One of my favorite dining places may be shoved out by high rents

[ellen_datlow]

Just got this alert from a friend:
Florent and greedy landlords

I'm really depressed about this. It's the last bastion of reasonable prices and a fun, relaxed atmosphere in a neighborhood that has been drowned by greed and real estate lust. This absolutely sucks if it's true.

Comments

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

That's a drag. Florent is a cool place, especially late at night.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Jack passed the report on to me.
I only went there once verryy late at night--Pat Cadigan and I stayed up all night to be on Jim Freund's radio show at 5pm and spent some time at Florent's around 3am. Awful--so smoky we couldn't breathe and boisterous icky company.
Thank god, no more smoking. I was there for dinner recently and it was great.

[readwrite.livejournal.com]

It's always been relaxed when I was there. And presumably no one smokes inside anymore...

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it's happening all over. Here in Dallas, the big boom is in evicting good restaurants and businesses in buildings with some sort of historical heritage, and then demolishing them before anyone can file protection papers. I really don't know what to do about it, and in an age where even CBGB's shuts down, the road ahead is getting awfully misty.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I know. The one positive thing I'd hoped the economic downturn would accomplish, was to slow down the real estate boom in NYC. So far, no go.

The last few actual meat packing places in the "meat market" are leaving. The facades of the buildings are landmarked, but installing high end designer shops and restaurants preserves nothing but empty shells. It makes nauseates me.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

If I've learned anything from watching the situation in Dallas, it's that economic downturns fire up real estate booms. In most cases, it's because the developers know that they'll probably lose the money on existing loans if they don't do anything with it, so they rush to spend it all before the bank can take it back. As for the property once it's finished, well, that's someone else's responsibility, and they'll either let the bank claim it or sell it to a sucker at what seems to be a great price. Meanwhile, since the general public sees so much activity, other greedheads figure "Hey, this is a great idea! I want to get in on this, too!" and jump in. Not only is the area flooded with more high-end retail and restaurant space than it'll ever need, but the owners get more of a tax writeoff by leaving it empty than they'd ever get by lowering rents to fill it up. In the long run, any ecomonic recovery is actually stalled by the real estate booms, because new businesses can't find spaces for anything less than what "some guy" told the owners the space is worth, and they can't attract business in retail areas that are otherwise empty and abandoned. Welp, time to demolish it all and build fresh!

As for the shells, the Dallas Hard Rock Cafe, one of the enduring symbols of the last Dallas real estate rush, was demolished last weekend by the same developer who swore he was going to preserve it. Even worse, the original building was a 106-year-old church, and the developer deliberately tore it down before anyone could register it as a historic space. I'll bet $10 right now that the space will remain empty for years, because said developer won't be able to find anyone crazy enough to pay his price. (And it gets worse: the Twenties-era Arcadia Theater burned down two years ago, amazingly coincidentally right after the owner was told he couldn't demolish it, and the old space is still empty. The worst, though, had to have been the "restoration" of the historic Knox-Henderson plaza in the early Nineties, where the developer was told that he would have to preserve the original facades of the plaza stores. He followed the letter of the law, propping up the facades with posts while tearing out everything behind them, and then pretended to look surprised when those posts "accidentally" gave way one night and caused the entire two-block stretch to crash into the street. Within three days, he'd bulldozed out the wreckage and put in the chain restaurants he'd wanted to build in the first place.)

[shvetufae.livejournal.com]

That really does seem to be the fate everywhere. . .and I am really tired of everything unique going, only to be replaced by a Walgreen's or a Bank of America.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

We don't even get that: oh, Dallas gets a lot of the unique little places replaced with BofA or CVS Pharmacy spots, true, but the real aggravation comes from when the developers tear down the original, put up a sign reading "COMING SOON," and then run like hell with the money. Literally up the street from me, one of the only decent repair garages in the area was sold and torn down almost a year ago, and all we have to show for it is a big mudhole with a sign promising an upcoming branch of a bank that was bought by Wachovia just after the demolition. The only good that came from the whole schmeal was that I was able to salvage some of the cinder blocks from the wreckage for my greenhouse, but that's not enough.

What really worries me is that I saw the same exact thing happen in this area during the oil bust of 1986, when all of the development speculation dependent upon the high price of West Texas Intermediate fell through when the price of oil dropped through the floor. The relatively minor concerns came from developers with plans for shopping malls and high-rise apartments who saw the reality that they were never going to see a profit and grabbed the money to finance their early retirements in Rio. (This literally happened with a shopping mall in my old home town north of here, and the mall was finally built when the city offered to cover most of the absconded $20 million for another developer to finish the job.) The scary ones are the projects that become major health and safety threats when they're abandoned; Back in the Eighties, one of these developers started work on excavating a gigantic foundation pit for an intended hotel/apartment highrise/supergym near downtown Dallas and buggered out when the oil market crashed: the hole abutted two major roads, so its erosion was a literal threat to drivers trying to get to work or home. The hole had been inadequately shored up in the first place, so the city had to take responsibility for reshoring it, as well as running sump pumps and spraying for mosquitoes in our newest city lake, and the hole was finally dealt with nearly fifteen years later. After nearly 20 years of seeing half-finished industrial parks, residential subdivisions, and strip malls slowly being completed or demolished, I'm wondering what similar nightmares are going to spring up when the current round of greedheads decide that they don't want their toys any more.

[rosefox]

Oh my god. I grew up there.

*cries*

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There are some assholes commenting on the original post--go there and kick their asses! Like I've tried to (tactfully).

[livia-llewellyn.livejournal.com]

Whoever wrote the "Cloverfield" comment is my new hero.

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

The last vestiges of old Americana are doomed. The international corporate empire, with help from our treasonous American leaders, have engineered America's down turned economy so that ultra wealthy investors can buy up property and muscle out old fashioned, small time entrepreneurs--not to mention the middle class.

Artists and writers will suffer, I'm afraid, along with everyone else who has not sold his/her soul to ol' Scratch for a wretched fortune in gold.

Forgive me for waxing political, but the whole mess makes me want to puke. And I don't see any end to it in sight.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Please feel free to vent. I feel the same way :-(

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

I don't think we're lone rangers.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Oh not at all--I also got two emails from friends responding to my post and everyone's comments.