The Fall of a Great American City by Kevin Baker

Author:Kevin Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Point Press
Published: 2019-07-16T14:35:59+00:00

Who spends this sort of money for an apartment? The Post described the record-setting buyer at 220 Central Park South as “hedgefunder” Ken Griffin, “a globetrotting house collector who also owns a $58.75 million condo in Chicago; a $60 million penthouse at Faena House in Miami; $250 million worth of land to build a Palm Beach compound and a $122 million London mansion.” Beyond the hedgefunders, other such buyers are reported to be Russian oligarchs, Chinese apparel and airline magnates, and increasingly, to use a Times term, “a mystery buyer,” often shielded by a limited liability company.

In its “Stash Pad” article, New York included a chart of One57 and listed the twenty-five condos that had been bought before it was even completed, cheekily noting that over half of them had been purchased by LLCs, and asking, “Will Anyone Sleep in One57?”

When I first dared to raise objections to what this was doing to our city, I was lambasted for the crime of criticizing “capitalism.” But of course what’s going on in New York is more often an atavistic retreat to some kind of pre-capitalist state, in which the plunderers of markets that are far from free reserve even more wealth for themselves. It is something more in the tradition of the king’s hunting preserves, from which local peasants were banned even if they were starving and the king was far away. Or to use a more urgent analogy, these areas are now the dead zones of New York, much like the growing, oxygen-depleted dead zones of our oceans and lakes, polluted with pesticide runoffs and smothered in runaway algae blooms.

Already, Billionaires’ Row has throttled what used to be one of the more eclectic and delightful avenues in Manhattan. Along with Carnegie Hall, 57th Street boasted the graceful Art Deco Fuller Building; the New Steinway Hall, with its piano showroom; the Art Students League; the Russian Tea Room; the gorgeous little gem of a bookstore that was Rizzoli’s, already a refugee from its old stand on Fifth Avenue; and the marvelous ramble of Coliseum Books. A steamship company travel office, where my wife and I once booked a trip to Europe. A diverse array of movie theatres including, once upon a time, the Bombay Cinema, New York’s only Hindi-language theatre. Countless little restaurants, churches, coffee shops, and art supply stores, studios, and galleries.

High culture and little hideaways: together they made up a stretch of Manhattan at its most alluring, a boulevard that was at one and the same time touristy and toney, a place to browse and to slip inside, both European and unmistakably New York.

Now the Steinway showroom is banished to 43rd Street. The Coliseum was chased away, and died. Rizzoli’s lived to sell books another day but its irreplaceable store, along with its entire building, were demolished. The Art Students League, where many of America’s finest visual artists learned and taught, and which proved a refuge for many more fleeing Europe in the 1930s and ’40s, was bound

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