Circumstance has found me subletting an Upper West Side shoebox this month, and I am quite amazed (and dismayed!) by what seems to be the predominant residential population around here. I am intimately familiar with the unrelenting landed property inflation in the NYC metro area, and in fact foreknowledge of this suggested to me that I would encounter lots of tweedy middle-aged upper-middle-class liberals for which I thought the UWS was notorious. Instead, at all hours -- not just on weekend nights when the bridge and tunnel crowd descends -- the streets are clotted with sorority girl types with tanning booth bronzes, skimpy cocktail dresses, and high heels, and nondescript jocks sporting flip flops and ipods. Needless to say most are white and even fewer appear in their 30's or older, an oversized herd of recent marketing and business admin majors from the likes of Bucknell University. I'm fully aware that this neighborhood ain't the East Village of yesteryear or the Williamsburg of today (pseudo-bohemians are grating anyway), but these folks make the cast of Friends look like tweedy liberals. What the hell is going on here? It's like an otherwordly scene from _They Live_.
The "suburbanization" of NYC (or at least Manhattan) seems to have as much to do with a groundswell from below as it does a chain store invasion from above... I don't even want to leave my tiny apartment because who wants to run the frat house and shopping mall gauntlet?
Maybe it's the just the microclimate of my immediate nine square block area... or perhaps I am just really out of it and I've "discovered" something that has long been obvious.
JG Akita, Japan
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