Upper West Side
Here are some rocks from 87th and Broadway, not far from where I lived way-back-when and boy has it changed.
1989, my first year in New York, set the dubious record for most murders - surpassed the following year at over two thousand. It was generally understood that anything above above 90th was dangerous and newly arrived white kids from Ivy League schools whispered about Harlem's beginning and, presumably, civilisation's end. It is hard to imagine today as Katie's 104th and Amsterdam thrives - I love her Korean veggie where I automatically buy papaya, pineapple and mango and sometimes pomegranate along with remarkably fresh produce.
We go to a fancy Thai on 111th and then there are the diners - not like I knew them with their 24 hour earnesty and working man's toast - no, these places are chic and offer goat-cheese omelets, caramelised onions and Italian sausage. What is surprising about this neighborhood is why it has taken so long?
Columbia U. begins at 114th and is one of the world's most prestigious institutions - it is shocking to think that in 1990 the business school considered re-locating to Westchester. Today, it is expanding to "SoHa" (South of Harlem) or North of 125th Street up to 140th where new students promised a dorm and state-of-the-art facilities. By 1995 and my return for graduate school, gentrification well on the march.
Riverside Drive, always proper, now serviced by upscale Fairway while sushi restaurants popping up left-and-right in Morningside Heights. Harlem now a sweet-spot of rustic brown-stones, compelling Americana, ethnic mixture and affordable. By recently, many of my friends talking about fixer-uppers with multiple floors for only a million dollars (cheap when compared to the same price for a down-scale two-bedroom apartment farther South). Anybody who wants to catch the area's nadir should watch De Niro's "Taxi Driver" whose final bloody shoot-out inside a derelict on 87th and Columbus - Scorcese was afraid of the ceiling collapsing underneath his filming equipment.
For some reason New Yorkers and everybody loves to romanticise the city in the 1970s - its grittiness, grime and deserted spaces somehow a cool backdrop for Popeye Doyle. I think also viewed as a decade of artistic freedom, sex and unity - James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison and all that. Me, I am glad there is no graffiti on the subways and the place as safe as anywhere- safer than London, in fact. I hope we are not going back to those bad-days given the recession which will hit any city harder than average and the Big Apple worse. I have enjoyed dinner-party discussion re NY's wealthful "sterility" somehow being oppressive. Well to them I say: find yourself in the Bronx. I was around in '90 when every day was a killing.
