Greenwich Village or Logan’s Run?

The mighty Fran Lebowitz takes on Mayor Bloomberg and New York University with the righteous indignation of someone who loves the city passionately and hates the steady shift away from a metropolis known for its cultural, racial and architectural diversity to one of homogeneity, privilege and wealth. She kicks ass and I think she’s absolutely brilliant. Lebowitz IS New York. She’d make a great mayor.

What Lebowitz and many New Yorkers are specifically upset about is NYU’s plan to construct four new buildings in Greenwich Village which will radically alter the area’s landscape by creating six city blocks (1.6 million square feet) comprised of massive concrete structures. The Village is one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan that has maintained its human scale and these “superblocks” would destroy one of the great cultural communities on the planet, replacing gardens with stone and flooding the area with more people, more bars and more noise - an urban Disneyland for academics and alcoholics.

Anyone who has recently visited the East Village knows just how bad things can get when a neighborhood is overrun by suburban asswipes whose idea of a groovy night out is finding the bar with the cheapest Jagermeister shots. The site of puke-slathered Lana Del Rays wobbling down Avenue B on their Jimmy Choo’s will make you long for the days of garbage strikes and man-eating rats.

You can read more about the struggle to keep the Village safe from the marauding armies of greed who are so arrogantly and wantonly hellbent on turning an historic neighborhood into a Bloombergian hellpit here.

Bravo Fran!