Finding the flaws in the New York Times's reporting on New York ruining itself
Someone named Abigail A. Frankfurt has a necessarily cute piece in the Times's The City section today, in which she decries how hipster gentrification destroyed her neighborhood in Brooklyn. I was with her right up until the end, when she claimed to be a "native New Yorker" and stated that
This sounded curiously like a midwesterner's fantasy of New York. So I looked up Abigail A. Frankfurt on Friendster. Hometown: Long Island, NY.
A reminder that the Times is written by and for the transplants, and owned by a large real estate concern.
I solemnly said farewell to New York and decided I would not return until I could come back to Manhattan, which meant until I prospered.
This sounded curiously like a midwesterner's fantasy of New York. So I looked up Abigail A. Frankfurt on Friendster. Hometown: Long Island, NY.
A reminder that the Times is written by and for the transplants, and owned by a large real estate concern.
posted by Rob at 10:30 AM
3 Comments:
Good catch, Rob. The article is pretty bad. She gets New York wrong, and then she gets the rest of the country wrong, too.
First: "I am not moving to Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island." What a snob. Perhaps she has her reasons, but she didn't provide any, and a quick look at Craigslist suggests there are some reasonably, even if not cheap, places in these three burroughs.
Secondly, the rest of the country doesn't exactly live on $450/month. An apartment in a central neighborhood in Denver goes for about $700 and up. And there are these other cities she may have heard of, too, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Miami, none of which is particularly cheap either. She doesn't seem to grasp that the rest of the country is, in fact, varied and interesting, and doesn't simply exist to provide affordable housing for those who can't afford to live in New York. I like New York a lot, and I like the rest of the country, too, and she badly mischaracterizes both of them.
Thanks, D. This is the kind of shit you can expect from the Times, without fail, every weekend. I admit that I only read "The City" Sunday mornings in hope of finding something new to eviscerate. It usually provides an outlet for what you called my "unmitigated anger."
Intelligent, native New Yorkers are in seemingly short supply. Even rarer are native New Yorkers who have explored the rest of the country and and/or have chosen to try living elsewhere.
See the blog archives from July for a drunken tale of another guilty Long Islander acting out in public.
There's an article from last week's Washington Post about this very topic. It actually takes it to the next level, demonstrating that gentrification in Williamsburgh may be pricing out the hipsters who started the whole mess.
The trouble now, it seems, is that these neighbhorhoods are not so much being replaced by rich whiteys, but that the thing that make the neighborhoods their own are being replaced by cookie cutter condos.
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