What is the future of New York City?
Every once in a while I’ll come across a title of an article that is better than the article itself, sometimes even on this very website. The book jacket is just better than the book. I’ve actually met a few people like this too, and after marveling at the beauty of the jacket and renewing the book a few times, I’ll come to the odd realization that the jacket may have atrophied the contents of the book.
With that complete digression I’d like to present you with an article I just read in the New York Times called New York Is Dead. Long Live New York. The title is very good and the content is kind of good. It basically posits five possible futures for New York: (i) a bankrupt, dirty ghost town; (ii) a progressive utopia; (iii) a party city; (iv) a concrete tech haven à la Silicon Valley; and (v) basically what it was before.
Chelsea resident Michael Musto offers some fun thoughts on option (iii):
“People will practically be mating in the streets,” said Michael Musto, the longtime nightlife columnist for the Village Voice, now back in quarterly form. “Fueling all that, cunning entrepreneurs will swoop into all the empty storefronts to reinvent them as dance clubs and other pleasure palaces.”
“People might even look up from their phones,” he added.
New York’s swingers clubs are already gearing up. Snctm, a members-only club, returns this month with erotic masquerades that recall the haute orgy scenes in “Eyes Wide Shut.” Killing Kittens, a London-based members-only club that throws lavish fem-dom erotic parties, returns later this spring, and the club’s founder, Emma Sayle, thinks that pent-up passions, along with more acceptance for non-monogamy and polyamory, will lay the groundwork for next-level indulgence. “As far as we’re concerned,” she said, “it’s go big or go home.”
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, though I should say I have no real sense of what and where the poles are. Whatever it was, whatever it is now, whatever it will be in the future, long live New York.
