The War for New York City Is Lost, Declares General

This weekend brought the final post on the blog Lost City. It has, for the last five years, documented what is disappearing in New York. If you have not been a regular reader, the blog will remain, and you may go back through it and remember things and places in New York that you may have forgotten. The final post is worth reading. Its proprietor writes: “I began the blog because I was incensed and alarmed at what the city was becoming. It was losing its grit, its fabric, its very character. It was losing its New York-ness, and gaining nothing but Subway franchises and luxury condos….”

And goes on:

The City continued on its inexorable march to glossy mediocrity. Bloomberg, the billionaire, city planner Amanda Burden, the millionaire, and their cabal of equally wealthy real estate and Wall Street pals forged ahead and got the metropolis they wanted all along: homogenous, anodyne, whitewashed, suburban, toothless, chain-store-ridden, ordinary, exclusive and terribly, terribly expensive. A town for tourists and the upper 2%. He took a world-class capital of culture, individuality and independent endeavor and turned it into the smoothest, first-class, gated community Houston ever saw. Walk down Broadway on the Upper West Side, Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, Third Avenue in Yorkville-or look at the gaping hole of Atlantic Yards-and you will see the administration’s legacy.

(via)