Manhattan Real Estate Explained, In Just One Street

★ Rain fell in the dark, sleepy morning. It took a sudden wash of sun, and the project of looking for rainbows, to pry the slumbrous three-year-old out of his bunk. The air outside had cooled off but was still uncomfortable and thick. The rain started again and stopped again. A few fresh drops were on the pavement on the way to the elementary-school pickup. Before the class got out, the rain was coming down so hard it was necessary to retreat to the scaffold over the driveway. Water was dripping steadily from the roof of the far-right-hand elevator, the air conditioner overwhelmed by the sogginess. When it was time to run out to get milk before dinner, the radar map said there was no shower, but a light rain was coming down anyway. There was nothing autumnal in the sweltering gray, but there was in the haste with which the daylight failed.

“I would love to crop it short on the sides, keep the top a bit long. I think we’d really need to move him away from that weird orange color. Maybe give him some highlights — not so he’ll have highlights, but just to transition him to his natural color. Gray, or whatever. It’d be like restoring an old building. I think that would help a lot…. I don’t really want to help him, though.”

— Luke, Soon Beauty Lab, Fort Greene

“If he’s a man, and wants to show he is a true leader, he would make it shorter. Take out the piece and walk like a businessman. Trim it close and keep it natural. Don’t try to cover it up.”

— Albert, L’Mosh Aliz Unisex Salon, Upper East Side

“Every inch of Manhattan real estate is in play, even the once-sacred co-ops,” said Adam Leitman Bailey, a lawyer who represents Mr. Selbert. Mr. Bailey, who won a temporary injunction to stop the collapse, or legal dismantling, of Mr. Selbert’s co-op, said he has a dozen clients in similar situations and that the number of cases he is getting has skyrocketed in the past 18 months.

The buildings most at risk of being caught in the cross hairs are in popular neighborhoods, have unused air rights or lucrative retail spaces on the ground floor and have just a handful of apartments. But buying three-quarters of the shares is no easy feat even in the smallest of co-ops. Multiple shareholders must be convinced to sell, which can lead to infighting and lawsuits among neighbors.

God help you if you live in a building with untapped air rights in a neighborhood that people would like to move to.

Photo of unrelated apartment buildings by Jeffrey Zeldman

“This was the last period in American culture when the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow still pertained, when writers and painters and theater people still wanted to be (or were willing to be) ‘martyrs to art.’ This was the last moment when a novelist or poet might withdraw a book that had already been accepted for publication and continue to fiddle with it for the next two or three years. This was the last time when a New York poet was reluctant to introduce to his arty friends someone who was a Hollywood film director, for fear the movies would be considered too low-status.”
—I swear to God, forty years from now someone who is currently in her 20s will be crafting a special Snapchat Review of Emoji visual essay about how the mid-teens in New York was the last time the listicle-makers still had their proper place as the age’s arbiters of cultural capital. Anyway, if you can stand to read one more thing about New York in the ’70s—an era now as distant from our own as World War II was from then—this Edmund White piece at least has the advantage of relative brevity to recommend it. #

Pure Bathing Culture’s “Pray For Rain” may be the best song I’ve heard all year. This… is not that, but if you can get past the lyrics you’ve got some very catchy synth-pop going on and sometimes that’s really all you need. Particularly, say, on a seasonable Friday with the weekend in your sights. Oh, what a coincidence: that’s where we are right now. Enjoy.

[No stars] Why, the three-year-old wanted to know, were the lights outside still on? The gloomy gathered clouds were doing the most they could, but didn’t have the numbers to sustain it, now and then letting through a little thinnish light. Regardless of the dimness, though, it was already hot on the long new walk to the pre-K, and the walk cutting back to Columbus Circle. The sun had found its way out, and the climate control on the subway train failed to take off the resulting layer of sweat. Water cascaded from air conditioners to the sidewalks, the overladen air dropping its burden at the first opportunity. A localized darkness covered Fifth Avenue in the afternoon. A few raindrops appeared on lumber on top of a scaffold; an umbrella went up. Nothing conclusive happened. The air conditioning at home was shut off, in advance of the announced mosquito spraying. Just past lights out, a rubbery smell seeped into the stuffy bedroom, where the covers had been kicked away. It strengthened for a while, and then either faded out or became olfactory background. Later, dreams under a tangled sheet were interrupted by wet-tire sounds from the avenue, the presumed pesticide treatment presumably being washed off by the rain.

Manhattan’s 14th Street is never a pleasant place to be, but there are few streets that one can comfortably walk from end to end on a hot, late summer afternoon whereupon the full blossoming of capital is more radiantly displayed. There is an idea of New York, and especially of Manhattan, as a place where the wealthy and the less wealthy (and even the not-at-all wealthy!) live in close proximity, even adjacent, to each other, and that this arrangement produces ambition in the latter to attain what the former has, and some amount of respect for the humanity of the latter in the former. This is not just incidental to life here, the thinking goes, but integral to it: Everyone, or almost everyone, suffers the city together.

At least as far as most pedestrians are concerned, 14th Street’s westernmost terminus is the High Line, an elevated, linear park built on a disused, mile-and-a-half long section of the West Side Freight Line. There is a set of stairs up to the railroad track a few steps past an enormous Diane von Furstenberg store. Von Furstenberg, a high-end fashion designer, and her billionaire husband, Barry Diller, donated upwards of thirty-five million dollars towards the completion of the High Line. (Von Furstenberg and Diller have also pledged one hundred thirty million dollars to refurbish nearby Pier 54, in the Hudson River.)

The stretch of 14th Street between the High Line and 8th Avenue is heavily oriented towards retail, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the High Line attracts at least five million visitors annually. (A smart investment on Von Furstenberg’s part, then!) But the High Line is a magnet for more than tourists’ money: According to a study conducted by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, before the park’s construction in 2003, the surrounding West Chelsea neighborhood—a mix of residential properties and light industrial businesses—were valued at eight percent below Manhattan’s overall median. In 2005, the city rezoned West Chelsea for luxury development, and, by 2011, residential property values appreciated beyond borough-wide values. “The park, which will eventually snake through more than twenty blocks, is destroying neighborhoods as it grows,” Jeremiah Moss wrote in the New York Times in 2012. “And it’s doing so by design. While the park began as a grass-roots endeavor—albeit a well-heeled one—it quickly became a tool for the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a new, upscale, corporatized stretch along the West Side.” Price per square foot for residential units within five minutes walking distance of the High Line more than doubled in less than a decade.

Welcome to THE UBER EPISODE. We’ve got Jonathan Shainin, editor of Long Reads at The Guardian, Jay Kang, a contributor to NYT Mag, and Matt Buchanan.

The questions: Is Uber the future of everything? Is public transit doomed? Will surge pricing spread… everywhere? Are we all destined to labor forever at the whims of app children??? OR: Is the anti-Uber movement just soft-left polite politics? Haha???

For background, read Matt’s piece on Uber’s “Endgame” and see Travis Kalanick’s response here.

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I spent most of my summer working on a novel, but I turned over the first third of it to my agent at the end of last week and just received a very disappointing response. The feeling is that it is “too fantastical,” that “no one would ever believe it,” that it is “the worst kind of wish-fulfillment outside of slashfic,” and that “all books are terrible but this is especially bad because it’s so over-the-top dreamy that no one could really accept the premise.” I heartily disagree and want to show the powers that be that there is in fact an audience that is hungry for this kind of material, so I am putting a brief excerpt here in hopes that you all will find it pleasing and demand more. All you really need to know about the story, which has the working title of The Year The Internet Ended, is that it opens with our protagonist, a brilliant blogger named Alan Falk—a handsome, sensitive, tortured soul who feels everything too deeply but is irresistible to the ladies—waking up from a seven-month coma that he fell into after being electrocuted by a surge suppressor. He is released from the hospital but finds himself in an unrecognizable world where no one speaks to him or anyone else. In this scene he wanders around New York City trying to understand what has happened.

Apocalypse Shopping List

Lead-lined gonad-guards.
              Lysol (radiation sickness causes killer runs).
Breadboxes, to bury stillbirths.
              Flare guns, glue guns, gun guns.
Marijuana brownies for the burn units.
              Ersatz shrouds (viz., bedsheets, towels, sails).
Triple-earwig-pincer Biohazard labels.
              Fun Size Snickers Not Labeled for Individual Sale
But good to barter in a pinch.
              Amputation pails.
Seeing-eye dogs bunker-kenneled in Kennebunkport, Maine,
              To jog the flash-blind through uranium rain.
Astronaut ice cream for the bedbound.
              Catheters (various calibers).
Lice combs to harvest protein.
              Steri-strips.
Spike strips.
              Benadryl, good for baby’s colic or mommy’s hives.
Teriyaki turkey jerky.
              Paperback copies of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Bullhorns for the water rioters.
              Firehoses for the riot police.
Wooden stakes, because you never know.
              Four-ounce jars of Fleischmann’s yeast.
Gallon jugs of Zen.
              Rabbit traps, for the mice of the future.
Bear traps, for the men.