New York Is Officially Over

Who says the terrorists haven't won? That's right, MetLife is putting Stuyvesant Town/ Peter Cooper Village on the auction block.

With a target price of nearly $5 billion, the sale would be the biggest deal for a single American property in modern times. It would undoubtedly transform what has been an affordable, leafy redoubt for generations of Manhattan’s middle class: teachers and nurses, firefighters and police officers, office clerks and construction workers.[...]

“It’s really sad,” said Suzanne Wasserman, a historian and filmmaker who has lived in Stuyvesant Town since 1989. “New York has always attracted people who aren’t just interested in money — people interested in culture and poetry and music and dance and those young people who are the creative capital of the city. They aren’t going to have a place here and probably really don’t already. I think it affects everything about city life.”

[... Many said the people who will suffer most will be younger tenants holding out hope of raising children in Manhattan.

I lived in Peter Cooper Village for 3 years, a struggling actress renting a bedroom from a sweet middle aged reclusive guy who had been born in the apartment and wanted nothing more than to work on his dance pieces in the living room and write at the Blimpie every morning. I wonder what will happen to him: or Gertrude, the 75 year old woman living next door who had me carry her groceries and whose one vice was the OTB?