Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Wait, what? Are you referring to like 1900 or something?
This neighborhood was terrible, one of the worst in Manhattan, until maybe 20-25 years ago. The neighborhood's rise coincided with the proliferation of boutique hotels on former parking lots and taxpayers. Broadway was basically a third-world bazaar of questionable legality, now it's getting Ritz Carlton and other luxury hotel towers.
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You're confusing two very different things:
1. The underlying architecture, built environment and street presence of a neighborhood, and
2. The quality of tenants and retail in a neighborhood
Your thinking above is the exact same thinking that drove the innumerable examples of "urban renewal" in the '50s and '60s ... and that left us with all sorts of atrocities in the built environment for the sake of slightly nicer tenants (for a few years - until the crappy modernist replacements lost their sheen and wound up more decrepit, much more quickly, than the tenements they replaced).