Times Square has essentially become a garishly lit Omaha-on-the Hudson what with its Red Lobsters and Applebees and ESPN Zones. SoHo is repeatedly bemoaned as being nothing more than an outdoor mall. Alphabet City has become a trust-fund haven and there are glass condos and trendy bars going up on the Bowery (THE BOWERY!!!).

Is there any place left in Manhattan that wasn't completely sanitized by Pope Giuliani? Are there any neighborhoods where you can still see eccentrics on the street and maybe catch a wiff of danger that, in my opinion, is vital to the life of a city? Or has the whole city been turned into a vertical suburb?

Not in Manhattan.

White eccentrics, starving artists, true bohemians, are pretty much gone out of the city as a whole. The Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, which was the 90s artist's safety valve, has been choked up with people working in the "media industry." Fringes of what you seek cling to the borders of Williamsburg/Bushwick and Red Hook in Brooklyn, and inhabit a bit of Mott Haven in the Bronx.

The vibrant life in NYC is an immigrant life, as it's always been, but those immigrants are browner than the folks who came in the early 20th century. Walk through Washington Heights in Manhattan to live la vida Dominicana or across west 116th in Harlem to smell Africa; hit the playgrounds of Astoria to see Arabs, Albanians, Brazilians, Japanese and Greeks, walk Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights to see how Colombians and Peruvians entertain themselves, or go to any one of our four - four! - Chinatowns. There are still Bukharans in Forest Hills, and Russians in Brighton Beach; Corona and parts of Sunset Park are almost entirely Mexican, and Union Turnpike in Flushing is a Korean boulevard.

You want a New York that doesn't look like a vertical suburb? Roam Brooklyn and Queens.

<<Is there any place left in Manhattan that wasn't completely sanitized by Pope Giuliani? >>

You apparently didn't live here during the 80's. Had you, you would have seen the gritty places. They were everywhere from crack heads smoking on the subway to the coke dealers on the corners. I guess when you grew up w/it, you're glad its gone.

There are still places you can find pissed all over. Any project in this city would fit that bill. The summer is better for finding the real street garbage. Most of the South Bronx is still a wasteland as is upper Manhattan.

Yeah, but bxgrl74, he isn't looking for trashy projects. He's looking for the creative scene that got slaughtered by the real estate boom. That just doesn't live here any more.

I grew up here, too, and yeah, my dad got mugged in our lobby and we had to get really creative about coming home at night, but I am *so* glad I got to be a kid amidst the scene in SoHo when everybody was painting, drawing, sculpting, designing, creating something, taking over old buildings, trying to invent new societies, etc ... and in the 80s when my parents' friends on the Lower East Side were still doing it. We made a trade for being able to walk the streets at 3 AM with dollar bills taped to our bodies safely, and yes, we did lose something along with all we gained. Bohemian New York City is maybe not 100% dead, but it's pale and wan and desperately gasping.

I walked down the Bowery yesterday, and didn't see one flophouse except for the whitehouse hotel.

I guess they are completly gone (:-

Nicky

Yeah, it is a different town then long ago, but that doesn't mean it is totally gone!

I've heard (but not seen for myself) that the South Bronx is actually growing into an arts community. Trust fund babies won't move there, and all of NYC is becoming so proserous that it actually has some sort of a arts movement among the Latino population. Atleast that's what I've heard from friends from the neighborhood.