Jun 6, 2008

The Lower East Side: There goes the neighborhood

From EV Grieve, via Vanishing NY: Here's a vintage 1984 article from NY Magazine about the changes taking place in downtown Manhattan, of which I was unknowingly a part of having moved to Eldridge & East Houston a week after graduating high school about a month after this article was published:

That's the headline for the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story that I recently came across. The piece begins in the early 1980s with the rotting hulk of the Christodora and the young man eager to own it, Harry Skydell.

"Skydell's enthusiasm was indeed mysterious. The sixteen-story building he wanted to buy, on Avenue B facing Tompkins Square Park, was surrounded by burned-out buildings that crawled with pushers and junkies. It was boarded up, ripped out, and flooded...Early in the seventies, the city had put up the Christodora up for auction and nobody bid..." Continued here.

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