The photo caption that appears with the main photo sums it up this way: "Uptown denizens who once thought Harry Cipriani on 59th Street was the southern border for gracious living are discovering new condos and restaurants downtown."
It's not necessarily about the East Village, but downtown in general. Examples in the article cite a UES couple who are buying apartments for their high-school age children in — gasp! — Battery Park City ...the article also mentions new developments on Charles Street and Leonard Street....
A few excerpts, because you don't really want to read the whole piece:
“Downtown is livelier — we feel as though we have been in Milan for the weekend,” said Brooke Garber Neidich, a chairwoman of the Whitney Museum.
(We believe this is a reference to Milan, Italy, and not Milan, Ohio, birthplace of Thomas Edison.)
And!
Such a rarefied perspective may particularly rankle longtime downtowners, and portend the end of Manhattan’s few remaining bastions of bohemia. But just as flocks of young New Yorkers who might once have lived in the East Village are now in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg, and those who had once lived in Williamsburg have moved on to Bushwick, it is perhaps inevitable that gaggles of Muffys and Thurstons wearing Lilly Pulitzer are invading neighborhoods below 14th Street. The cool crowd has long been on a southward migration.
And!
“You are seeing people ask themselves: Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?” said Michele Kleier, the president and chairwoman of Kleier Residential.
