OY + YO = home
By: Zachary Thacher
Tags: Nomad, Brooklyn, New York, Covid 19, Memoir

October 2020 — New York City

After seven months of living in rural New England, I’ve now landed in the most inevitable place possible for a guy priced out of Manhattan—and who also became alienated by the amoral “luxury” now dominating a once scrappy and creative island. Inevitably, I’m now living in the borough where OY meets YO. It’s my happy place. If you don’t know where I mean, keep reading…

But hey, why not return to Manhattan? Great question. The 2008 financial meltdown taught New York developers and our ostensibly “liberal" government absolutely nothing. Was there soul searching and bold new low cost cooperatives for middle class people? Did the wealthy oligarchs depart for Florida and middle-income people move in? Do pigs have jet packs?

For the past twelve years we’ve charged ahead, after Wall Street destroyed our economy, with the same fervency to steal wealth upwards. Bush, Obama, Trump, no difference in direction. We’re more and more a city of a few white people clutching onto their wealth while masses of disenfranchised people afford less and less, especially during Covid.

When you have a glut of $2 million one-bedroom apartments, you know something is wrong. (The link goes to a real estate listing that shows 123 Manhattan apartments selling from $2M to $4.5M. For a one bedroom. Think about that.)

For me, Hudson Yards is what sent me teetering in 2019. It’s a housing project for extremely wealthy people, subsidized by the government via lax zoning and tax breaks, since in America, socialism is reserved for the rich. Everyone else gets warlordism, I mean, capitalism. Don’t believe me? Try getting lower cost internet for your home. Try getting a home.

Hudson Yards is a symbol of a greater trend, and a physical manifestation of it. It’s aggression cloaked in sub zero banality. If this is what Manhattan prioritizes: ultra-expensive, architecturally-vapid towers stuffed with impossibly expensive housing, surrounding a mall of high-end chain stores, fenced off by a wall lording over 10th Avenue, and the invisible wall of wealth you have to scale to live or eat or shop there, then that’s it. Game over, dude. There’s no future for Manhattan except as a playground for the 1%. Add as many decimals as you need.

For the record, this is also happening in Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. There’s a giant rusting toilet bowl that is Barclay’s Center, a venue named after a bank that rigged interest rates for years which ended in long prison terms for the firm’s entire c-suite. Oh wait. They’re living large in Marylebone.

Thankfully, Brooklyn is vast enough to absorb the Atlantic Yards mega project that is moving as slowly as Jeff Bezos’ charitable donations, but Hudson Yards has dented Manhattan irreparably. It’s nearly 30 acres of glass towers built on a giant pedestal — metaphors abound — that I would say reminds me of Dubai, except Dubai is far more bold, and also, far more expected from a fossil-fuel autocracy. Hudson Yards’ stalagmites of glass rectangles are artfully tapered, world-class middle fingers to the rest of us. Maybe the Trump-supporting developer, Stephen Ross, has a wicked sense of humor. Certainly he has the adjective.

Manhattan’s older neighborhoods are still gorgeous gems of 19th Century pre-car living, I lived in the West Village for nearly 20 years, but they’ve become as precious and darling as a museum funded by rich people. What happened to the hole in the wall Italian restaurant on Hudson Street with Chicken Milanese on peppery arugula for under $10 and served plonk in plastic? The Czech café on Perry Street with writers and illustrators and loungers who chatted with you instead of staring at phones? The antique shop on Bleecker run by a woman who looked just like David Bowie’s sister, down to the blonde hair and ballet figure? First they were replaced by anti-fashion Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers boutiques, then they were replaced by… the vacuum of space. Storefronts shuttered. Years before Covid. Where will those owners of $2 million plus one-bedroom shop for hundred dollar t-shirts? (Cf. Jeff Bezos.)

Hudson Yards pitched me off balance as a guy who loved downtown living after having spent an incredible day as a teenager in Soho in the mid 80s. Seeing my uncle’s girlfriend’s loft, meeting her skateboarding son with floppy dyed hair, gawking at fresh art by Keith Haring on city walls — that experience forever inspired me.

Manhattan became a lifelong lover I once had deep feelings for and now no longer recognized. What happened? It used to be so good, Manhattan. Now I don’t know, you’ve changed.

I could have done the off-balance shimmy for years longer, housing was expensive everywhere so why move? Covid pushed me. Hard. Fell right off the edge. And by fell I mean I fled — for friends in New England. They gave me seven blissful months of fresh air with wonderful company and outdoor meals and organic farming and camaraderie and safety and understanding when I was frightened. I am forever grateful.

During these long months of temporary staycation, I searched for a new longterm home, first by my friend’s farm outside Concord MA.

Then the Pioneer Valley around Northampton.

I visited a co-housing project in Moretown, VT. I moved in with friends in Charlotte, VT.

I Airbnb’ed in apartments by truck routes in the Hudson River Valley:

Hudson

Tarrytown

Beacon

I considered Rhinebeck and Hastings and New Paltz and a few other places, but everywhere I went, I knew no one. Most are great towns, housing is more affordable than Stephen Ross would have you believe, but what about winter?

I pushed south, down to the mouth of the Hudson and then east, over the Atlantic inlet that forms the East River. I headed to the city for Rosh Hashanah, for dating, for family and for old friends.

So now you know, if you don’t know. (Cf. Biggie Smalls.) Oy, I’m in Brooklyn, Yo. Where Jewish and Black culture sparkle and reflect against each other and everyone else from all over the world so beautifully — as expressed by Deborah Kass’s 2015 sculpture.

Brooklyn feels like home. Only took me twenty years of saying I’d move here to finally make it so, as Star Trek’s Captain Picard says. Patrick Stewart also lives in Brooklyn.