Yes, New York City is a hellish place that only the rich can live in! So why was I reading and hearing about it since I was just a baby 73 years ago?
Because it's a good story, no matter how weathered the idea may be, that's why.
The New York Times took us down that well-trodden path last week with an essay called “Behind the Doors of a Private World for the Wealthy New Yorkers.”
Author Eliza Shapiro hilariously quips about “private” laundry services, helicopter trips and at-home IV drips to “rejuvenate” us when we're tired and stressed.
Viewed in its own right, her work in the “tale of two cities” genre, which predates Bill de Blasio by nearly a century, can be both entertaining and, understandably, gently infuriating at times.
But the cultural and economic assumptions that underlie it are simply infuriating.
The Times cannot help but scold its readers for the way their supposedly comfortable lives border on an endless, vast world of New York poverty, spiritual desolation and all-around misery.
It is the belief of Times journalists that privilege, no matter how hard-earned, is at best questionable and at worst colonial, predatory, racist, sexist and criminal.
Remember, if you can bear it, Mayor de Blasio had an undisguised contempt not just for “the wealthy” but also for hard-working merchants and small business owners, whom he viewed as blood-sucking bugs that preyed on the masses and therefore deserved constant regulatory harassment.
New York, or the dream of it, has always come with excess, and with what we would now call “injustice,” or, perhaps more wisely, “life sucks.”
My favorite columnist, the late Pete Hamill, once wrote that the central reality of this city is that there are “very few very rich people and very many very poor people.”
That was in 1973. It was true then and it's true now.
But there was, and still is, a great middle class of middle- and working-class people who, despite exorbitant housing costs, lacked “concierge” medical care and lived surprisingly well.
The opening sentence of the Times essay, “It's a great time to be rich in New York City,” suggests that our current times are abnormal.
But was there ever a time when this wasn't a great time to get rich? The Rockefellers had their best years during the Great Depression.
They built Rockefeller Center, right?
During Gotham's financial collapse in the late 1970s, movie stars, art dealers, tennis greats, models, and Wall Street scions partied into the night at Studio 54. At the time, the South Bronx's burnt, moonlit landscape made a mockery of what we today call an affordable housing shortage.
But “the pandemic changed a lot of things,” the founder of a national staffing firm told Shapiro, saying she had so much new business that she had to double the size of her company.
Of course, in the 1980s and '90s, wealthy people like John and Susan Gutfreund eschewed such services and merrily pushed brooms from the comfort of their penthouses.
“A new kind of private, members-only concierge service is emerging as a kind of gated community within the city,” Shapiro writes.
But there's a difference between a metaphorical gated community and an actual gated community.
Many of New York's progressive politicians and “allies” hide behind their heavily guarded homes.
Jumaane Williams, a far-left, NYPD-hating activist, was arrested while living in a townhouse on an army base in Brooklyn, but according to a report in the Washington Post, “he receives free, 24-hour security.”
Mayor Eric Adams' “favorite hangout spot” is reportedly the members-only club.
Like Shapiro, I lament the recent proliferation of private dining establishments, but I'll give him a break.
By all accounts, Adams' time at Zero Bond is shorter than it used to be.
He goes to regular restaurants more often than Rudy Giuliani.
He spent election night at an Italian restaurant on West 52nd Street.
He showed up to the opening night of a nondescript steakhouse last week.
The ultra-exclusive Casa Cipriani, at the top of the Battery Maritime Building, is “a social club in the modern sense, where style, décor, privacy and respect are still highly valued,” a spokesman said in response to an inquiry about Shapiro's waiting list for membership.
But it seems like this store doesn't care about its customers.
Page Six recently reported that management is looking to “push” members and replace them with “a cooler clientele, higher profile people, including people from the art world.”
Well, isn't that rich?
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