This is New York too. While strolling in the Lower East Side on Orchard Street on Saturday night, I happened upon this doorway. It had the edge department well covered: graffiti, garbage, poorly lit, a bare fluorescent bulb, heavy duty roll gates with padlocks and a sign warning of rodents and rodenticides fastened with duct tape. See closeup here.Does this affect desirability of the neighborhood? Not at all. Of course, real estate prices will not be quite as high as, say, an apartment on the Gold Coast - 5th Avenue in the 70s with Central Park views. There is a large demographic that would prefer the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side, SoHo, Tribeca or the Upper West Side, for a time.
There's certainly no debating the fact the the Lower East Side and the East Village are two of the most exciting neighborhoods in the city with the widest range of restaurants, bars, theaters, and music clubs. And I am sure most residents are content to live out their entire lives there. Unless big money is at hand or added to the equation. Then, for many, the residence becomes a passing fancy, fad, a toy to be discarded or a place one has outgrown, followed by a move uptown or out of town. The charms of duct tape and rodenticide give way to those of the Dakota, Beresford or San Remo. And edge is only a taxi or limo ride away.
Take the Silk Building, e.g., above the former Tower Records at 4th Street and Broadway. The penthouse apartment has been a revolving door for the affluent - it has seen Keith Richards, Cher, Britney Spears. There are a handful of extraordinary buildings downtown like the Police Building and many of the well-heeled do remain downtown, but they are few. Once a image statement has been made, most leave. After all, this really is a neighborhood that caters more to the young and restless than the established and rested.
Money is like an unguent and when applied liberally, it usually is absorbed readily with predictable effects. It doesn't appear that one has to rub the salve that hard or long to take off most edges :)
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5 comments:
Lovely to visit, but not an appealing doorway to call home. Great insights today. Edges are tiresome; rough or otherwise - often outgrown, though if not then probably not outlived.
~Chuck
NYC is great for teaching you to see the beauty in the unconventional, even the chaotic and ordinarily repulsive, as I think you demonstrate by having made a good photo out of an pretty unprepossessing visual cue.
Nowadays we see the beauty in lots of places we didn't before (such as the looks of Keith Richards for one, he is the human equivalent of this doorway, in many ways)...
hello brian sorry to ask you a non 'your~blog' specific question, BUT the queens daily photographer hasn't posted in over a year. i wrote to them as i am moving to queens with all my rabbits and was looking forward to seeing the posts from there. they did not write back. i'm assuming it's over for them. how would i go about becoming the queens representative photographer?
thank you for any info you may have on this,
"alice"
I bet people pay at least $1500 (if not more) to live inside that building.
I actually saw that photo and did a little "awwww..." and felt all warm inside. Because it reminds me of the place I used to know for so many years and be able to afford to live in.
I am originally from Detroit and that place looks like many I've seen in the motorcity--except in DEEtroit these buidlings are completely trashed and unhabitable. Really third world. This is New York charm at its best.
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