Seeking to escape from ground zero
Financial Times, October 27/28, 2001
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Native New Yorker and property writer Robert Liebman sees his city before and after the September 11 attacks
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Approaching Delancey Street on Manhattan's lower east side, I was surprised to see a fixture of my 1950s childhood, the live poultry market, that once fascinated and repulsed me. It was still there.
Growing up on Manhattan's lower east side, I often glimpsed customers selecting a chicken or goose. Moments later, the hapless fowl was held over a barrel and its throat slit in full view of passers-by and customers.
Delancey Street now widens to accommodate the approaches to the Williamsburg Bridge, and the open expanse of a schoolyard is almost opposite the market. With stunning suddenness, the twin towers of the World Trade Center dominated the landscape.
I was in New York on a personal visit. My next stop was Alphabet Soup, where Avenues A, B, C and D, encompass First to Fourteenth Streets. I used to enter this grid reluctantly, scared off by addicts and muggers. Twenty years later their descendents amused and enriched themselves preying on hippies.
The latest arrivals are members of café latte society, and the bodegas and empty lots now have chic restaurants and boutiques for neighbours. Not long ago many buildings in Alphabet Soup were torched by junkies eager to snatch abandoned plumbing fixtures, or by landlords seeking an insurance payout. Today, six-figure sums are changing hands for flats in buildings that were worthless a few years ago.
The gentrifying lower east side is one of the borough's more affordable neighbourhoods. Values for midtown flats and downtown lofts have soared. Days before the suicide attacks that constituted America's "new day of infamy"—September 11—Richard Ferrari, senior vice-president of Insignia Douglas Elliman, told me: "prices have not dipped despite a lot of economic uncertainty."
Following the attacks, Elliman said, business was slow for very expensive properties and very brisk for small flats, with "commuters wanting smaller apartments due to the increased time for security checks at the bridges and tunnels".
Although it was too soon to detect trends, Ferrari dismissed the "rumour that buyers will shun residential skyscrapers. Colleagues told me that the AOL Time Warner complex at One Central Park has had over $30m in sales since September 11. Personally, I have noticed sales on high floors in many other high-rise condos".
Before the attacks, Pam Liebman (no relation), president of the Corcoran Group, the New York estate agent, expected prices to "stabilize this year. Last year, they really went flying, increasing by 30 to 40 per cent in some segments".
She believes "the events of September 11 accelerated the already slowing trend. The attacks caused a sloping line to become a vertical drop in the short-term". She insists prospects for Manhattan remained excellent in the long-term.
Liebman admits some businesses and residents will relocate to nearby suburbs, but "contrary to rumours we have not seen a mass exodus out of Manhattan. However some people are moving to other parts of the city because of the physical and psychological difficulties of living so close to ground zero".
Liebman still enthuses about New York being the "capital of the world". So too does my old friend, Kevin Kelly, a native New Yorker who now lives in Rhode Island after being a pioneering buy-to-let the landlord in Brooklyn's Park Slope.
"I think the attacks won't affect the housing market long-term. New York is still a 'world' city and more and more people from all over the world will want to live or have a residence there," he says. "No matter what I do, I remain a New Yorker, and I hope to live there again someday, at least part of the year."
While not necessarily endorsing his feelings entirely, I was glad the live poultry market was doing well, serving a mostly Hispanic, Black and Chinese clientele.
Previously I'd have given odds that it would have been long gone. In fact when the Williamsburg Bridge was found to be crumbling, the market simply moved across the street, next to the bridge, instead of being directly underneath it. So this anachronistic poultry slaughterhouse is still there—and the World Trade Center is no more.
If this irony pains me, I am comforted by the continuity, the sense of history and heritage in a city and nation sorely lacking both. Manhattan is still the in-your-face city it was when I lived there, and an ambience that was anonymous and ominous in my day is now friendly and benign.
Three days before the attacks, my nephew, his wife and I visited one of New York's better-kept secrets, the Jamaica wildlife refuge, a bona fide bird and animal sanctuary that retains its serenity, and its animals, despite having Kennedy Airport for a neighbour. Like Kevin Kelly, I wish it well.
www.robertliebman.com