Intel editor Chris here, dispatching live from my apartment in Stuyvesant Town! (Well, not really. For once I shed my cut-off sweatpants, fed the fish early, and came into the office this morning. But I usually blog from there!) Thought I’d toss in a little first-person blog post to defend my glorious neighborhood after reading a nasty, but admittedly hilarious, post on the blog StuyTown Lux Living. Here’s an excerpt from a comment that appeared on the site last week:
“Stuyvesant Town has sank to a new low. I don’t mind the beer bottles and used condoms in the hallway, hey, it’s New york City, but last night I saw something which shocked even me, a jaded lifetime old New Yorker. I was walking up the stairs to my third floor apartment and I saw an obviously drunken college kid TAKING A SHIT in the stairwell. I did a double take. The clearly inebriated young man just looked at me and said, “Hey when ya gotta go ya gotta go.” Thnaks Tishman-Speyer for bringing such high class tenants into what USED to be a wonderful place to live.”
Okay, I’ll admit, I laughed out loud at this comment. Not because I could relate (pooping publicly, in my book, is something that’s only funny when it happens accidentally and very much by surprise), but because it seemed so ridiculous. While I think the Lux Living blog is amusing at times, occasionally its raging anti–Tishman-Speyer hyperbole is just too much. Sure, I have noisy neighbors. I can even occasionally hear the water bong being employed in the apartment above me, through the floor. And yes, I’ve had the police (well, the complex-hired version that tool around in tiny cars on the sidewalk) called on me after a party or two.
But the thing is, Stuyvesant Town is nice now. All this nostalgia for when it was a set of glorified geriatric dormitories really strikes me as misplaced. I haven’t seen a cockroach there in four years, the laundry rooms are much cleaner and more efficient than they used to be, and frankly, I like the new landscaping, even if the “roses” mysteriously don’t have a scent. I won’t defend Tishman-Speyer for raising rents in a recession and illegally attempting to kick out a lot of rightful rent-controlled tenants. But if cracking down on the ones that shouldn’t be there is the reason there are suddenly so many more attractive bodies sunning in the Oval, that’s fine by me.
In conclusion, sure, if someone pooped in the hallway six years ago, it would be easier to clean up off the gross linoleum floors. But I’d rather have the carpet we have now, thanks.
Comment of the Week [StuyTown Lux Living]
Related: Clash of the Utopias [NYM]
