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There are no collapsing towers or jets screaming overhead, but, storefront by storefront, the economic crisis is ripping holes in the city.
By Tom Engelhardt
March 22, 2009
One in an occasional series.
Ablock from my Manhattan apartment, on a still largely mom-and-pop, relatively low-slung stretch of Broadway, two spanking new apartment towers sprouted just as the good times were ending. A massive ground-floor window on one of them displays a message advertising retail space in white letters against a bright red background: "Locate yourself at the center of the fastest expanding portion of the affluent Upper West Side."
Successive windows assure potential renters that this retail space (10,586 square feet available! 110 feet of frontage! 30-foot ceilings! Multiple configurations possible!) is conveniently located only "steps from the 96th Street subway station, servicing 11 million riders annually."