Building up in Queens and Brooklyn.
For years, I've been talking about the renaissance that awaits Downtown Flushing. Right now, cranes dominate the skyline. CitiField has risen in Shea's parking lot. On the south side of Roosevelt Ave, a massive development has been steadily rising. SkyViewParc is the recently-given name of the project, which will meld retail, lots of parking, and really expensive condos. I have to wonder what will appear on the north side of Roosevelt at the Flushing River, where a large warehouse was recently demolished.
Closer to Main Street Station, Downtown Flushing is also gaining more of an "acceptable" appeal as the city's second Chinatown, with a recent proliferation of Vietnamese, Malaysian, and pan-Asian eateries. Here's a neighborhood that was a largely white ethnic shopping district in the 80s, an insular Korean and Chinese community through the 90s, and now boasts many new buildings, gleaming, new restaurants and banks, and many, many more signs in English! When I was a high school student, I did what everyone else did on Main Street: got off the bus and got on the subway. Now, I look forward to eating my way through the neighborhood on subsequent return trips to New York.
No word on the progress of Flushing Commons.
Meanwhile, over in Billyburg, the Domino Sugar refinery just received landmark status. Next door, the massive EDGE project is almost complete. Loft conversions and new loft buildings are going up everywhere. Between the shoreline and the BQE, incongruous condo towers stick out like sore, suffocating thumbs above the wooden rowhouses. Hipsters, who looked comical in 2004, and now look positively fucking ridiculous, dominate Bedford Ave.
Further down on the Southside, the formerly bleak corner I lived on (where Serpico gets shot in the face) now features a retail bank and the neighborhood's second Brooklyn Industries store. And the most extreme irony of all: the illegally zoned Hasidic cellphone store I lived behind is now a cigar bar.
Progress is fast; progress is expensive. In New York, it may be faster and more expensive than anywhere else in North America.
Closer to Main Street Station, Downtown Flushing is also gaining more of an "acceptable" appeal as the city's second Chinatown, with a recent proliferation of Vietnamese, Malaysian, and pan-Asian eateries. Here's a neighborhood that was a largely white ethnic shopping district in the 80s, an insular Korean and Chinese community through the 90s, and now boasts many new buildings, gleaming, new restaurants and banks, and many, many more signs in English! When I was a high school student, I did what everyone else did on Main Street: got off the bus and got on the subway. Now, I look forward to eating my way through the neighborhood on subsequent return trips to New York.
No word on the progress of Flushing Commons.
Meanwhile, over in Billyburg, the Domino Sugar refinery just received landmark status. Next door, the massive EDGE project is almost complete. Loft conversions and new loft buildings are going up everywhere. Between the shoreline and the BQE, incongruous condo towers stick out like sore, suffocating thumbs above the wooden rowhouses. Hipsters, who looked comical in 2004, and now look positively fucking ridiculous, dominate Bedford Ave.
Further down on the Southside, the formerly bleak corner I lived on (where Serpico gets shot in the face) now features a retail bank and the neighborhood's second Brooklyn Industries store. And the most extreme irony of all: the illegally zoned Hasidic cellphone store I lived behind is now a cigar bar.
Progress is fast; progress is expensive. In New York, it may be faster and more expensive than anywhere else in North America.
Labels: christmas break 2007, new york city, queens, williamsburg
posted by Rob at 4:26 PM
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