif- in this country, more than eighty and inward, away from the rest of us—the cation” that Michael Bloomberg ninety stories in the air. Super tall, they very antithesis of urban life. This is an- seemed to have had in mind but some- are also super skinny, like 1,500-foot other way in which the rich and their thing more in the tradition of the king’s embodiments of the rich themselves. real estate brokers have made essential hunting preserves, from which local The Steinway Tower—minus changes to the nature of New York. peasants were banned even if they were Steinway—at 111 West 57th Street The latest and greatest condo ame- starving and the king was far away. Or, even has an 800-ton “tuned mass damp- nities now include an “adult tree to use a more urgent analogy, these er” at the top of its 1,428-foot height, to house” and a “sumac meander.” The areas are now the dead zones of New keep it from moving so much in the “grand-scale residences” at 70 Vestry York, much like the growing oxygen- wind that it will nauseate its residents. Street, in TriBeCa, entice with “warm- depleted dead zones of our oceans and Together, these buildings perch hued Beaumaniere limestone quarried lakes, polluted with pesticide runoff over Central Park like a row of gi- from the banks of the Seine River in and deadly algae blooms. gantic predatory birds. There are France” (not to be confused with the Already, Billionaires’ Row has throt- now so many of the supertalls gath- Seine River in Dumont, New Jersey). tled what used to be one of the more ered so closely together that they The duplex penthouse at 50 United eclectic and delightful avenues in Man- threaten to leave the lower sections Nations Plaza “comes with its own hattan. Along with Carnegie Hall, 57th of Central Park, the only true archi- infinity-edge pool” (judging by the Street boasted the graceful Art Deco tectural marvel to be seen here, in proliferation of pools and billiards Fuller Building, Steinway Hall, with its shadow for much of the year. One rooms, the average luxury condo own- piano showroom; the Art Students simulation found that the shadows of er in Manhattan is a combination of

REPORT 37 Esther Williams and Minnesota Fats); other “focal points” include “the 10,000-pound handcrafted stainless steel staircase,” in case you have a hankering to drive your Sherman tank up and down the steps. “Private outdoor space” is the true goal, and never have so many buildings been construct- ed in such an insular fashion in New York. Want a drink or a meal, a swim or a game of pool at the end of the day, a yoga class or a good book? There’s no need to step out into the city. Some- thing to do with the kids? Don’t worry, there’s no reason for them to go outside, either. All the best new buildings offer playrooms; the “grand-scale” 70 Vestry adds an “art area, climbing structure, ball pit, slide, magnetic wall and faux farmers’ market.” The emphasis on privacy is constantly stressed. There is no need to expose even one’s automo- bile to the prying eyes of the hoi polloi. My favorite fringe beneft, a luxury that has been steadily gaining favor not only in New York but also in such other favor- ite hangouts of the superrich as Miami and Singapore, according to the Wall Street Journal, is “en suite parking.” Over in Chelsea, 200 Eleventh Avenue was offering a separate elevator for your car, which could be taken directly up to your foor, with “no senses of fumes, or sound, and it can burn for three-to-four hours before it imposes any risk on the building.” New York’s great buildings used to be chockablock with bea- cons, crowns, ornamentation, friezes, the wonderfully gaudy, gold-frosted ery bit as much to the people and the and statues, pointing the way to the American Radiator Building, intrigu- city that it lords itself over. future. We did not always like what ing enough to become a major paint- Hudson Yards, meanwhile, features they were selling, but they made a ing by Georgia O’Keeffe. the $455 million Shed, formerly the public argument; for example, the By contrast, Rafael Viñoly’s new su- Culture Shed, no twenty-frst-century Chrysler Building, with its brilliant pertall 1,396-foot-high residential tower Carnegie Hall but a six-story perfor- Art Deco diadem and silver hood- at 432 Park Avenue, which is taller than mance and exhibition space that is ornament gargoyles; the Woolworth the Empire State Building (excluding its supposed to lend some cultural dimen- Building “cathedral of commerce,” antenna-cum-zeppelin mooring) and sion to the vast development. The lead- with its terra-cotta tiling, glittering now dominates the Manhattan skyline ing feature of its design is its “retract- mosaic and stained glass, and mag- from many viewpoints, was inspired able outer shell” made up mostly of nifcent carvings; Grand Central Ter- by . . . a designer trash can, according to highly durable plastic; planned events minal, with its paeans to the history its architect. It comes from nothing and include “Fashion Week, TED Talks, of transportation, celestial map, and nowhere, just an extension of an empty, and concerts”—a virtual compendium statue of a glowering Vanderbilt; even overpriced receptacle, and it means ev- of the banal and pretentious.

38 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 What actually happened was that the design of the new subway stations was outsourced to assort- ed stars of the modern art world, most of whom not one New York- er in ten thousand would likely recognize by name or achieve- ment. One of them, Chuck Close, f lled his station with mosaic por- traits of “New York artists who have formed Mr. Close’s wide circle,” which includes Lou Reed and Kara Walker along with Ce- cily Brown, Philip Glass, Alex Katz, several younger artists he favored, and two self-portraits. The artist Vik Muniz did Close one better, providing three dozen images of various friends, relatives, and cultural celebrities dressed up, reported the Times, like “normal people,” including “the restaura- teur Daniel Boulud holding a bag with a f sh tail sticking out; the designer, actor, and man-about- town Waris Ahluwalia”; and Mr. Muniz himself, “in a Rockwell- esque scene of him tripping, spill- ing papers from his briefcase,” as well as his son, dressed “in a tiger suit, like a Times Square mascot on lunch break.” Isn’t it marvel- ous? The artists are depicting themselves and their celebrity friends imitating us, waiting for a train and doing all the perfectly ordinary things that we ordinary people do! It is one thing to replace some of the more offensive monuments and messages from the past, quite another to simply blank out ev- erything with the generic and the tragically hip. Our buildings and our public art today are not a cor- Next to the Shed, in Hudson Yards’ subway that New York f nally managed rective but the easy disengagement of Public Square, will be Vessel, the devel- to produce last year, after nearly a cen- the developer. The void in our art re- opment’s $200 million interactive, ar- tury of effort, are devoid of anything f ects the sensory deprivation of our tistic centerpiece. This is a f fteen-story connecting them to the city that has neighborhoods, where the complex collection of 154 connected staircases, awaited them for so long. In his fervent and varied city has also been wiped which thousands of visitors can climb celebration of what is, in the life of the out. Once the iconography of New at the same time, continually passing city, a minuscule accomplishment, York honored ideas, enterprises, one another. Not even its developer is Governor Cuomo praised the design of achievers, and heroes, but today’s pub- able to take it seriously. Related Com- the broad, bland new stations to the lic spaces speak a secret language of panies chairman Stephen Ross jok- New York Times as “a public space the cool and knowing, an inside joke ingly called it “the social climber.” where community can gather and that is lost on the rest of us. The It must be admitted that in the new where culture and shared civic values things we have lost will never be found city, the values of our public authorities are celebrated,” and, at a news confer- again, and the new things we have seem just as misplaced. Those three ence, predicted that “this is just the received are literally empty and spiri- new stations of the Second Avenue beginning of a new period of rebirth.” tually devoid of meaning.

Hudson Yards, by Fred R. Conrad REPORT 39 hat are you going to do into building in these newly rezoned hot ceilings, nailing up plywood over doors, about it?” Boss Tweed, the spots: article 421-a of the property tax locking tenants out and getting them “Wcorrupt sachem of Tam- code. This has been the leading means arrested, and, in one instance, even many Hall, allegedly sneered when by which New York has built new hous- bearing false witness to get a tenant confronted about the nineteenth- ing since 1971, when the federal gov- committed, temporarily, to a psych century New York that he and his ernment largely dropped out of the ward. The neighborhoods themselves confederates so ruthlessly plundered. business. It works like this: developers look much improved; it’s just the people What are we going to do about a New get massive tax breaks on new build- that were lost. York that is, right now, being plun- ings for up to thirty-fve years as long dered not only of its treasure but also as they rent 25 to 30 percent of the n my part of the forest, thank of its heart, and soul, and purpose? units in said buildings below market goodness, the process is (a little) Bill de Blasio, our current mayor and rates. The developers are taxed only at Imore civilized, a sort of soft, run- previously an obscure local politician, what the property—often a vacant ning eviction. The large rental com- was first elected in 2013, running lot—was valued at to begin with, ex- pany that now owns every building on against Republican Joe Lhota, a long- cluding all the value their new building my side of the block (and much of the time state and city bureaucrat under the adds to the property. next block as well) brought in crews of old regime and its ethos of development No one could ever accuse this provi- what obviously seemed to be undocu- first, now, and always. Lhota ran a sion of discouraging new building. But mented workers to repoint the brick- scorched-earth campaign, warning in recent years, 421-a has become most work, and thus drive up the rent for all New Yorkers in commercial after com- famous for leading landlords to add of us by a couple of hundred dollars mercial that a vote for some fuzzy lib- separate “poor doors” for their less each month. Working out on precari- eral like De Blasio meant regression, wealthy tenants, as Extell announced it ous scaffolding in winter weather, meant going back to the bad old days of would do for its new tower at 40 River- these men were forbidden to talk to us, runaway crime, bankruptcy, and disor- side Boulevard, on the Upper West Side even when we tried to offer them wa- der. When all the votes were counted, of Manhattan. (One is tempted to ask ter. As the older families move out, Lhota had lost by nearly 50 points. if the front entrance will be known as more crews descend on their apart- Vowing to be the mayor of “the other the “ghost door” for all those foreign ments, tearing them apart, right down New York,” De Blasio announced his investors who never show up.) to the brick, in storms of noise and intention to go after the threat looming The greater problem, as Michael dust that go on for months. over so many voters: the cost of living Greenberg spelled out in his New York They cut through electrical cables here. The new mayor promised to “build Review of Books analysis, is that by its and crash through ceilings and walls or preserve” 200,000 affordable rental very defnition new housing that is 25 too. An overly zealous smash that shat- units over the next ten years, something to 30 percent “affordable” still means tered our bathroom ceiling, in the that sounded like a good start. huge numbers of high-cost new rentals. workers’ rush to get things done, led to Of those 200,000 units, it developed, It is, in other words, mass gentrifcation that room being redone for the frst 120,000 were to be “preserved,” mostly locked in for many years to come, while time in thirty years. What we got was by negotiating with landlords to reha- the city is further starved of tax dollars the same “deluxe” treatment that the bilitate buildings that had fallen into needed to maintain and improve its new tenants receive: cheap linoleum extreme disrepair or were seized by the public services. tile made to look as close as possible to city for back taxes. Crucial as this sort The 421-a tax break is an anachro- actual ceramic, cheap wooden shelving, of work is, it only stanched the bleeding. nistic tool left over from the Seventies, and furnishings built to last a fortnight. The remaining 80,000 new units of af- when both landlords and the middle All to lure the next tenants into ac- fordable housing would start to material- class were abandoning the city in cepting three times what my wife and ize with De Blasio rezoning fifteen droves. Nothing could be further from I now pay. And there are rumors that neighborhoods for higher-density habi- the case today, and the recent evi- next our perfectly adequate lobbies will tation. The Bloomberg Administration dence is abundant that continuing to be soon be “redone,” which will no had taken another approach, rezoning use it is a counterproductive strategy, doubt raise our rents more. more than a third of the city but more one that is subsidizing the wealthy I like my new neighbors. They’re often “downzoning” neighborhoods to while diminishing the amount of afford- terrifc people, just like the old ones, limit housing capacity and preserve able housing available. and drawn from nearly as many differ- their “character.” Unsurprisingly, the Not so coincidentally, as Greenberg ent places. Better educated, usually, downzoned neighborhoods tended to be reports, landlords have redoubled their with better jobs, but just as friendly and whiter and more well-off than those efforts—often illegal—to bribe or in- helpful. They tend to be younger, with that were upzoned, but ultimately a net timidate their less aff uent tenants into younger families, and it’s nice to hear of 15,000 buildings and 170,000 housing moving out. Some of the more egregious and see so many kids in the building units were added during Bloomberg’s examples he cites are in Brooklyn: land- again. On the surface, this would seem three terms. This approach, as well, did lords cutting off heat and hot water, to be what New York—and America— absolutely nothing to contain rents. inviting belligerent homeless men to is all about: everyone moving on up Worse still was the other tool that De defecate and hold drug parties in the another rung on the socioeconomic Blasio would use to coax the developers halls, not fxing collapsing walls and ladder, the city flling again with the

40 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 cities all over the country. It is the same thing for commercial spaces. Rath- er than drop their rent demands even now, land- lords are often simply switching to short-term tenancies, better known as pop-ups. As Dennis Lynch detailed in The Real Deal, the real estate industry magazine, this can mean “experiential activation” renters “look- ing to penetrate a confer- ence or event crowd— occupy a space for four days out of a month,” on average. Or a “brand launch” that might last six weeks. Or a “target market launch” that averages three months. Anything from a day to a year, with the landlords reportedly enjoying the fact that such temporary clients don’t require a long lease and are very easy to evict if anything goes wrong. Between 2010 and 2014, Lynch writes, the rents in sixteen Manhat- tan retail corridors tracked by CBRE Group, the self-described largest commercial real estate services and investment frm in the world,

skyrocketed by a whopping 89.1 percent while total re- tail sales for the borough grew by only 31.9 percent, creating what the commer- cial brokerage firm called “an unsustainable situation next extraordinary group of people who We are becoming a city of transients. for some tenants as rents surpassed will cherish and enhance it. Already, there are at least two apart- what their sales growth could support.” But I try not to get too attached, for ments in my building operating as I know that their time here is limited. Airbnbs, an increasingly popular prac- What’s more, this price gouging It couldn’t help but be, paying as much tice in many New York buildings; the continued even as vacancies multi- as $5,000 a month, as they do, to only question is whether they are being plied, a supposed impossibility under squeeze growing families into 700 run by the tenants or by the landlord. classical capitalist economics. The square feet. They are transient, here The potential safety or comfort of the better business got, the more stores only for a few years at most, until the rest of us, now living with night-to- went under and were abandoned. The next child or the next job—until they night tenants who could be anybody, is more storefronts went vacant, the can buy a place of their own, or the not their concern. higher rents kept going. home company in France or California The very idea of permanence is In some of the swankier districts decides to stop subsidizing such outra- anathema to our landlords, just as it of Manhattan, this can lead to the geous rents. is to most employers in this city and in likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Kanye

Photographs by Isaac Diggs and Edward Hillel. Above: Impromptu Michael Jackson memorial on a barricade next to the Apollo Theater, 2009, from 125th: Time in Harlem. Below: A Red Lobster opening on the same lot, 2014 REPORT 41

West, or Tommy Hilfiger “popping When it comes to the retailers, others of other good legislative f xes, comes up up.” In less glamorous neighbor- have dared to suggest reinstituting com- against New York’s dysfunctional politi- hoods, such as my own, it’s more mercial rent control. David Dinkins cal system. Because of archaic rules de- likely to mean the headquarters of a even made that idea part of his winning signed mostly to suppress Tweed’s Tam- political campaign, or the ubiquitous mayoral platform back in 1989, many Hall and other long-vanished Halloween costume stores that open though—as happens with so many win- political machines, the city’s ability to now in mid-September. But wherever ning Democratic Party campaign alter its own rental and tax laws is large- and whatever they are, the lesson is promises—once he was elected, Dinkins ly subject to approval from Albany, with quickly made it clear that predictable results. As Greenberg re- he had no intention of ported, state legislators from outside the seriously pursuing any city—many of them Republicans—are such popular measure. routinely given enormous contributions Unbeknownst to most from developers, and subsequently New Yorkers today—so thwart pro-tenant bills of any sort; from thoroughly has even the 2000 to 2016, city developers poured rumor of it been stomped $83 million into legislative races, “more out—the city did have than any other economic group.” commercial rent control The prevailing idea that we now live for eighteen years, from in the best of all possible New Yorks 1945 to 1963. This was the remains a powerful one. A rationaliza- most widely prosperous tion, perhaps, to compensate for the time in New York’s histo- frustration we experience living in a ry, and an era that many system that no one really likes but that New Yorkers still remem- we feel helpless to alter. In a recent ber as the city’s golden history-memoir titled St. Marks Is Dead, age. How much that was the journalist Ada Calhoun laid on because of commercial another such coat of Pangloss with her rent control is probably entertaining narrative of one of New unquantif able, but obvi- York’s most fabled streets and neighbor- ously it didn’t hurt. hoods. She concedes that the apart- Another good idea ment she grew up in now would cost would be to restrain our- $5,000 a month but insists, the same: everything is temporary. selves. For some sixty-f ve years, from The whole idea of a permanent com- 1942 to 2007, New York co-ops were Who understands the soul of any munity is fading away. forbidden from gleaning more than place? Who deserves to be here? Who 20 percent of their building revenues is the interloper and who the interloped-upon? Who can say which o what are we going to do about from storefront rents, under the IRS’s drunk NYU student stumbling down it? so-called 80/20 rule. Co-ops, then St. Marks Place will wind up writing S Some practical reforms might more collectivist enterprises, were the next classic novel or making the start with ending 421-a and other sub- originally encouraged as a way by next great album? sidies for wealthy developers, thereby which working- and middle-class ten- bringing the city tens of billions of ants could save buildings for them- Well, it will have to be a drunk NYU additional tax dollars over the next selves that had been neglected or aban- student who can afford $5,000 a month few years and eliminating a major in- doned by landlords. In time, though, in rent. What Calhoun and the other centive for those who would build they became one more preserve of the adamant Pollyannas refuse to under- primarily for the rich. With that mon- wealthy, and in December 2007 their stand is that a bar is one thing, a dance ey, or at least some percentage of it, lobbyists managed to get Congress to hall is one thing, and even a Gap or a New York City could then build its repeal the 80/20 rule and let co-ops Starbucks is one thing, but a bank own affordable housing—affordable for charge stores whatever they wanted. branch is another. It is a carpet and a actual working-class people—without Since then, New York homeowners machine from which one extracts mon- worrying about support from the fed- have been able to join the ranks of the ey, then leaves. No one is writing a eral government or 80 percent of the biggest landlords, running longtime novel or an album about it. Those apartments going to more of the rich, small businesses out of their stores with things that we do not value, that we do absent or otherwise. And, as Greenberg extortionate rent increases while re- not actively protect, fade away and die. suggests, an additional, dedicated half ducing or eliminating their own I used to hang out on St. Marks cent in sales tax, say—akin to how Los monthly maintenance fees and other Place, back when Calhoun was a girl. I Angeles taxed itself recently to expand assessments. In other words, we have was seeing a dancer from Waycross, its mass transit system—could provide met the landlords, and they are us. Georgia, and we would go drink a permanent funding source to build Actually instituting these reforms, seventy-f ve-cent shots at the Holiday and rehabilitate housing. though, or pushing through any number Cocktail Lounge, and talk with old

Previous spread: Central Park South and Billionaires’ Row, by Fred R. Conrad 44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 This page and opposite page: Photographs from the NYC Newsstands series, by Nei Valente © The artist Ukrainian men about the great middle- These numbers declined slowly at owned, government-subsidized mega- weights they had seen fght, and watch frst, then more rapidly, with about half development is sustainable. Already, the punks out from the dance clubs of the old manufacturing base gone by there are indications that the whole play pool. Afterward, we would go back the Seventies. Deindustrialization con- gimcrack structure is starting to give to her place in Brooklyn, where she tinued rapidly in the Eighties, until way. Before the end of last summer, The turned me on to the joys of homemade today there are estimated to be fewer Real Deal was reporting a signifcant curry and Patti Smith’s Horses album, than 80,000 manufacturing jobs, in softening of the Manhattan condo among other delights. Walking back 6,000 companies. Some of the last and market, with inventory up a hefty from her place to Manhattan one day, most integral parts of the city’s work- 35 percent from the year before. in the midst of a transit strike, I crossed ing culture are now fnally fading away With many of their buildings still the Manhattan Bridge with a couple of altogether. The Meatpacking District just half-full or less, even after the winos, with whom I stopped to watch is a euphemism for drunken club- initial rush to buy into them, develop- the sun set over the Statue of Liberty, hopping and shopping. The Garment ers are scrambling now, trying to en- a moment I will remember for the rest District, caught between Madison courage brokers with higher commis- of my life. Square Garden and the Hudson Yards sions; offering to pay for buyers’ closing I did not believe that I was living in excrescence, is dissolving into still costs, storage units, and parking spac- a utopia, or through the only possible more trendy bars and restaurants. The es; and shaving as much as 10 percent iteration of St. Marks Place or New rag trade, so instrumental in shaping off the prices. The Madison Square York City. But I defy anyone to have the very nature of New York, has Park Tower, an eighty-three-unit con- that experience in a bank branch, no been steadily pulled overseas for years. do at 45 East 22nd Street, was offering, matter how drunk they are. The same thing has happened to the The Real Deal reports, “to throw in makers of clothing throughout Amer- two studio apartments and two park- ities are all about loss. I get ica. The advent of container ships ing spots for any buyer willing to shell that. Intrinsically dynamic, would have spelled the end of New out $48 million for the building’s Ccities have to change, or they York’s hundreds of miles of working 7,000-square foot penthouse.” end up like Venice, preserved in am- waterfront and the tens of thousands This weakness has even begun to ber for the tourists. New York City, of jobs it provided no matter how spread to Billionaires’ Row. The ma- for all its might, is no more immune much the city tried to keep them. For jority investor at 111 West 57th Street to economic sea changes than any- a generation, the piers rotted down to claimed in court that the building is place else—maybe less so. the pilings, while the waterfront crum- facing a $100 million shortfall. All It could be said that New York bled into a drugs and sex bazaar. those sumac meanders don’t grow on has been gentrifying ever since a Things change, people go. Favorite trees. Extell’s One57 suffered the Row’s lack of space started to push its doz- stores and bars close. ens of shipbuilding yards off the East The owner of that deli Side and over to Greenpoint in the you love gets tired of years just before the Civil War. Many carving cold cuts all day other industries followed, rarely to and decides to retire to the city’s disadvantage, unless you Florida. So what? pine for the open-air rendering The trouble lies not in plants and stockyards that also pro- the inexorable fact that liferated along the Manhattan wa- cities change but in our terfront. Just, I suppose, as residents failure to deal with that. of Pittsburgh or Detroit don’t miss Since the Seventies, all the choking haze at noon that that our urban leaders, meant “prosperity” back in the day. in New York and else- New Yorkers, over time, made just where, Democratic as about anything and everything, from well as Republican, have chemicals to bread, metal parts to been able to come up chocolates, furniture to crates for with is one scheme after shipping fne art, toys, and clothes of another to invite the every description. Moreover, as the rich in. busiest harbor in the world for most The prevailing cri- of a century, it moved things. These tique of American cities industries were constantly in flux, from the right, dating and by the end of World War II, as back to the Sixties, was the only great world city that re- that our existing social mained unbloodied and unbowed, welfare state was unsustainable. The frst two foreclosures in 2017, including New York still had more than a mil- question haunting our urban success a possibly record-setting $50.9 million lion manufacturing jobs, more than stories today is whether the prevailing foreclosure on a condo contracted by any other city on the planet. conservative addiction to privately one of its “mystery buyers.” (The New

REPORT 45 York Post later identifed him as a Ni- itself in which we barely notice as our placed were left vacant, to let in air and gerian oil tycoon.) Extell even failed fellow human beings are picked off by light and provide room for children’s to rent out thirty-eight lower-floor the monsters living among us. playgrounds and places where their par- units at One57, opting instead to list A little-noticed but quietly magnif- ents could sit and talk. The buildings them for sale at a discounted price. cent exhibition at Hunter College’s were small, and they, too, were no The danger of a city economy based Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute utopia—though they remain much- on little more than these oversized piles this past year, “The New Deal in New sought-after homes to this day. By 1941, of Jenga blocks should be obvious. The York City”—part of the nationwide according to the exhibit, a total of nine Real Deal demurred from trying to quan- Living New Deal history project—put such projects had been built in New tify just what the outstanding—and the on display a vision for another way of York, with 11,570 units, and more than soon-to-be outstanding—debt is on life, a way of life that Mayor La Guardia 500 of these developments had gone up New York condos, but claimed, “It’s un- was instrumental in building. The ex- around the United States. doubtedly in the billions.” hibit featured images of the frst public Unlike so much later public hous- housing in the United States, built by ing, they were not envisioned or de- ore disturbing than any po- New York City from 1935 to 1937 with signed as projects simply to store the tential fscal or physical col- funds provided by the federal Works poor but as integral parts of a new Mlapse, though, is the moral Progress Administration and Public community. Their residents could collapse that New York has suffered. Works Administration. take advantage of any number of “Too often, life in New York is merely These projects—the First Houses, other government-funded commu- a squalid succession of days, whereas Ten Eyck (now Williamsburg) Hous- nity projects all around them, from in fact it can be a great, living, thrill- es, and Harlem River Houses—were beautiful new swimming pools to ing adventure,” Fiorello La Guardia built on a human scale, just four to fve refurbished—and free—schools and told New Yorkers during his 1933 may- stories high. At First Houses, the spaces colleges. They could find work re- oral campaign. Today, life in New York formerly occupied by one out of every building their own city’s infrastruc- too often seems like a sci-f version of three of the rotting tenements they re- ture or writing guidebooks to New

46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JULY 2018 “Doña Teresa, Williamsburg Houses,” May 2018, by Samuel James York. They could attend plays and asserted matter-of-factly at the open- ers and eccentrics as well as visionaries concerts of all sorts. ing of the appropriately named First and billionaires; a place of school- Their buildings and the public in- Houses. “That is a departure for us, teachers and garbagemen and janitors, stitutions around them were adorned but other governments have done it. or people who wear buttons reading is by murals, painted not by art-scene Low-cost housing must go on in the it fascism yet?—as one woman in my stars imitating them but by artists who United States.” Getting back to neighborhood has for decades, even as lived among them and depicted the these frst principles, to a city and a she grows steadily grayer and more histories of their place and their own society that are committed to pro- stooped. A city of people who sell lives. This, again, was not utopia. viding a decent life for all its citizens, books on the street—and in their own Marion Greenwood, painting her mu- is the only way we can regain “the shops. A city of street photographers, rals for the Red Hook Houses, groused great, living, thrilling adventure” and immigrant vendors, and bus driv- about how she had to endure the crit- that La Guardia envisioned. ers with attitudes, and even driven icisms of both bureaucrats and tenants New York has been—and should businessmen and hedge fund opera- regarding her work, both classes of be—a city of ambition and content- tors. All helped to get along a little people she felt had a much lower ap- ment. Of the getting-there and the better, out of gratitude for all that they preciation of art than the Mexican got, with plenty of room carved out for do to keep everything running, and to peasants she had formerly worked those whose desires do not include keep New York remarkable. with. But this was America, too—and that deluxe apartment in the sky but Instead, our leaders seem hopelessly especially New York. simply making a living and raising a invested in importing a race of super- “I hope the day is dawning when family by doing something useful, or men for the supercity, living high private capital will devote itself to not doing anything especially useful above the clouds. Jetting about the better and cheaper housing, but we at all but existing, living, appreciating world so swiftly and silently, they are know that the government will have the vast urban swirl around them. barely visible. A city of glass houses to continue to build for the low- Yes, the rich will be with us always. where no one’s ever home. A city of income groups,” Eleanor Roosevelt But New York should be a city of work- tourists. An empty city. Q

“Doña Teresa’s La Mano Poderosa shrine, Williamsburg Houses,” by Samuel James REPORT 47