It Goes Full Circle

Never in my life did I think that seeing a bunch of kids drinking in the street would bother me. Mind you 15 years ago I was drinking on the same stoops.

When the city cracked down with their “Quality Of Life” campaign I was really bummed. There was a sort of class rift that came of it. The question in the back of many a citizen’s mind was “quality of life for whom?”. The simple and mildly illegal pleasures of the lower and working classes were gone. No more brown bagging your beer on a nice summer walk. No more drinking wine at Mostly Mozart in the park (unless of course you are in higher status) and no ice cold beer on the beach.

I can see why these enforcements came to be. I understood why they needed to be. But it was frustrating to watch things get revoked from the lower classes of the city and yet the upper classes were really allowed to do as they pleased.

Gentrification set in and pushed away the people who made these new frontiers what they were. The East Village and The Lower East Side are just shells of what they were. While they were always a party spot they have become the hip and happening party spots for the trust fund kids, the middle class hipsters and even the bridge and tunnel crowd. I never in a million years thought that Ludlow and Stanton would be the new Soho. I never had the foresight to think that Chinatown would elevate from dive bar status. Nor did I ever think that there would be velvet roped lines and guestlists on Ave. D.

So here I am 10 or more years later walking down a familiar strip where as a youth I spent many a night drinking on stoops. It’s 1am and once upon a time I’d at least see a few familiar faces, but instead it’s a sea of endless strangers. All drinking brazenly on the street. Large bottles of Asahi in the hands of youth where once a 22 oz. of malt liquor was the norm. But these young men and women are much different than the youth that paraded and littered this very strip. They are from good homes. Money is never an issue and more importantly, they are outside of the law.

A cop car cruises past and takes in the same visual. For a moment I had hopes that they would clean up the streets and get rid of this mess. Instead they stop a few feet down and make a homeless man vacate from the store front he was camping in front of. Probably a safe target seeing as he will never be able to afford a lawyer. I grab a coffee and plant my ass on a stoop I was once very familiar on and wish that someone would in fact do something about the quality of life around here and I laugh.