On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Tom Sobota wrote:
(One of them is, BTW, on my block..., #42 Morton. The others
> are all over the city, from East Village to West End Avenue,
> uptown & down.
> Nice place to live, Judy. Somewhere I found this about Morton St.:
>
> "42: An 1889 building with a charming caryatid. "
Actually it's not nearly as nice as when we moved here 48 years ago. Then
we had neighborhood services, like grocery and fruit and vegetable stores,
a Lamston, hardware & drug stores (in the traditional meaning of the
term). Now it's a tourist mecca, so we have 12 pizza parlors & 30
sidewalk cafes and enough sushi for all of Japan between here and my gym
about 3/4 of a mile away, but at the end of this month we're losing our
last local fruit and vegetable grocery, space to become a "lounge" and
restaurant with ruckus til all hours and on the roof and the smokers
standing and hollering under your window til 4 AM.
That's not to mention the real estate taxes for all this specialness -- or
that with Times Square Disneyfied and "cleaned up" that stuff didn't
self-destruct, but arrives to the wild west of us every night. (Want some
transvestite hookers? We have enough to spare.)
On the bright side, many streets (including ours) are landmarked, so the
nice caryatid won't fall to the wrecking ball anytime soon, and there's a
limit of 7 stories for building so if I can figure out the details I can
put solar panels on the roof -- which gets full sun when there is any --
tho needless to say, well connected or sly builders seek to evade, and the
community now rising up may just stop -- Julian Schnabel planning 13
stories in a 5 story zone, & NYU, the-evil-Lord-Moldevort of the Village,
planning I think it's 19 stories in a lowrise area, on East 12th or
thereabouts.
And a VERY interesting battle now in Brooklyn... as Forest City Ratner
invokes eminent domain to clear out a neighborhood and build stadiums, et
al in park Slope. Met one of the leaders of the neighborhood fighting back
at Yang's opening in fact... She says they'll win, and .... WOW ! A
watershed moment, like landmarking the Village in the 1960s (the first
city district, as I recall -- led by Jane Jacobs... but that's another
long story, though not at all off topic, since it's about photography).
Meanwhile, of course, the bastards are everywhere.
And anyone who possibly can should see John Yang's show. It is delicious.
J.
Received on Sat Dec 3 01:09:14 2005
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