Political control is on its way out everywhere, even in developing countries. But strangely, one of the ugliest physical vestiges of communism seems to be flourishing in a surprising place New York City. The city is booming, and new apartment buildings pop up on every available square foot of real estate. Yet, the more the island of Manhattan becomes the playground of the rich and famous, the more those buildings come to resemble the dreary residential blocks that sprung up on the outskirts of every city in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the decades of communism. There are huge differences, of course.
Manhattan buildings have marble-faced lobbies with live flowers and uniformed doormen.
Manhattan developers tore down quirky low-rise structures to make room for their new buildings. Soviet planners tore down the bourgeois. To make room for those aesthetic and functional monstrosities, developers bulldozed quirky low-rise buildings that housed unusual businesses and helped make New York so appealing. This too makes the current Manhattan boom similar to the communist building methods, where everything from the bourgeois past was razed to the ground. After all, New York is the self-proclaimed capital of greed and the center of the world.