by Bryan | Feb 11, 2009 | Neighborhood Scenes, Writing New York
I wrote a while back about attempts in the 1820s to gentrify the Bowery. More recently, a couple blogs I follow have charted current efforts to remake the street’s image as a luxury shopping district with a little bit of urban edge. (That shitty Hamptons store...
by Bryan | Jan 30, 2009 | Film
Lots of chatter lately about the economic crisis bringing a return of an older, grittier era. Crime on the rise, city services down, that sort of thing. A couple Sundays ago I saw three shell games going on in a three-block stretch on Broadway … in SoHo! So...
by Bryan | Jan 14, 2009 | Neighborhood Scenes
Apropos of yesterday’s post: I was reading in Wallace and Burrows’s Gotham this morning while doing a little work and came across this passage on a bunch of gentrifiers buying out a dive bar and trying to scrub up the neighborhood:Bowery Village remained...
by Bryan | Dec 18, 2008 | Books, Neighborhood Scenes
Jeremiah Moss at Vanishing New York has a justified rant up about the use of books in promoting luxury lifestyles. Such trends seem of a piece with efforts to market downtown luxury living by appealing to “history” and to a neighborhood’s...
by Bryan | Sep 26, 2008 | Odds and Ends
Now that WaMu’s been seized by the government (before being sold off to JP Morgan) is it too much to ask that we get all our corner 99 cent stores and bodegas back?Photo from an old 1000 Bars post, lamenting the Brooklyn Bank Virus.
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