The NY Times Real Estate section is the Rosencrantz to the Style Section's Guildenstern, the yin and yang of out-of-touch manufactured high class trend stories. This weekend, the world's most unintentionally hilarious newspaper put forth yet another brilliant missive about the struggles of the oh so rich centered around a particularly relatable concern: "You are seeing people ask themselves: Do I have an affair, get a divorce or get a downtown apartment?" said Michele Kleier, the president and chairwoman of Kleier Residential. "It has become a very sexy thing to do, especially for those people living a sedate Park Avenue lifestyle."
Yes, the hottest trend for NYC's upper elite is to venture below 59th Street, "embracing downtown neighborhoods that would once have been considered unthinkable" as the Times put it. “Downtown is livelier — we feel as though we have been in Milan for the weekend,” said Brooke Garber Neidich, a chairwoman of the Whitney Museum whose resume reads like the ideal fit for a Weddings Section biography, and who apparently has never been to Milan....unless Milan opened up their own Welcome To The Johnsons outpost and no one told us.
With all the kids stuck in a gentrification loop in Brooklyn or buying $1 million condos in Bed-Stuy, the olds have begun to cautiously venture to the abandoned Lower East Side, where the kickball games go all night long.
“I think there is a big romance about living downtown,” said developer and (apparently) amateur anthropologist Izak Senbahar. “It is much more diverse, it isn’t all fund managers, but artists, literary people, then some Wall Street sprinkled in.” These Upper East and West Siders are quickly discovering that life below the 59th Street fault line of Manhattan is wild and untamed, a wild west for the gaggles of Muffys and Thurstons: “You can go out to dinner and you don’t have to be dressed,” said Linda Lambert. “You don’t have to wear jewelry.”
