Saturday, November 10, 2007

Paradoxymoronic quote of the day

"I came into a small inheritance from Grandma Eva, enough to buy an apartment."

From a New York Times article about "reluctantly" living on the Upper East Side in one's 20s.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"For my first few years on 74th Street, I familiarized myself mostly with the crosstown bus stop at 79th. I was dating a West Sider who was allergic to my cat."

Ok - that's the first episose of the pilot for the new tv series about emergence of a real estate neocon

kei said...

"After years of loft and rooftop parties and aggressive quirkiness, I was O.K. with a neighborhood that didn’t scream, 'I’m different!'"

I have to admit I liked this article because of the above quote. In Chicago terms, this is why in many ways I prefer Lincoln Park and its residents to Wicker Park and hipsters. I also don't know much about NYC, but I do remember walking towards the Met and taking pictures of buildings, being initially attracted to them and ultimately disgusted by what it might mean to live there.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Kei: I can see that. There's something ridiculous about areas where it's clear people are paying a ton to seem bohemian.

The main thing that struck me about the article is how rare it is these days for recent college grads to be able to afford to live anywhere in sub-96th-street Manhattan--the stodgy Upper East Side, the hip Lower East Side, certainly the most-expensive-of-all TriBeCa. The uptown-downtown divide is really long-gone at this point, and was already losing way when this woman was choosing a place to live. Everyone, even the most conventional of Ivy grads, now spends his mid-20s either above 96th or in Brooklyn. Choosing the Upper East Side is a way of acknowledging that everything's expensive, so your area might as well be safe and pleasant. That's how I ended up in Park Slope, which is in many respects a safer and slightly more upscale (or maybe just Northeastern) version of Hyde Park, where the best bars are pretty much non-smoking versions of Jimmy's.