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Will Success Spoil Astor Place?
The "tremendous irony" of moving Midtown to the East Village
In 2010, the Cooper Union hosted a forum featuring punk icon Patti Smith in its Great Hall. In the auditorium where Abraham Lincoln launched himself toward the presidency with an anti-slavery oration, Smith advised young people to "find a new city." New York, she said, "has closed itself off to the young and struggling."
If IBM had hoped its new location would give it the aura of a hip startup, Moss wryly notes, the computer colossus is "already a generation too late." Most of the action has shifted to Brooklyn neighborhoods like DUMBO. "There's a vast young population living off the F and L trains," he tells the Voice. "There's so much talent and activity across the river."
Except that Brooklyn has fallen to the same developmental pressures. As pioneering EDM DJ and musician Moby noted in an op-ed last month in the U.K. Guardian, creative types, having been priced out of Manhattan, have long been "moving farther and farther east, with many parts of Brooklyn even becoming too pricey."
Rob Menzer
51 Astor Place
Robert Menzer
9 Bleecker: "Old world charm ready for a new world establishment"?
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IBM's 2,000 new employees may not notice the profound changes. They may well revel in "being part of the other creative companies in the area and that 24/7 vibe" that Paul Glickman, the leasing agent for 51 Astor Place, recently touted to the New York Observer. What they won't find is the same rundown but welcoming city that could nurture a Patti Smith or Dana Beal.
"It's great that they've discovered Lower Manhattan," Moss says of the new tech arrivals. Unlike Berman and Romanoski, however, he believes Astor Place has passed the tipping point. "My feeling is that that area's housing has already been transformed," he says. "They're not going to change the area, because it's already changed dramatically."
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18 comments
in order to make the past tense of the headline realistic, one would have to take a time machine back a decade or so. astor place went to hell years ago.
 It's impossible for such a change to take place and not change any long established culture and its values, no matter what the soundbites and press releases say. For any corporate tenant to claim a neighborhood's longtime "character" as any kind of attraction is completely disingenuous lip service at best, and at worst a conscious effort to "tame" natural localism that thrived without them in the first place. I'll bet it's only a matter of time before the new "locals" fence in the Tony Rosenthal's 'Alamo' sculpture and impose curfews for sitting there. The same way hotdog vendors are being chased out of Washington Square Park because a bunch of self appointed social engineers think they know what's best for everyone (i.e. their own property values and nothing else) Just another battle in the money based "culture war".
it sucks totally that 9 bleecker which was my home for 5 years and the base of operations for the legalization of pot has been hijacked by real estate scum who want to maybe construct a yogurt stand
@cherryandwhite many parts of Brooklyn are too pricey for the average person to live there, these days.
@cherryandwhite Yeah, many parts of downtown have business offices..(mostly up and coming start-ups) and luxury apt buildings. Manhattan &
@cherryandwhite Because he spoke out, someone put graffiti on his old brownstone and a neighbor's in Fort Greene, where he used to live. He
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