The Suburbanization of New York?

The second half of the title is "Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?"

I have just dipped into this book so far, but it is almost completely Manhattan-centric. Chain stores, fast food, and Starbucks replacing everything that was unique about the island, which was especially its intense and next-door close mixture of low-and-high end stores, bars, and restaurants; and the rich, middle-class (emphasis) and poor living in close proximity. Every three blocks or so, wrote EB White in his famous "Here is New York" essay, was like an entire town elsewhere in the country.

Living in the outer New Jersey suburbs, but connected by both frequent rail and bus, I grew up vicariously in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. (This included being threatened by various Ratso Rizzzo dirtbags when my teen friends and I went to get fake ID's in Times Square).

One of my favorite places was a magazine store on 43rd just off of Eighth Ave. that sold old "National Lampoons" from the early 70s that were absolutely hilarious and dirty as hell. Their fake news section was a precursor to "the Onion" and helped me construct an entirely bogus and funny newspaper for my fraternity at Tulane (before leaving for Madison, where the uber-serious lefty Daily Cardinal wouldn't even print an April Fool's paper).

The last time I took the misnamed "New York Express" bus into the Port Authority, the New York Times had replaced the "massage parlors (read whorehouses) on Eighth.

But this is begging the question: to be authentic, does a city have to cater to vice, crime, and the needs of the poor and working class? No, the point of most of the essays in the book is that blocks that used to contain a local business squeezed into every doorway now have been taken over by block-long Duane Reade's.

But everything else in the world has been changed by technology and the global economy, so why not Manhattan's mom-and-pop businesses? A city is organic, constantly changing, especially in world economy command-and-control centers like Manhattan, London, and Tokyo.

What needs to happen is for western Brooklyn to congeal. Hipster Williamsburg needs to connect to yuppieish Park Slope, Carroll Gardens et. al. There needs to be a new center of youthful discontent, a square that served the purpose of Tompkins Sq. Park in the 1980s.

One last note, to Rambler especially, is that 75 percent of Harlem is either rent controlled, regulated, or public housing. 125 St. will never be upper Madison Ave.

Looking out from the top of the bluff of Morningside Park in the 1980s (when a cousin and a friend were at adjacent Columbia), you saw below you a cityscape of abandoned buildings. When I went back about 7 years ago, everything was occupied. Is this so bad? Is Harlem not "real" unless it's black and poor?
More later when I've actually read and digested the book.