Some things never change. For example, did you know that Iron Maiden is still on tour?
Additionally, the culture war over livable streets in New York continues to rage, with the NIMBY side deriding the YIMBY side as “grafts”:
CM @VickieforNYC hurled insults at @chabot_jackson because he wasn’t born in New York??? pic.twitter.com/b0o6riWDi0
– Open New York (@OpenNYForAll) October 22, 2024
And fiercely defending the Almighty Car:
Transplants new to New York have no right to insist that we redesign our entire city according to their agenda just because they hate people who own cars. Sorry, we are not Barcelona or Amsterdam. Go get transplanted there if it’s that great.
I said what I said.
– City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (@VickieforNYC) October 22, 2024
After officially checking this stuff out, I mostly find the discourse around it all amusing, and so it’s impossible for me to generate real outrage here. However, while Councilwoman Vicky Paladino and her constituents are certainly entitled to their opinions regarding cars, she is absolutely wrong about what “transplants who just arrived in New York” can and cannot do. The fact is that this city belongs to transplants, it always has. Just ask these guys with the pipes:
Oh wait, you can’t. That’s because the clerks took over and sent them packing. And it’s been that way ever since. So whether it’s a Dutch merchant or a senior product marketing manager at Etsy, money talks in this town, and that’s it.
So while it’s completely natural for vintage New Yorkers to be unhappy with newer models, they should also keep in mind that this whole “transplant” thing doesn’t really apply anymore. Consider bike lanes, which all “real New Yorkers” supposedly hate, and which began to appear in earnest in 2007 when Janette Sadik-Khan began her reign of terror as commissioner of the city’s Department of Transportation. New York :
And the city’s first protected bike lane appeared on 9th Avenue in Manhattan:
[From here.]
Now, if we stick to the idea that the kind of people who advocate these things are a bunch of moronic transplants with liberal arts degrees – which is undoubtedly the case with a lot of them them – it is also true that at least some of them have been reproduced. Well, at least those who haven’t decided not to do it to save the planet, anyway:
This means that a baby conceived when Sadik-Khan took office (and many of these people probably had sex to celebrate) will soon be old enough to vote. In other words, the so-called “transplants” are now in their second generation. So, is a child born in Brooklyn who grew up being transported by a transplant in a bakfiets also a transplant? And if in a few years they too carry theirs Genderless kids in Bakfietsen campaigning for even more bike lanes, is it still accurate to say that a bunch of whiny transplants are trying to remake the city? Barely. What’s going on there is a bunch of entitled crybabies Native New Yorkers trying to remake the city. In reality, as I’ve pointed out before, the only difference between a typical livable streets advocate and a typical NIMBY is the type of restaurants they prefer. (One likes expensive farm-to-table restaurants with bike corrals, the other likes expensive Italian restaurants with valet parking.) In fact, I’m sure a few generations ago someone was equally disgusted with one of Vickie Paladino’s transplanted ancestors for blocking Mott. Street with his stroller or something like that.
Indeed, when it comes to New York, at the risk of relying on a cliché, the only constant is change. Consider this before and after photo of 9th Avenue that I posted above. Before this bike path, it was a great place to pick up a transsexual prostitute. (Um, at least that’s what I heard!) Today it has Google and an Apple Store, the High Line, and a bunch of galleries and fancy hotels and everything in between:
Maybe you don’t like all this money and corporate monoculture. Maybe you even miss the whores. But it happened, and it’s not because of the bike lane.
Ultimately, New York keeps New York whether you like it or not – and you probably don’t, because no one really likes it here except those who managed to come to terms with the former part of this sentence. Or, if you can’t accept that, you can at least accept the idea that you have to go crazy and then get away with it, and in that regard, I suspect the transsexual prostitutes of yesteryear and the tech workers of today share a lot in common.
Streetsblog points out that New York can learn from other cities:
Although they are not always the utopias that the complacent pretend to be:
Not by far:
Cycle paths are not necessarily greener on the other side.