DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Economic dirty bomb goes off in New York
By Tom Engelhardt
A block from my apartment, on a still largely mom-and-pop, relatively low-slung
stretch of Broadway, two spanking new apartment towers rose just as the good
times were ending for New York. As I pass the tower on the west side of
Broadway each morning, one of its massive ground-floor windows displays the
same eternal message in white letters against a bright red background: "Locate
yourself at the center of the fastest expanding portion of the affluent Upper
West Side."
Successive windows assure any potential renter that this retail space (10,586
square feet - 980 square meters - available! 100
feet of frontage! 30ft ceilings! Multiple configurations possible!) is
conveniently located only "steps from the 96th Street subway station, servicing
11 million riders annually."
Here's the catch, though: That building was completed as 2007 ended and yet,
were you to peer through a window into the gloom beyond, you would make out
only a cavernous space of concrete, pillars, and pipes. All those "square feet"
and not the slightest evidence that any business is moving in any time soon.
Across Broadway, the same thing is true of the other tower.
That once hopeful paean to an "expanding" and "affluent" neighborhood now seems
like a notice from a lost era. Those signs, already oddly forlorn only months
after our world began its full-scale economic meltdown, now seem like messages
in a bottle floating in from BC: Before the Collapse.
And it's not just new buildings having problems either, judging by the
increasing number of metal grills and shutters over storefronts in mid-day, all
that brown butcher paper covering the insides of windows, or those omnipresent
"for rent" and "for lease" signs hawking "retail space" with the names, phone
numbers, and websites of real estate agents.
I hadn't paid much attention to any of this until, running late one drizzly
evening about a month ago, and needing a piece of meat for dinner, I decided to
stop at Oppenheimer's, a butcher shop only three blocks from home. I had
shopped there regularly until a new owner came in some years ago, and then the
habit slowly died. The store still had its awning ("Oppenheimer, Established
1964, Prime Meats & Seafood") and the same proud boast of "Steaks and Chops
Cut to Order, Oven-ready roasts, Fresh-ground meats, Seasonal favorites," but
you couldn't miss the "retail space available" sign in the window and, when I
put my face to the glass, the shop's insides had been gutted.
Taken aback, I made my way home and said to my wife, "Did you know that
Oppenheimer's closed down?" She replied matter-of-factly, "That was months
ago."
Okay, that's me, not likely to win an award for awareness of my surroundings.
Still, I soon found myself, notebook in hand, walking the neighborhood and
looking. Really looking. Now, understand, in New York City, there's nothing
strange about small businesses going down, or buildings going up. It's a city
that, since birth, has regularly cannibalized itself.
What's strange in my experience - a New Yorker born and bred - is when
storefronts, once emptied, aren't quickly repopulated.
Broadway in daylight now seems increasingly like an archeological dig in the
making. Those storefronts with their fading decals ("Zagat rated" [1]) and
their old signs look, for all the world, like teeth knocked out of a mouth. In
a city in which a section of Broadway was once known as the Great White Way for
its profligate use of electricity, and everything normally is aglow at any
hour, these dead commercial spaces feel like so many tiny black holes. Get on
the wrong set of streets - Broadway is hardly the worst - and New York can
easily seem like a creeping vision of Hell, not as fire but as darkness slowly
snuffing out the blaze of life.
A stroll in the neighborhood
Let me take you, then, on a little tour of the new face of my neighborhood.
Along the 10 blocks closest to my home, the banks (with one exception), the
fast-food restaurants (Subway, Dunkin' Donuts, Blimpie), and above all the
chain drugstores that crowd onto successive blocks (Rite Aid, Walgreens, Duane
Reade) still stand. It's the small places that seem to be dropping like flies.
So here we go up those subway steps at 96th where a branch of WaMu (Washington
Mutual Bank, placed in receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation last September and quickly sold to JP Morgan) stands empty. Now,
start walking up the east side of Broadway, past Citibank on 96th and the Bank
of America at the corner of 97th, until you come to little Alpine Sound
Electronics, or the shell of it anyway, where I used to buy my cheap,
waterproof watches for my daily swim at the Y. Now it's gone, though an
emphatic "sale, sale, sale, sale, sale" sign over the door is a reminder of its
final moments.
Take another sec and check out the other side of the street, where at mid-block
a canopy advertising "Moroccan & Indian Home Decoratives ... Aromatherapy
... Exotic Gifts" still stands, but with a "Store for Rent" sign in the window
and a desolate interior - a couple of ratty shelves, a single chair, a
half-filled black garbage bag, and a broom. Right beside it is (or was) a tiny
children's clothing store. Its striped awning now sports a gaping hole in its
center as if it had been hit by a missile, though its window still says, "Made
in New York City ... enjoyed worldwide!" Not so much today.
But let's not tarry. Keep going past 98th, by that butchered butcher shop, but
do note, next to it, another vacancy, the shell that housed a small wine bar
and restaurant, Vinacciolo, that came and went. Only two long, bare, narrow
tables remain on a floor scattered with trash.
Now, we're almost at 100th, passing those two towers with their unrented
frontages and, on the east side of the street, the classic facade of the old
Metro movie house, closed to build one tower, and still empty. The cracked
glass of the ticket teller's booth backed by plywood gives the neighborhood
that distinctive Last Picture Show feel.
Just above 100th on the west side of Broadway is the store once occupied by
Sterling Optical. They moved more than two years ago (I followed them
faithfully) and the metal security grill has remained in place ever since.
Ditto the storefront next to it, empty but for a little hand-lettered sign on
the door, "Fedex Please Knock Hard" - it better be mighty hard! - and a tiny
"Zagat Rated 2006 Shopping Guide" decal on the window.
Well, you get the idea, if you haven't already experienced the equivalent
wherever you live. At 101st, A & S Art/Framing ("custom framing and
mirrors"), a sliver of a store, has closed up shop. Between 102nd and 103rd,
Planet Kids is emptying out. ("After 18 years we are closing on March 31st ...
") On 103rd, the Royal Kabab & Curry restaurant has, like the optician,
moved on to lower-rent digs without being replaced; and, on 105th, Tokyo Pop, a
Japanese restaurant, all of whose wait staff mysteriously spoke English with
French accents, has also disappeared, though its papered-over windows uniquely
promise a "Pizzabar" in the Spring. (I'm not holding my breath.)
Actually, if you head in just about any direction, the toll is apparent. Go
south on Broadway from 96th, for instance, and you pass the same proliferating
patches of emptiness. At 93rd, the tiny storefront of the all-detective
bookstore Murder Ink, which closed on the last day of 2006 (about the moment
when this deepening recession officially began) remains unoccupied.
Further south, there are slaughtered neighborhood restaurants galore. Not
surprisingly, even in food-mad New York, people are eating out less and our
streets, except perhaps on a Saturday night, seem visibly less populated. Near
the corner of 91st, Mary Ann's, a festive Tex-Mex spot, bit the dust; just
before 90th, the upscale seafood restaurant Docks Oyster Bar shut its doors so
recently that its red "restaurant" sign is still lit ("Docks thanks you all for
your loyal patronage over the years but this restaurant is now closed ... ");
at the corner of 88th, in the spacious two-floor space that used to house
Boulevard (on whose paper tablecloths my kids and I drew faces with
restaurant-provided crayons), and then a dizzying succession of restaurants
whose names escape me, the bar chairs are carefully stored upside down on the
bar and a "For Rent" sign is in the window; and, on 77th, Ruby Foo's, a giant
pan-Asian joint, described by Zagat's as "Disneyfied," has shut, too.
Only below 72nd street, where the neighborhood gets noticeably tonier, and the
banks (TD, HSBC, Capital One, Chase, Bank of America) begin to breed and
multiply, and the urban mall stores (Pottery Barn, Barnes & Noble, The Gap,
Bed Bath & Beyond) proliferate, do the deaths end (except for a Circuit
City branch at the corner of 67th that went down with that bankrupt chain).
Here, stores are still clean, well-lighted places, though a remarkable number
of them sport signs that say: "save up to 50%," "up to 70% off…"
9/11, the sequel
Let's not exaggerate. New York City is not downtown Elkhart, Indiana - not yet
anyway (although the other night on Amsterdam Avenue, just east of Broadway, I
noted a block of 12 tiny storefronts, nine of which had been emptied). Yes,
rents on avenues like Broadway remain sky-high and, these days, getting a bank
loan if you're a small start-up is bloody murder, and the city's zoos are
losing their state funding, the hospitals are getting rid of staff, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art is having layoffs, the unemployment rate is rising
fast, property values are sinking, mass transit riders are facing fare
increases as well as major service cuts, and the Greater New York Orchid
Society has canceled its annual show. Nonetheless, this global financial
capital is still surfing the final modest wavelets of the tsunami of money that
flowed through its veins in the good times (some of which continues to head
"our" way, thanks to government bailout plans).
Still, as you walk past those patches of darkness, a thought almost can't help
but form. For the last seven years, we've been waiting for 9/11, the sequel, to
arrive from Afghanistan or some similar place. The media has regularly featured
fantasy scenarios in which Islamic terrorists sneak atomic bombs or "dirty
bombs" into cities like New York and set them off. ABC's Charles Gibson even
highlighted such a possibility in a Democratic presidential debate. ("I want to
go to another question ... The next president of the United States may have to
deal with a nuclear attack on an American city. I've read a lot about this in
recent days. The best nuclear experts in the world say there's a 30% chance in
the next 10 years ... ") And the Bush administration claimed as one of its
great accomplishments the prevention of a repeat of 9/11.
And yet, in a sense, as on September 11, 2001, maybe we were just looking the
wrong way. After all, you might say that an economic dirty bomb did go off in
downtown New York and this city (not to say, the nation and the world) has been
experiencing a second 9/11 ever since, even if in slow motion.
In my neighborhood, back in those fateful September days in 2001, you could
hear the sirens, see the jets streak overhead, catch the acrid smell of the
towers and everything chemical in them burning, and like the rest of America,
watch those apocalyptic-looking scenes of the towers collapsing in clouds of
ash and smoke again and again. But if the look then was apocalyptic, the
damage, however grim, was limited.
This time around there's no dust, no ash, no acrid smell, no sirens, no jets,
and no brave rescuers either. And yet the effect might, sooner or later, be far
more apocalyptic and the lives swallowed up far greater. This time, of course,
the fanatical extremists were homegrown. Their "caves" were on Wall Street.
They hijacked our economy and did their level best to take down our world.
And they may have come closer than most of us imagine. Alpine Sound and
Oppenheimer, Tokyo Pop and Planet Kids, Docks and Ruby Foo's have all gone down
(and more are surely headed that way). For the people who owned, or ran, or
worked in them, unlike the survivors of the original 9/11, there will be no
moving bios in the local papers, no talk of compensation, and no majestic
memorials to argue about.
For the perpetrators, who have, at worst, gone home pocketing their millions,
there will be no retribution. No invasions will be launched, no missiles shot
into homes or hideouts. None of them will be pursued to their lairs, or
kidnapped off the streets of New York, or from their palatial mansions, or
apartments, or estates. None will be spirited to foreign lands to be imprisoned
and tortured. None will be labeled "enemy combatants".
Quite the opposite, in 9/11, the sequel, the US government is willing to pay
many of them and their institutions in the multi-billions for their time and
further efforts.
In the second 9/11, all the pain and torture is in the neighborhood.
Note: 1. Zagat proclaims on its website that it is the "Web’s
Most Trusted Guide to Restaurant Reviews and Ratings for New York".
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of
Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel,
The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to
TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative
history of the mad Bush years.
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