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.

Mainstream media on the destruction of Williamsburg: at Verb Cafe, "It's like lunchtime at Oberlin College."

Matt sends us a link to this incredibly solid article on the death of Williamsburg--from the Washington Post. When I got out of B-burg three years ago, it was like the glowing embers of condoization had just reached new supplies of air and fuel. What the article doesn't point out is that the condo boom was fueled by (if not started by) Hasidim and Poles (etc) trying to make a buck off the newfound hipness of their ghetto.

I loved the Verb Cafe comment; when I doodled there I could always find a seat. But my dad would liken any neighborhood where people go out of the loft in pajamas all weekend to the "fake world" of college. I would have to agree with him there.

The Village and Williamsburg have proven that New York is not invincible. When the coolest neighborhoods are sanitized and turned into playgrounds for the super-rich, I fear for my home. I fear even more for the talented and intelligent youth who now have nowhere cool to hang out--the village lasted decades before being turned into condos. Billyburg only lasted five years.

We gave what Dan Meade calls the "Upper Frat Side" the cold shoulder for decades (even while he and I went to high school there). But now the rich frat boys are coming down from their towers and colonizing more of the city. What neighborhood will they price us out of next? How will a smart kid who's not rich experience the city if there's nothing to experience?

And when and if I return from exile, how will I go about living in a real neighborhood? College Point just started looking really good.

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I'll continue to ponder the role of the artist in reviving and ruining cities. This article makes that process seem even more obvious.