As the worm turns in the Big Apple
- |
NEW YORK
WHEN I STARTED to write this, back in April, the city of my birth was flush. Elsewhere, jobs were disappearing and mortgages had started to go belly-up like dead cod. We knew that the country was suffering. The war stumbled along, or surged ahead, depending on your analysis, the price of gas rose daily, and the hallucinogenic absence of leadership kept the country fog-bound.
But here. . . my friend, you couldn't swing a dead chinchilla without hitting a new co-op. Chef/owners designed tasting meals that cost as much as some of the cars I'd owned, and women slugged it out in the aisles of Bergdorf's to get the last $18,000 Kelly pochette in stock. Bentleys continued to purr around the cobblestones of Soho and Tribeca as their owners prowled the salumeri and patisseries gathering sustenance for the trek to East Hampton; traffic might be bad on Route 27, and there was hypoglycemia to consider.
For all that I was born in an (otherwise) unremarkable hospital that occupied the land where the
Parents who had done well in the stock market during the '80s and '90s, and/or sold the empty nest in Rye - a steal in '77 at $300,000, sold in '02 for a cool $3 mil - had no problems sending Chas or Muffy a few grand each month so he or she could live in a studio overlooking an erstwhile crack den on Allen Street for $3,000 a month, not including utilities. After all, these kids couldn't earn enough to wobble off in their $800 Jimmy Choos to order $16 lychee martinis and still pay rent, could they?
So we felt safe. The Apple was still crispy and full of juice. Estates in the Hamptons were sold (with otherworldly prescience, or maybe just common sense) for $50 mil and up, including a pair of adjacent oceanfront lots that a fund manager bought for $103 million. He's going to knock down the houses and build a big one. Some real estate pundits thought he made a good deal.
Until recently. As the big firms took ill and died, the whimpering began. Bear Stearns fell, along with Lehman, Merrill, AIG, some of the big hedgies. . . and now everyone's finally scared. There aren't any Visigoths at the gates of the Imperial City. The striped suits did the deed on their own, blinded by the smoke from their Cohibas.
Two years ago, a huge housing development that had been a middle-class stronghold since the 1940s sold for $5.4 billion, the biggest real estate deal in modern history. Last week, the new landlords, already staggering under the twin burdens of unrealistic expectations and falling revenues, took a hit as their bonds were downgraded by Standard & Poor. Major commercial leases worth hundreds of millions, waiting for signatures, were torn up as the prospective tenants found that they could realize major savings.
Many if not most of the 40-somethings and their younger cohorts have never seen stuff like this. It's not supposed to be like this. They didn't claw their way through Princeton and Harvard Biz and spend those 120-hour weeks sleeping on couches at Goldman so they could be told they have to start economizing. What's next? Doing their own laundry?
Those of us who stood outside, reading the menus in front of the $200-assiette restaurants, shaking our heads and smiling wistfully before turning and slogging off to work, grateful to have a job, probably won't be shedding a lot of tears. And as for the truffle-studded saucissons for the ride to East Hampton. . . somehow I don't think the traffic will be that bad on Route 27 next summer after all.
Bill Mehlman is a New York writer. 
