188 Ludlow Assumes the Crane Position

1.

rezoning can't come soon enough. here you have a crane that takes up an entire block while looming behnid it is nothing but low rise tenements.......ridiculous

2.

wow! that picture is awesome!

3.

The rezoning will luckily prevent more of those ridiculously tall buildings from going up. But at the very least, the shitholes and the riff-raff continue to be purged at a nice clip regardless.

4.

Crane won't be there for long. Do you have no patience at all? Any new construction leads to some interruptions. So what?

5.

I'd love to know whom #3 considers shitholes and riff-raff.

6.

Rezoning is despartely needed: please make buildings as tall as possible. Bigger buildings = more apartments = lower rents.

For those that think old NYC is alive: forget about it. Those days are over.

7.

5: I lived down on Ludlow street back around 1995 and the area was run down and nasty. Ten years later, and the area is teeming with great boutiques, restaurants, bars and much nicer housing options. Sure, there are still plenty of crumbling tenements throughout the area, which as we all know attracts the less desirable folk that you'd want as your neighbors. But if the next years go as well as the last ten years, the Lower East Side will really continue to thrive. I get warm fuzzies just walking through there now.

Sorry if you happen to be the riff-raff getting pushed out. That's the way it goes.

8.

Sorry, I do not get warm fuzzies from the drunken bridge, tunnel, and Murray Hill hordes that regularly invade the LES. Not that I did when the place was a scary junkie slum either. However, eventually these newcomers will move on to the next hot nabe (or to procreate in the suburbs); hopefully current residents will be able to hang on until then.

9.

8: Well, that;s why you hardened locals don't like the Meatpacking District or Hells Kitchen or any place else in the City that has benefited from gentrification. What makes NY great is the diversity of the people who cram the City streets. I don't see any reason to exclude or rail out against those who wish to enjoy these gentrified nabes. There's plenty of things to do for everyone to be happy. And you can definitely count on the LES not being returned to "the locals" any time in this lifetime.

10.

I have lived near Ludlow Street most of my life and remember it in the 70s,80s and 90s when it was full of junkies and had mostly Hispanic residents and old Jewish retailer/wholesalers.

At least junkies don't piss and vomit all over the place, and don't have a sense of entitlement that some of the Yuppie posters are going to exhibit when they respond to this.

It was a much more preferable neighborhood than the one now infested with B&T trash, Yuppie Scum and the developers' running-dogs who frequently post on this site.

11.

As a native, I also prefer than pre-Giuliani era NYC. People were more interesting, more character. I prefer B&T people than another person from the midwest/northwest/whereever.

But my point remains: we are never going back. Let's make the buildings tall and get it over with.

12.

I don't get why anyone would want an oversized building in a low-rise neighborhood. It doesn't make aesthetic sense.

Tall buildings in mid-town and Wall Street, for example, make sense. Not in the LES or Village.

They stand out like a sore thumb or buck teeth, and who wants a sore thumb or buck teeth?

13.

"What makes NY great is the diversity of the people who cram the City streets"

Exactly -- and there is nothing diverse about a bunch of loud, obnoxious, rich, drunk kiddies. In fact they're all extremely, boringly the same -- same clothes, same vocabulary, same superficiality.

I like the LES in the daytime, when it still functions like a real neighborhood.

14.

"I like the LES in the daytime, when it still functions like a real neighborhood."

i couldn't agree more.

15.

10: Oh, here we go again -- the anti-Yuppie hate thing. The "have's" versus the "have-not's." Jealousy and soreness abound. Don't you ever find all this pent-up anger a waste of precious time?

11: You are correct. Perhaps #10 just can't accept it. We are never going back to those days. Never. (But I don't think we need these super-tall buildings in the nabe.)

13: I am guessing that you are one of these people who has only been through the hood once or twice, or lives in the hood and never emerges from his apartment. I am down there all the time and there is plenty of diversity throughout the streets, day and night, and I'm a native New Yorker who grew up poor on the streets of the Bronx. This idea that only one group or type of people have a right to lay claim to an entire neighborhood is so stupid, so immature and smacks of such complete and utter bias that you give the rest of us New Yorkers a bad name.

It's really pathetic how much hatred people have for one another when posting on this site.

16.

Your remarks are typically misplaced.
I refer you to #3 who started this off by writing: "the shitholes and the riff-raff continue to be purged at a nice clip regardless".

Subsequent remarks by residents of lower Manhattan, which clearly you are not, are a reaction to this hateful and likely racist comment. Why don't you attack these hateful comments, and lay off the people who lived in the LES when no one else had the balls to?

I happen to be a self-made'have' incidentally, but that doesn't make me turn my back on the have-nots. If you were also born poor, shame on you for forgetting your roots.

If anyone is laying claim to the streets here, it is not the LES residents, it is the slobs who piss and vomit on the street who are laying their claim,
like dogs staking their territory by peeing on a hydrant.

I refer you to what Babs #13 had to say about your nonsensical claim to diversity:
"there is nothing diverse about a bunch of loud, obnoxious, rich, drunk kiddies. In fact they're all extremely, boringly the same -- same clothes, same vocabulary, same superficiality."

Go Babs go.

And as a Bronxite, do not speak to me about people laying claim to their neighborhood. I can think of no more territorial people as Bronx residents.