Golly gee, New York City’s an unaffordable hellhole for everyone except the rich! Now, why have I been reading and hearing that since I was a newborn baby 73 years ago?
Because it’s a good yarn, that’s why, no matter how weather-beaten the notion is.
The New York Times hauled us down that well–trampled street last week with an essay titled, “Behind the Gates of a Private World for Only the Wealthiest New Yorkers.”
Writer Eliza Shapiro has fun snarking about “private” laundry services, helicopter rides and at-home IV drips to “revitalize” the tired and stressed among us.
Taken on its own terms, her specimen of the “tale of two cities” genre that predates Bill de Blasio by approximately a century is entertaining and, appropriately, gently infuriating by turns.
But the underlying cultural and economic premise is merely infuriating.
The Times can’t stop scolding readers that their presumably comfortable lives exist tangent to an infinitely vast firmament of the wider New York world of privation, emotional desolation, and all-around misery.
It’s an article of faith among Times journalists that privilege, no matter how hard-earned, is suspect at best and colonialist, predatory, racist, sexist, and criminal at worst.
Recall, if you can stomach it, de Blasio’s undisguised contempt not only for the “rich” but for hard-working store and small business owners whom he regarded as bloodsucking insects preying on the masses and therefore deserving of ceaseless regulatory harassment.
New York, or the dream of it, has always been about excess. And about what’s now called “inequity,” although a more intelligent way to express it might be, “Life’s a bitch.”
My favorite columnist, the late, great Pete Hamill, once wrote that the city’s central reality was that it had “very, very few very, very rich people and many, many, many very, very poor people.”
That was in 1973. True then, true now.
But there was, and is, a great middle-ground of middle- and working-class people who get on remarkably well despite absurd housing costs and yet without “concierge” medical care.
The Times essay’s opening sentence, “It’s a great time to be rich in New York City,” implies that our present epoch is aberrational.
But when was it not a great time to be rich here? The Rockefellers had a whale of a time during the Great Depression.
They built Rockefeller Center, didn’t they? Film stars, art dealers, tennis greats, models, and Wall Street scions partied until the wee hours at Studio 54 during Gotham’s fiscal meltdown in the late 1970s — when the burned-out moonscape of the South Bronx mocked what we today call an “affordable housing shortage.”
Ah, but, “The pandemic changed so much,” the founder of a domestic staffing agency told Shapiro. She had so much new business she had to double her company’s size.
Of course, in the 1980s and ‘90s one-percenters like John and Susan Gutfreund shunned such services and cheerfully pushed brooms around their penthouses themselves.
Shapiro wrote that “a new class of private, members-only and concierge services is emerging as a kind of gated community within the city.”
But there’s a difference between a metaphorical gated community and an actual one.
More than a few progressive New York pols and “advocates” hide behind their own heavily guarded domiciles.
Far-left, NYPD-hating public advocate Jumaane Williams was caught living in a townhouse on a Brooklyn army base where, as The Post reported, “he enjoys free, around-the-clock security.”
Even Mayor Eric Adams’ “favorite haunt is a members-only club,” we’re told.
I deplore the recent plague of private dining facilities as much as Shapiro seems to. But give the guy a break.
By every account, Adams spends less time at Zero Bond than he once did.
He goes to more ordinary restaurants than Rudy Giuliani did.
He spent election night at an Italian place on West 52nd Street.
He showed up on the opening night of an ordinary steakhouse last week.
As for ultra-exclusive Casa Cipriani atop the Battery Maritime Building, it’s “a social club in a modern sense where style, décor, privacy, and respect are still appreciated values,” a spokeswoman responded to Shapiro’s inquiry about membership wait-lists.
But the place apparently doesn’t appreciate its own clientele.
Page Six recently reported that management is “purging” members in the hope of replacing them with “cooler clientele, like art world people, more high-profile.”
Now, isn’t that rich.
scuozzo@nypost.com
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