Stuyvesant Oval by Knile.
Like a lot of us, I read the story in New York Press about how these college kids were invading Stuy, and even getting 2 months' free rent and coupons for $500 and turning the Oval into a beach with sun-tanners, dope-smokers and even dog-walkers.
Looking out over Waterside Plaza, and not seeing anything much happening out on the baking tiles except two helicoptering moms with two summer babies squalling (don't worry, they will finally fall asleep this winter) and an elderly women tanning herself and smoking cigarettes who had no intention, ever, in her life, of dying of cancer....
...I realized I had to go where the party was.
Heading over to Stuy, I skirted the edges of what the kids call "the white projects". Traipsing through what our old nanny Larissa used to call belyochiy park (Squirrel Park) in Cooper, I caught up with...an old lady struggling along with her walker and a home attendant in tow. She didn't even have a transistor tuned to a classical station.
Was I too late?
Pressing on, I went further into the Oval area in Stuy expecting to have to elbow my way through a throng of bikini-clad co-eds and muscle-bound BMOCs.
The place was deserted, except for a few of those really cheerful, innocent corn-fed sort of southern girls in the big city for the first time who were quizzing an older man as to whether there were any "fun places" nearby. Maybe they hadn't read New York Press and realized they were *in* the fun place already? Except, as one of the commenters put it, getting outside your apartment to see...other apartments...wasn't the thrill perhaps one had been led to expect.
Perhaps everybody fled to Atlantic City for the long weekend.
I imagine college kids would be attractive to a landlord because they'd move out in a year or at least four years, and then you could raise the rent again, whereas a family might stay for decades. NYP claims that Stuy has money problems too -- I think the luxury apartment thing isn't really a big seller right atm.
I think Stuyvesant -- and Cooper -- are big enough to accommodate different kinds of people from town and gown -- after all, after hours, the town kids jump in the fountain drunk, cut their feet, and put their pictures up on Facebook, making it easy for management to catch them lol. I think the gown kids tend to stay in their apartments to drink.
Well, this is one of those stories that journalists -- in this case a reporter who lives here and wants to write "about me" -- may not stay on because it may not stay true or may change.
So TPB will keep a "watch" on the situation, mindful of the passions involved and snark available to be applied.
Comments