Sharon Zukin's Prayer for The City

My cousin, a 30-year-old securities lawyer who takes more jaunts to places like Moscow and South Beach than to his office, has lived in Manhattan for years. His new apartment—a glistening, glass-walled, nearly transparent ridgeline of a building on the Bowery near Houston Street with an attended lobby and well-manicured roof deck and $4,000 per month rent—imposes little of the spectre of its neighborhood’s past. It manages to be all hulk and angles, yet achieves that New York new-construction anonymity. It sits around the corner from the old CBGB (now, of course, the edgy John Varvatos storefront), and a half dozen discount chandelier shops. The alley that buffers it has an artisanal chocolate boutique at its end. He finds no irony in this at all.

Sociologist Sharon Zukin, however, finds the irony endless, and more than a little dejecting.