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Sad Young People Lament The Plight Of Living On The Upper East Side
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 16, 2014
Modified Mar 17, 2014
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 16, 2014
Modified Mar 17, 2014
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In a city which is in the midst of a serious homelessness crisis, we should all be so lucky as to have an apartment with a working toilet and maybe a microwave, an apartment we can afford to live in and fill up with our accumulated stuff. Unless you're dealing with some serious landlord sabotage, you probably don't have any good reason to go complain to a local paper of record about your living situation. Thankfully, that hasn't stopped some sad, financially-stable 20-somethings (we will not use the dreaded M-word, although it is entirely applicable here) from complaining to the NY Times about the hardships they've endured by sacrificing their social lives to reside on the Upper East Side. Because, dear god, no one will visit them.
Despite the fact that the UES is home to the Meatball Shop, a store that only sells frozen food, several highly-regarded museums, the loneliest brownstone in NYC, Dante de Blasio, dolphins, ridiculously low-crime rates and ridiculously clean avenues, some residents can't get past the fact that their friends won't come to their apartment, and all the action is happening on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, because those are the only two places in the city that apparently exist according to this article.
Julie Murray shares an apartment with a friend on 95th Street near First Avenue. The building is respectably maintained, it’s true, and the bathroom is a reasonable size. There’s an elevator, and Ms. Murray, 22, a college senior hoping to work in the fashion industry, has her own room.
Shoot her. Just shoot her now.
“The Upper East Side is very inconvenient for 20-somethings,” Ms. Murray said. “The type of people we want to be with are all downtown.” She therefore conducts her social life in and around Union Square, and either waits an hour for the No. 6 train home in the wee hours of the morning or reluctantly ponies up for a cab.
On those rare occasions when she hangs around her own neighborhood, she feels decidedly out of place. “This is a family area,” Ms. Murray said. “There are a lot of strollers and double strollers, and women use them as weapons. They’re ruthless. They just bulldoze you over. If it weren’t so much money, I’d be living in the East Village or on the Lower East Side.”
There's more:
“I have friends in the East Village who will not come up here,” said Alexandra Perrotta, 27, a recruiter for a law firm who just moved into a studio on 97th Street between Park and Lexington. “I have to go to them.”
And even more!
Arielle Grabel, 27, who works in public relations... has two good friends in the neighborhood, but has been unsuccessful in recruiting others, even if it’s just to come uptown for drinks and dinner.
“They say there’s nothing to do up here,” said Ms. Grabel, who herself prefers the night life downtown. But perhaps her sales pitch needs a bit of work. She tells her friends the Upper East Side isn’t that bad, not that far from the action, and the people aren’t that old.
No, the Upper East Side is not cool. No place where Dorrian's Red Hand is considered an institution and SantaCon is a respected tradition can be cool. All these people knew that before they moved into a one-bedroom apartment that "runs $2,600 to $3,100 a month"—and that is cheaper than the average apartment in Williamsburg (going rate: $3,300). Yes, there are a lot of families with strollers in the neighborhood, just like there are in Park Slope and Cobble Hill and the Upper West Side and lots of other gentrified parts of the city. And you know what the trade-off is for sharing sidewalk space with strollers? You get an elevator in your building. AN ELEVATOR.
Being forced to leave the confines of your neighborhood to socialize with your peers is a GOOD thing. Being lazy and entitled are, surprisingly, not good things—nor is the desire to broadcast your narcissism to the world via The Grey Lady.
Anyway, if you want to see real hardship, try getting your friends to visit your place in Times Square.
Tagged
manhattan
ny times
poor you
rich people
ues
upper east side
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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