Buyers who wait for a New York neighborhood to change before purchasing might miss a chance to get in cheap or at all. The gentrification of the Upper West Side, Park Slope and Soho more than two decades ago might point to how the next hot neighborhoods may emerge.
In a new “Looking Back” feature, The Real Deal examines the modern-day origins of these neighborhoods all of which underwent gentrification in the late 1970s and early 1980s–with the help of interviews and archival sources.
Our first of three installments looks at the transformation of the Upper West Side from a decayed and dowdy survivor of the city’s late 1970s financial crisis into its current incarnation.
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Tourists and newcomers to New York might find it hard to believe that the word “sleazy” could be used to characterize the Upper West Side, but that’s just how the New York Times described Broadway between 59th and 96th streets in a 1982 article, which credited the area with a “sleazy vitality” that improved on its condition in the previous decade. At the time, in the midst of its early- 80’s redevelopment, the ambiance was becoming “genteel, even prissy” and “increasingly successful at attracting the class of young affluent professionals who have for so long felt at home on the Upper East Side,” the Times reported.
Today, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue are lined with restaurants–some with white tablecloths and candles, some less classy–as well as boutiques and national chain stores such as Victoria’s Secret and Pottery Barn. Housing prices have increased by extraordinary lengths since the Gray Lady weighed in back then, and now the Upper West Side has relative pricing uniformity up as far as 110th Street.
For decades, property values on the West Side trailed far behind those of the East Side, but in 1979, the margin narrowed dramatically, almost overnight, wrote Barbara Corcoran, founder of The Corcoran Group, in her book “Use What You’ve Got, and Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom.”
The reason for the speedy gentrification, according to Corcoran: the “thirty-something” children of affluent parents on the East Side were moving in. She ignored naysayers who she said called her “crazy” and opened a huge West Side office to capitalize on the influx.
The Upper West Side’s rejuvenation happened despite abundant graffiti, abandoned buildings and the city’s fiscal crisis. At the same time neighborhoods such as the East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Yorkville and Park Slope were transformed by an urban-style social revolt.
Baby boomers rejected the lifestyles and values of their parents and “moved to rural Vermont or back to the city that Mom and Dad fled,” according to the Times. On the Upper West Side that often meant moving in to new construction or renovating old brownstones and hotels. At the time, the changes were expected to push poor residents from the neighborhood, and as observers correctly predicted put the squeeze to many middle-class residents as well.
Today, the Upper West Side is synonymous with a sort of settled, familial affluence. The asking price of a five-story townhouse recently listed by Corcoran is $8.25 million, an unimaginable price 20 years ago. Two-bedroom co-op apartments averaged more than $1 million last year, and two-bedroom condos around $1.7 million. Prices reach up to $23.5 million, the asking price for three adjoining apartments being sold in the legendary San Remo that could set a record for the most expensive apartment on Central Park West.
Next month: Manhattan refugees turn Park Slope from scruffy to spiffy in the 1980s, seeing the sparkle in tarnished, aging brownstones.