TRUE LIFE: I Have Roommate Issues
Has your living situation become a nightmare? Are you fighting ALL the time?? Got some SERIOUS roommate issues??
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--- roommate@mtvn.com ---
Tell us as much about your situation as possible. Also, please be sure to include your name, location, PHONE NUMBER, and photo.
A 25 wide vacant lot which is off the corner of Stanton Street. The lot has 4,250 square feet of buildable air rights. The property is in a neighborhood that is undergoing lots of development. There is also a lot of demand for retail space for bars and restaurants and art galleries. This zoning allows commercial as well as residential development. This property is a prime development opportunity or a great user opportunity. For a user they can build a nice town house or use the lot for parking. The seller can get a variance for the buyer to build under the old zoning.
THE Lower East Side has become a destination for those from other boroughs, other towns and other nations who seek a few hours of Manhattan life. On a recent Saturday night, on Rivington Street between Essex and Ludlow, it was easy to find people from Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, England and Germany. It was harder to find a local resident.
Nearby, a stretch limousine idled, its passenger area illuminated by a black light and filled with champagne glasses. Inside, Luis Salcedo, the driver, waited for his evening’s charges — eight people from Queens. Mr. Salcedo said he was often called to drive to the area. “They always sing songs on the way,” he added.
“The greasy dude factor is low here,” said Sam Sellers, one of the resident D.J.’s. “You can play reggae and the guys aren’t grinding up all over the girls. It’s parties of friends, not one or two or three people looking for a night, so the energy is amazing.”
In the early 1990s, comedian Mike Myers regularly dressed up in a giant wig, gaudy fake nails and gigantic sunglasses to become Linda Richman -- a stereotypical New Yorker who had fits of feeling "verklempt" and thought that Barbara Streisand's voice was "like buttah."
"Welcome to Coffee Talk," Myers said at the beginning of his Saturday Night Live sketch, twisting the vowels with an exaggerated New York accent.
This unique accent -- which has set New Yorkers apart for decades -- may now be disappearing among some of Gotham's natives, according to a Jan. 9 presentation at the Linguistic Society of America in Baltimore.
In 1966, linguist William Labov noticed that New York City residents had a peculiar way of saying words like "bought" and "daughter" that pushed the vowels up and into the back of the throat. He included this linguistic quirk, the "raised bought," in his "Atlas of North American English," a definitive text for scientists who study language.
"The longer your family's residence in New York, the more likely you are to raise bought," said Kara Becker, a graduate student at New York University in Manhattan.
Becker revisited the way people talk on Manhattan's Lower East Side for the first time in 40 years. Working with local community activist groups, she interviewed 64 native speakers over the course of two years and analyzed thousands of vowel sounds in their speech.
Older residents like Michael, born in 1933, still sound like New Yorkers when describing their mother's "sauce." But younger residents of Manhattan's Lower East Side, like 25-year-old Sam, did not pronounce "talk" and "cause" like their older neighbors, even though their families have lived in the neighborhood for several generations.
Compared to the high-crime years of the late '80s and early '90s, the Lower East Side has far fewer serious reported crimes, according to police statistics. Of the four precincts, only the 9th Precinct showed an overall increase in crime last year, with increases in assault, grand larceny, and rape, and a big jump in burglary. The 5th, 7th, and 13th precincts, meanwhile, all showed overall declines.
On the other hand, comparing 2008 to 2009, there were some increases here and there. Felony assaults in the 7th Precinct jumped by 40 percent last year. Grand larcenies increased, as did rapes. Assaults in the 5th Precinct were up compared to 2007. And the 13th Precinct saw a rise in burglaries.
The number of neighborhood kids 15 or younger sent to the city juvenile justice system rose from 38 in 2008 to 54 in 2009. Typically, about half of those admissions were on robbery or assault charges.
The Voice also obtained misdemeanor arrest numbers for the four precincts, which show overall increases from 2006 to 2008 — largely fueled by jumps in burglary and larceny offenses, along with a significant increase in low-level marijuana busts.
For example, misdemeanor arrests in the 9th Precinct jumped by almost 25 percent between 2006 and 2008, largely as a result of burglary and theft cases. Misdemeanor arrests in the 5th Precinct rose by about 20 percent, largely on theft offenses.
Overall, the numbers present a picture of relative order compared to the bad old days. But if you ask around the neighborhood, you'll find a pretty strong perception that things have worsened over the past year, particularly as a result of these loosely organized groups of teens and young men who identify with a given public housing project or city block.
"We certainly saw an upsurge in the past couple of years of the presence of gangs," says Matthew Guldin, a lifelong educator who retired as dean of students for a Lower East Side high school last June. "You knew it was there. I think some of it has to do with the economic downturn. The crisis always comes first in the poorest neighborhoods. With fewer jobs available for teens, parents being laid off, and schools and community agencies losing funding, there are fewer positive options available to engage teenagers during the after-school hours. And I think YouTube, MySpace, texting, the communications technology, exacerbates it."
A woman riding a bicycle was struck by a school bus and died from her injuries on the Lower East Side Tuesday.
Authorities say the woman was hit by the bus, operated by Atlantic Express, just after 4 p.m. at the intersection of Delancey and Ludlow streets.
There were reportedly two children on board the bus at the time. Officials say neither was injured.
The woman was pronounced dead at the scene.
The intersection is just a few blocks away from the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge. Since 2008, volunteer group Adopt-a-Bike Lane has been advocating for a protected bike path on this stretch of Delancey. "This is tragic news -- no one should risk his or her life to get to and from the most popular bridge for biking in the country," said Adopt-a-Bike Lane coordinator Marin Tockman. "We can only hope that in the wake of such sad news that our city officials do something to improve this essential corridor."
delancey is a mess, and always extremely dangerous for bikers and pedestrians. i don't ever cross against the light, and sometimes don't even when i have a walk signal.
theres definitely been a policy decision made that moving traffic on and off the bridge gets priority over safety. even tonight traffic police were waving cars through reds in front of me as i was crossing the street with a walk signal.
the only traffic enforcement i routinely see is a block-the-box ticket trap on orchard and delancey, taking advantage of the poorly timed traffic lights at allen. not only is this unfair to drivers (i can see that and i don't drive) but it makes the orchard/delancey intersection extremely dangerous for pedestrians.
You gussied yourself up with shiny new hardware: Thor, Fat Baby, Spitzer’s. Hordes of banker boys in J. Press checked shirt/chino uniforms and manicured necklines swarmed to you faster than to the promise of a government bailout. They enjoyed sausage-party dinners at Schiller’s (“It’s like Pastis, but edgy!”), used winter as a verb and eyed sun-speckled Germans and Australians “on holiday.”
Toothsome Upper East Side girl packs (never fewer than four) tarted up in too-new Lilly Pulitzer dresses and slurped down sugar-free Red Bull and Grey Gooses at the Stanton Social. Hipster millennials, rocking extra-skinny jeans, oversize Elton John glasses and cocked-back fedoras, turned Pianos and Welcome to the Johnsons into their own private Thompson Twins video. Hold me now. Hold my heart.
The influx of luxury buildings and the moneyed residents who can afford them, panelists like Mr. Patterson seemed to say, erase the color and vibrancy of the area, even as they shoo away perceived blight like the suppliers of drug baggies. But if the roof is made of glass and steel and is designed by a celebrity architect, are the stories underneath less “real life”?
The problem, Mr. Ferrara said, is that newcomers to the Lower East Side have “amnesia of some sort — a self-entitlement. Somebody’s paying $3,500 to live in the same two or three rooms where somebody’s grandmother used to sit in the window crying, ‘How am I going to pay my rent?’ ” If they were aware of the history behind sky-high real estate, he said, the pricing out would be “a little easier to bear.”
Yet the very history being rubbed out by developers and yuppies is, paradoxically, what draws them to the area, Ms. Polland said, citing, for example, the Hotel on Rivington’s founding concept: “The area has arrived, but retains it’s colorful, urban diversity,” says literature on the hotel’s Web site. It “caters to the upper class,” she said. “It’s staking its image on the identity of a neighborhood that in order to have that diversity,” officials “would need to be thinking about affordable housing.”
“I think the East Village does have a clear identity separate from the broader Lower East Side, but it clearly also has an identity as part of it, as well,” stated Berman. “It seems that of late there has been a revival of that thinking, and I find many people, especially neighborhood activists, are seeking to rejoin the East Village to the broader Lower East Side and re-identify with it. Interestingly, this may reflect the fact that today the East Village and the Lower East Side in many ways share more in common than they have since the 1960s when the ‘East Village’ identity was first created and the blocks north of Houston St. began to develop a distinct ‘bohemian’ character.”
Both areas are struggling equally with issues of overdevelopment, large-scale gentrification and the difficulty of longtime residents and businesses being able to afford to stay here.
“Not only are they once again very similar in character,” Berman said of the two areas, “but I think in many ways they are seeking to hearken back to the days before the big high-rises, frat bars and exorbitant rents swept over the neighborhood — and the name ‘Lower East Side,’ which is less associated with the gentrification process than ‘East Village,’ may be one way of doing that.”
