The Old and the New

I had one of those quintessential New York City experiences last week.

My neighbor down the hall from me died. He died some time on Wednesday and they didn't find the body until Saturday afternoon. They didn't take him out of the apartment until Saturday night, at which point they slapped the notice on the door to the apartment that you see at left.

I was coming out of my apartment just as the cops and the people from the medical examiners office were taking him out of his apartment in a body bag. They literally dragged the corpse along the hallway (the scrape marks are still visible on the floor) and then down the stairs to the gurney that was down on the first floor. Then they managed to heave him up onto the gurney and take him out of the building.

Of course, a lot of my neighbors are speculating as to when the apartment will be rented to someone else (after it's emptied and renovated, of course), and how much the new tenant -- probably some asshole stockbroker -- will pay in rent. It's been said that the average rent on a studio apartment in Manhattan now is something like $2,000 a month, and going on the theory that you need to make 45 times a month's rent in yearly salary, that would mean that only people who make $90,000 a year and up can afford to live in Manhattan. I make considerably less than that, but then I was able to find the last cheap apartment in Manhattan over a decade and a half ago, which means that they'll probably be taking me out of this place in a bag some day.

They're building luxury condos on the Bowery and, according to Time Out New York, the lowest tip of Manhattan is "The New Downtown." The space once occupied by The Second Avenue Deli, with its now almost illegible stars on the sidewalk dedicated to the great performers of the Golden Age of Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue, is now going to be a bank. Bank branches are going up left and right in this neighborhood. Orchard Street is being demolished and high-rise condos are being built where century-old tenements used to be. Tower Records has folded and, not too long ago, Coliseum Books went under as well. Don't get me started on what's happened to 42nd Street.

The city is changing, and I'm not sure it's for the better.

It used to be that you could come to New York, find a cheap apartment in Manhattan and struggle while you tried to make it as an actor or a dancer or a painter or a writer. Not so long ago that was still true. My first Manhattan apartment, which I lived in during the Reagan Administration, cost me $365 a month: now it would probably rent for five or six times that much. I worry sometimes about the kids who come to New York today -- where the hell are they going to live? What are they going to have to do just in order to just pay the rent and survive? What if they find out that no matter what they do they can't afford it? And if Manhattan gets too expensive for anyone under fifty to live in, where are we going to get the actors and painters and writers that are the artistic lifeblood of this city?

I worry about these things, because this is a great city and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. But sometimes it seems like, in ten years, there will only be two kinds of people living in Manhattan: the rich and the homeless. No one else will be able to afford it.

Tom Moran