Did you notice the characterizations made by the media about the Lower East Side in the telling of the Tatum O’Neal crack buying story? From ABC: “A police spokesman said she was seen buying a controlled substance from a man in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, once a crime-infested neighborhood that has become trendy.” The AP went with: “O’Neal’s arrest Sunday on charges of buying cocaine in her gritty-chic downtown Manhattan neighborhood suggests her struggle with addiction may not be over.” So which one best describes the LES: “trendy” or “gritty-chic”?
Not only is the neighborhood screwed, but the crappy and outdated apparel shops in the LES are too. The owners can’t figure out why the throngs of younger people are not interested in their “dusty old samples” and irrelevant inventory, although the lady who can guess women’s bra sizes on a whim is doing just fine. You can read the article or listen and watch the multimedia slideshow instead. |NYT|
Photo: Annie Tritt/New York Times
The “rapid development” of the Lower East Side in the form of lot clearing, ugly high rise buildings, has landed the neighborhood on “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” of 2008 according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This could be due to the city’s aggressive permitting for tenement destruction: “Last year, New York City approved permits to raze about a dozen buildings in that district compared with one permit in 2006.” |Bloomberg|
Photo: WiredNewYork
As if one LES wasn’t obnoxious enough, the masters of self deprecation, Vice, have launched a hybrid Second Life-like/MySpace-ish LES world: VLES. If this were really some sort of comical micro site it would make sense, but by the looks of this thing, these dues mean business. So if you can’t be the coolest kid below Houston in real life, go ahead and take a crack at it with your VLES virtual identity.
Second Life LES Launched; No Room for Chrystie St. | Curbed|
VLES |www.vles.com|
While not nearly exciting as finding thousands of pounds of assorted drugs and cash, the media whoring energy drink, Cocaine, has begun infiltrating the LES. We came across this 4 pack at an Allen St. deli just below Houston. We asked the Lotto salesman-energy drink peddler how the new product was selling. He told us it was “doing real well” and that CNN came in to interview him about the red canned canister of excess. Once the clip makes the website’s ‘Pipeline’ we can then insert the obvious drug reference joke.
Graffiti writer LES shows that vandalism can sometimes double as a public service announcement for the good of city residents. With the J and M trains running sporadically on the weekends and the MTA often doing a terrible job of announcing the disruptions, we can only thank this graffiti writer for boldly getting the word out to straphangers.
Editor-in-Chief:
