by Kevin Baker
From “Death of a Once Great City”
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine

New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great. [Read more…]

by Aaron Timms
From “The Needles and the Damage Done”
Courtesy of The Baffler

What kinds of people did I expect to find here, in the public garden at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, New York’s tallest residential building? In the days before I arrived in Manhattan to chart a course across the city, I’d studied the plans and websites of the “supertalls,” the new crop of skeletal residential towers rising one thousand feet and more above midtown. The architects’ renderings of these new superstructures were charged with all the clichés of the genre: the plate-glass exteriors knifing skyward, the unobstructed views of the miniature city below, the lobbies at once massive and discreet. The humans were harder to grasp. Artists’ impressions showed the supertalls’ residents-to-be in a variety of unnatural poses: a couple in formal wear touching each other next to a baby grand, a woman alone on a balcony with a dining table set for eight. But it was the passers-by sketched at the periphery who interested me most. Would the people here be like they were there, smudged and passive with the bready limbs of a disaster movie’s sacrificial-crowd-in-waiting? [Read more…]