Amongst all the legitimate crises hitting the city of Chicago these days, I'm reading/hearing the exact same things from local conservatives. People are fleeing the city in droves! They have personal AND secondhand anecdotes to prove it! Sure you—or your cousin's fiancee's brother's friend—sold their condo in the city and moved to the western 'burbs... but that means someone *purchased the condo and is moving in.*
Don't mean to minimize the issues facing Chicago and Illinois, but these "everyone is leaving!" stories are as real as president Don's next pivot.
Agreed! The development creep continues northwards up Milwaukee and west down Belmont, getting closer and closer to my very unfashionable neighborhood. Even here in the Bungalow Belt the rehabs and new construction are continual. Someone's moving in.
"Development creep" is how you can describe Atlanta these days (another city people are supposedly fleeing) also. From Five Points east out Decatur Street/DeKalb Avenue into Decatur, and northwest out Marietta Street/Northside Drive over the 'Hooch into Cobb County. God knows who's buying them.
Ah, memories. I moved from my parents’ home in the Bronx to my 1 bedroom apartment on East 11th between B and C in 1979. The first night in the new place I slept on a futon on the living room floor because the bedroom was full of boxes. I noticed three shafts of light coming through the door from the hallway, landing in three circles on my chest. I got up to investigate and discovered they were bullet holes. I lived there for 10 years and loved every minute of it, even though the bullet holes remained (I covered them with cardboard) for 4 years until the landlord replaced all the doors in the building. I won’t tell you how low the rent was because some of you would never speak to me again, LOL.
My oldest son lives in Prospect-Lefferts and has friends all over Crown Heights, Bushwick, etc. Manhattan is completely out of reach for any of them and will remain that way. Last year I saw a rental advertised for $3000 a month on my old block. It’s going to take a lot of ‘Rona to bring those prices back down again, unfortunately.
7th between C & D is my would-be home. I have an acquaintance there and when he goes away (sometimes for a couple months) I rent his place -- he makes it affordable -- and burn up all my vacation days for the year, some years, just to live in that city. Man.
I grew up right outside it and in the mid-80s in high school, I figured my future was to live in a giant loft with a freight elevator, full of half-finished art projects, in a crap hood like TriBeCa, where I'd throw parties and 100 strangers would show up, and once in a while I'd recognize one as an actor or rock star.
I ended up going to a couple of parties like that in the 90s, but I never had a NYC job that paid me enough to live there. So I slept in NJ most nights but spent all my free time in the city, trying to stretch my spending money in low-cost East Village bars. That area was full of streetwalkers too, and rock clubs where friends' bands played, and every night felt fraught with mystery and promise. For a while instead of going back to NJ, I couch-surfed, living out of a duffel between Mott St, Gramercy Park where a painter friend paid $850 (way beyond me) for cavernous digs with a fireplace, and a few places uptown, Astoria -- wherever I had a friend... then I ended up dating a girl whose dad bought her a place in Hoboken, so that became my base. But I watched Hoboken gentrify at a dizzying pace, and just wanted to go live someplace near Tompkins Square, which would Never Change. In the end, every inch of NYC seemed too expensive... so I quit my job and moved to ultra-cheap (it was!) Los Angeles, figuring I'd seen so many shit movies, I could easily write a better one and return to NYC flush with cash...
Twenty years later that plan has not worked out 100 percent. But it is still, maybe, who knows, the plan. I do feel a bit like a man without a country.
I just started reading Chris Frantz’s book Remain in Love and Jesus, does that take me back. Like Roy says, sometimes I still dream about that era and some of those clubs and dive bars from the old days.
I hear ya, Roy. This stupid trope keeps getting rolled out every so often, and while it may be *slightly* more true this time around, it's still ridiculous. Anyway, my (admittedly extremely fortunate) ass is staying put, and while I completely sympathize with your better half, it would be delightful to have you back in the fold someday!
Regarding your first paragraph and the locale of dreams - mine usually take place in the bedroom suburb I grew up in, so I'm insanely jealous.
Although, my dream the other night where my brother drove down our family's street, hit a hearse, and landed the car on a McMansion's roof was pretty cool.
New York dreams: I once dreamt I was buying a tract from Moondog and he started talking to me and then we wandered over to a park bench somewhere (dreams are so damn indistinct) and he was telling me about his life, which was nothing like his real life, he was in the Merchant Marine and told me I should go to the South Seas and then he was more like Walt Whitman and said I should keep writing poetry.
1. At that rate it will be the 22nd century before New York is empty.
B. I have moved myself across state lines twice, the first time I was 24 and moved to Utah to do my Ph D. I put my small lump of crap in my Chevy Cavalier and drove myself. When I finished my graduate work at 31, I moved to Rapid City, I again put a lump of crap into my Chevy Cavalier and drove. A few months later I flew back and rented a U-haul to get the rest of my lumps of crap. My point is young people moving to the big city aren't going to use United Van Lines, but older people moving out may
About 2 years ago I took a trip to Brooklyn to check out the places I remember from when I was a kid, as I had not been back to the borough in roughly 20 years (plus, I was seeing a concert at the Barclay's Center). I was able to stop in the same bakery that made the cake for my Holy Communion, and while there ordered a loaf of prosciutto bread, which I have never seen anywhere outside of NY. I walked past my old apartment and my old school while munching on my bread, and it was easy to trick myself into a bit of nostalgia.
Then I was visiting a neat little stationery shop (the kind that absolutely did not exist in 1990) and asked the young clerk if she knew of any places to get a good bialy, and she had no idea what I was talking about. That was a good reality check. New York is different now, but it's a city that always changes. The Ramones don't play at CBGB's, kids don't play stickball in the street, immigrants don't come pouring in through Ellis Island, black people don't live in Seneca Village (because it was razed to become Central Park), there are no farms in the Bronx, etc.
Cherish the memories, but don't try to recreate them. The past has passed. The Mets don't play at Shea anymore.
I remember a good friend of mine in Brooklyn telling me the day he realized that the kids on his block, where he'd lived his whole life (we were ~23, in ~'95.) didn't play stickball anymore. We neither of us could grasp it. Our dads played stickball. This kid played it. Why wouldn't kids now? He'd figured he was one link in a long chain, not the last link. It was sad. (It is shocking how much NYC has changed, and how some things are still around but have become the theme-park version of themselves. Prime example being McSorleys, which used to be a goddamn nightmare you could either embrace or avoid, depending on your interest in hanging out in 1895; it's now depressingly clean and welcoming, with smiling bartenders and tourists in polo shirts and their kids running around with the toys they were allowed to bring.)
A lot of New York has been sanitized, for sure, and while it's nice not to get knifed in Times Square, you still need some of that grit. There was a time when New York's theme song wasn't by a pretty young blonde girl named Taylor.
When I was last in town, I was surprised to see Wonderland (the card and toy store) still standing only a few blocks away from where Anthony Faucci grew up. I assumed that Wonderland was a shop that would've been eaten up a long time ago, but I guess that area of Brooklyn is too far away from Manhattan to be attractive for most transplants (or it's simply easier to kick out poor black people from Crown Heights than white people from Dyker Heights, some of whom still have mob connections).
On my last day in the city after 30 years, I went to take a look at Astor Place, where thieves used to sell burgled junk on the sidewalks. The only thing I recognized was the subway station and the cube.
In my travels I've been in a group of islands where all the people on the various islands appear to live substantially the same, with the same traditions and material circumstances. Yet invariably, I'd be talking to locals who would tell me "oh, don't go to that island, the people over there will steal your stuff and cheat you". Later, when I'd travel to that island and talk to the locals there they'd be telling me "oh, you better watch out when you're on that island (where I just came from), they can't be trusted at all and their women show their thighs!!!"
A long time ago the people in these islands would head hunt by raiding their neighboring islands. One of the local chiefs, directly descended from a great chief who took many heads, told me it was just a game. And maybe it was...
It's something in the human animal that makes us this way I guess.
I can't say anything about NYC. But I know about missing a place.
I grew up five miles from the Huntington Beach Pier. I lived near the beach until my mid thirties when my wife and I moved to Irvine because we thought it would be a better place to raise our daughter. Fifteen year later, in the aftermath of the last meltdown and both jobless, my daughter grown up, my wife decamps for Moldova in the Peace Corps. I wanted to be in the Midwest for may parents at the end of their life. An additional benefit was being withing driving distance of my brother. I got a job I loved, my parents got older and then passed away and the job turned to shite. In the meantime, my wife returned to the Southland to care for her parents. My daughter had twin boys. It took my two years to realize that I should be with them as my reasons for Cincinnati no longer were valid.
So, in February, I made the decision to quit my job and move back to HB. Then COVID happened. I quit my job, anyways, took what I could fit in a SUV and came back.
I am happier now then I've been in decades. The place itself brings me joy, apart from my wife, daughter, SIL and beautiful four year old boys who love to play make believe with their BigGuy (what they call me).
I don't know how long my money will last. I am working onemployment. But there is no where I would rather be.
From the Post article, which is entirely about people fleeing New York City:
"More than 16,000 New Yorkers changed their address to Connecticut from March through June, the Hartford Courant reported."
From the Hartford Courant:
More than 16,000 New Yorkers have left the state for suburban Connecticut since March, according to new data from the U.S. Postal Service."
The state≠the city.
You'd also never know it to read these articles but the population of NYC has actually increased by several hundred thousand people over the last decade. What makes almost everything written about trends in NYC total bullshit is that they almost exclusively mean Manhattan, which comprises only about 15% of the population of the whole city. I doubt if they could manufacture a similar bullshit exodus "in droves" from Brooklyn or Queens.
I wonder. Do you think these people enjoy lying for a living?
This is a shameful column, Roy. Don't you realize that a loss of 277 people a day means that New York City will be a moss-overgrown ruin in only 31,000 years? You should be more concerned.
Amongst all the legitimate crises hitting the city of Chicago these days, I'm reading/hearing the exact same things from local conservatives. People are fleeing the city in droves! They have personal AND secondhand anecdotes to prove it! Sure you—or your cousin's fiancee's brother's friend—sold their condo in the city and moved to the western 'burbs... but that means someone *purchased the condo and is moving in.*
Don't mean to minimize the issues facing Chicago and Illinois, but these "everyone is leaving!" stories are as real as president Don's next pivot.
Agreed! The development creep continues northwards up Milwaukee and west down Belmont, getting closer and closer to my very unfashionable neighborhood. Even here in the Bungalow Belt the rehabs and new construction are continual. Someone's moving in.
"Development creep" is how you can describe Atlanta these days (another city people are supposedly fleeing) also. From Five Points east out Decatur Street/DeKalb Avenue into Decatur, and northwest out Marietta Street/Northside Drive over the 'Hooch into Cobb County. God knows who's buying them.
Roy. Come out to play-ayyyy!
Ah, memories. I moved from my parents’ home in the Bronx to my 1 bedroom apartment on East 11th between B and C in 1979. The first night in the new place I slept on a futon on the living room floor because the bedroom was full of boxes. I noticed three shafts of light coming through the door from the hallway, landing in three circles on my chest. I got up to investigate and discovered they were bullet holes. I lived there for 10 years and loved every minute of it, even though the bullet holes remained (I covered them with cardboard) for 4 years until the landlord replaced all the doors in the building. I won’t tell you how low the rent was because some of you would never speak to me again, LOL.
My oldest son lives in Prospect-Lefferts and has friends all over Crown Heights, Bushwick, etc. Manhattan is completely out of reach for any of them and will remain that way. Last year I saw a rental advertised for $3000 a month on my old block. It’s going to take a lot of ‘Rona to bring those prices back down again, unfortunately.
Almost the same here with walk-up and rent. I wonder how many times we passed one another on the street, LOL.
7th between C & D is my would-be home. I have an acquaintance there and when he goes away (sometimes for a couple months) I rent his place -- he makes it affordable -- and burn up all my vacation days for the year, some years, just to live in that city. Man.
I grew up right outside it and in the mid-80s in high school, I figured my future was to live in a giant loft with a freight elevator, full of half-finished art projects, in a crap hood like TriBeCa, where I'd throw parties and 100 strangers would show up, and once in a while I'd recognize one as an actor or rock star.
I ended up going to a couple of parties like that in the 90s, but I never had a NYC job that paid me enough to live there. So I slept in NJ most nights but spent all my free time in the city, trying to stretch my spending money in low-cost East Village bars. That area was full of streetwalkers too, and rock clubs where friends' bands played, and every night felt fraught with mystery and promise. For a while instead of going back to NJ, I couch-surfed, living out of a duffel between Mott St, Gramercy Park where a painter friend paid $850 (way beyond me) for cavernous digs with a fireplace, and a few places uptown, Astoria -- wherever I had a friend... then I ended up dating a girl whose dad bought her a place in Hoboken, so that became my base. But I watched Hoboken gentrify at a dizzying pace, and just wanted to go live someplace near Tompkins Square, which would Never Change. In the end, every inch of NYC seemed too expensive... so I quit my job and moved to ultra-cheap (it was!) Los Angeles, figuring I'd seen so many shit movies, I could easily write a better one and return to NYC flush with cash...
Twenty years later that plan has not worked out 100 percent. But it is still, maybe, who knows, the plan. I do feel a bit like a man without a country.
I just started reading Chris Frantz’s book Remain in Love and Jesus, does that take me back. Like Roy says, sometimes I still dream about that era and some of those clubs and dive bars from the old days.
They like getting paid for it.
Yet where all the people moving out of New York are going isn't to red state hot spots. That's because...?
Red states are already full? Sure NYC has 24,000+ people per square mile; while SD has 11+, but we really hate other people
I hear ya, Roy. This stupid trope keeps getting rolled out every so often, and while it may be *slightly* more true this time around, it's still ridiculous. Anyway, my (admittedly extremely fortunate) ass is staying put, and while I completely sympathize with your better half, it would be delightful to have you back in the fold someday!
Coupled with "suburban women will vote for me 'cause I'll keep the n*****s out". A no-longer-veiled appeal to racism.
Regarding your first paragraph and the locale of dreams - mine usually take place in the bedroom suburb I grew up in, so I'm insanely jealous.
Although, my dream the other night where my brother drove down our family's street, hit a hearse, and landed the car on a McMansion's roof was pretty cool.
Staying in DC with the missus? What you won’t do for love.
https://youtu.be/Gru4IfbKlfU
Fox News et alia are a pretty good stand-in for Satan.
That's what I always figured.
New York dreams: I once dreamt I was buying a tract from Moondog and he started talking to me and then we wandered over to a park bench somewhere (dreams are so damn indistinct) and he was telling me about his life, which was nothing like his real life, he was in the Merchant Marine and told me I should go to the South Seas and then he was more like Walt Whitman and said I should keep writing poetry.
Dreams like that make me envy the psychotic.
1. At that rate it will be the 22nd century before New York is empty.
B. I have moved myself across state lines twice, the first time I was 24 and moved to Utah to do my Ph D. I put my small lump of crap in my Chevy Cavalier and drove myself. When I finished my graduate work at 31, I moved to Rapid City, I again put a lump of crap into my Chevy Cavalier and drove. A few months later I flew back and rented a U-haul to get the rest of my lumps of crap. My point is young people moving to the big city aren't going to use United Van Lines, but older people moving out may
About 2 years ago I took a trip to Brooklyn to check out the places I remember from when I was a kid, as I had not been back to the borough in roughly 20 years (plus, I was seeing a concert at the Barclay's Center). I was able to stop in the same bakery that made the cake for my Holy Communion, and while there ordered a loaf of prosciutto bread, which I have never seen anywhere outside of NY. I walked past my old apartment and my old school while munching on my bread, and it was easy to trick myself into a bit of nostalgia.
Then I was visiting a neat little stationery shop (the kind that absolutely did not exist in 1990) and asked the young clerk if she knew of any places to get a good bialy, and she had no idea what I was talking about. That was a good reality check. New York is different now, but it's a city that always changes. The Ramones don't play at CBGB's, kids don't play stickball in the street, immigrants don't come pouring in through Ellis Island, black people don't live in Seneca Village (because it was razed to become Central Park), there are no farms in the Bronx, etc.
Cherish the memories, but don't try to recreate them. The past has passed. The Mets don't play at Shea anymore.
I remember a good friend of mine in Brooklyn telling me the day he realized that the kids on his block, where he'd lived his whole life (we were ~23, in ~'95.) didn't play stickball anymore. We neither of us could grasp it. Our dads played stickball. This kid played it. Why wouldn't kids now? He'd figured he was one link in a long chain, not the last link. It was sad. (It is shocking how much NYC has changed, and how some things are still around but have become the theme-park version of themselves. Prime example being McSorleys, which used to be a goddamn nightmare you could either embrace or avoid, depending on your interest in hanging out in 1895; it's now depressingly clean and welcoming, with smiling bartenders and tourists in polo shirts and their kids running around with the toys they were allowed to bring.)
A lot of New York has been sanitized, for sure, and while it's nice not to get knifed in Times Square, you still need some of that grit. There was a time when New York's theme song wasn't by a pretty young blonde girl named Taylor.
When I was last in town, I was surprised to see Wonderland (the card and toy store) still standing only a few blocks away from where Anthony Faucci grew up. I assumed that Wonderland was a shop that would've been eaten up a long time ago, but I guess that area of Brooklyn is too far away from Manhattan to be attractive for most transplants (or it's simply easier to kick out poor black people from Crown Heights than white people from Dyker Heights, some of whom still have mob connections).
On my last day in the city after 30 years, I went to take a look at Astor Place, where thieves used to sell burgled junk on the sidewalks. The only thing I recognized was the subway station and the cube.
No one selling old crap on the sidewalk around the cube?
No, just skateboarding tourists.
In my travels I've been in a group of islands where all the people on the various islands appear to live substantially the same, with the same traditions and material circumstances. Yet invariably, I'd be talking to locals who would tell me "oh, don't go to that island, the people over there will steal your stuff and cheat you". Later, when I'd travel to that island and talk to the locals there they'd be telling me "oh, you better watch out when you're on that island (where I just came from), they can't be trusted at all and their women show their thighs!!!"
A long time ago the people in these islands would head hunt by raiding their neighboring islands. One of the local chiefs, directly descended from a great chief who took many heads, told me it was just a game. And maybe it was...
It's something in the human animal that makes us this way I guess.
I can't say anything about NYC. But I know about missing a place.
I grew up five miles from the Huntington Beach Pier. I lived near the beach until my mid thirties when my wife and I moved to Irvine because we thought it would be a better place to raise our daughter. Fifteen year later, in the aftermath of the last meltdown and both jobless, my daughter grown up, my wife decamps for Moldova in the Peace Corps. I wanted to be in the Midwest for may parents at the end of their life. An additional benefit was being withing driving distance of my brother. I got a job I loved, my parents got older and then passed away and the job turned to shite. In the meantime, my wife returned to the Southland to care for her parents. My daughter had twin boys. It took my two years to realize that I should be with them as my reasons for Cincinnati no longer were valid.
So, in February, I made the decision to quit my job and move back to HB. Then COVID happened. I quit my job, anyways, took what I could fit in a SUV and came back.
I am happier now then I've been in decades. The place itself brings me joy, apart from my wife, daughter, SIL and beautiful four year old boys who love to play make believe with their BigGuy (what they call me).
I don't know how long my money will last. I am working onemployment. But there is no where I would rather be.
Oh yeah. California is another place people are 'leaving'. You couldn't tell by the rents.
Jesus. So much lying bullshit.
From the Post article, which is entirely about people fleeing New York City:
"More than 16,000 New Yorkers changed their address to Connecticut from March through June, the Hartford Courant reported."
From the Hartford Courant:
More than 16,000 New Yorkers have left the state for suburban Connecticut since March, according to new data from the U.S. Postal Service."
The state≠the city.
You'd also never know it to read these articles but the population of NYC has actually increased by several hundred thousand people over the last decade. What makes almost everything written about trends in NYC total bullshit is that they almost exclusively mean Manhattan, which comprises only about 15% of the population of the whole city. I doubt if they could manufacture a similar bullshit exodus "in droves" from Brooklyn or Queens.
I wonder. Do you think these people enjoy lying for a living?
This is a shameful column, Roy. Don't you realize that a loss of 277 people a day means that New York City will be a moss-overgrown ruin in only 31,000 years? You should be more concerned.