'Death of a Once Great City': is New York City Really This Bad?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Ok, here’s something I’ve really got a problem with. It’s gotten a lot harder to locate a Mr. Softee truck than it used to be. The last time I was in the East Village all I saw was somebody selling soft serve for twice the price of Softee. The only one I’ve seen consistently the last 3 times I was in Manhattan was the guy who stays parked near Lincoln Center. Have the vanished from the outer boroughs as well?

82

I keep on reading about them in the Times. When I was a kid they were my go to ice cream truck. But I never saw one in the East Village back when I used to hang out there, even when they were all over Queens.

83

There is usually one within a few blocks of a Yankees games. Just off River Rd, on either 165th or McClellan.

Oddly enough, I’ve had one come by at work twice in the last 2 weeks now and I’m down in Central Jersey. I never saw a Mr. Softee down here before.

84

I see them fairly often on the upper east side. There’s a regular one at the end of my block outside of Carl Schurz Park. They raised the price on their already expensive (to me anyway) shakes and the guy was kind of an ass to my daughters so we don’t use it anymore.

85

The mention of Yorkville reminded me that back in the day that neighborhood was seriously German–thousands of immigrants from Germany and Austria, German owned shops, German spoken widely in the streets and in the homes. I wonder if the author of the article wants to go back to that? Or was it too long ago for it to matter to him? Nostalgic people tend to focus on a particular time when everything was perfect and ignore the dislocations that happened before that.

Found this, by the way, in Wikipedia’s article on Yorkville, if you wanted another reminder that the complaints in the linked article are nothing new. This is from 1926 in the NY Times:

“Yorkville, for well-nigh two decades known to connoisseurs of east side life as the exclusive domain of Czechoslovaks, Hungarians and Germans, is slowly giving up its strongly accentuated Central European character and gradually merging into a state of colorless impersonality…”

Bolding mine. Almost one hundred years ago, and a complaint that would’ve fit right into the Harper’s article. The more things change…

86

yes, well, everyone who reaches the age of 14 thinks he/she is the first person to ever think of something.

87

Thanks for the hearty laugh!

88

I think almost all major cities face the same serious problems:

  1. They become increasingly crowded over time.
  2. A whole lot of expensive things (public services, roads, bridges, tunnels, infrastructure in general) age and break down.

These problems are not new, yet the cities go on. New York is far from “dying”.

89

SharkWife reminisce: her mama, an Austrian who fled Hitler’s invasion, for years got her meats from a German butcher in Yorkville.

Wife bought her 93rd digs in 1998 and says at the time anything above 86th was not quite regarded as “The” Upper East Side (in its glitzy sense); when she sold two decades later it more so was. In my wanderings as a non-native, it feels like the hood gets a bit rougher around 96th as it transitions toward Spanish Harlem.

90

Yeah, the problem with cities is that they are so crowded no one lives there anymore.