Going up in the world ... the newly gentrified Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty
Last week I met someone who remembered paying $75 a month for an apartment in Manhattan. Granted, this was back in the 70s - and her place was down in Wall Street. But these numbers still make the eye twitch. They pop up in books and biographies, taunting New Yorkers in the present day. In Downtown, the journalist Pete Hamill recalls paying $58 a month on 9th Street.
Twenty years earlier, future New Yorker scribe EB White was forking out twice that for a walk-up over on 13th Street. Sounds like a lot of money, but it's only $1,100 in today's dollars - roughly a third of what the apartment would rent for today.
All these figures are on my mind lately because in November the New York Post reported that Manhattan dwellers earned three times more on average than other Americans - $147,000 per year. In many parts of America this is doctor money, big house money, buy-a- Hummer-with-all-the-trimmings money. It is not, except for among a small percentage of the most successful, writer money.
In truth, Manhattan has not been a writerly town for quite some time. Many of our storied independent bookstores have shut their doors. Starbucks lowered its shoulder and hip-checked many coffee shops off the island. And bohemia has gone, well, elsewhere. America is living in a new gilded age, and Manhattan is at the mouth of that swiftly moving river of cash. Each week, it would seem, ground is broken for another 40-storey office tower or apartment block. There are more places than ever to spend your money. Our housing market has supposed taken a hit, and yet four bedrooms on the east side were up 17% this year to an average price of $6.6m.
New York wasn't always such a Disneyland for adults. If you want a taste of how things used to be, pick up a copy of Brandon Stosuy's Up is Up But So is Down (NYU Press), a cultural history of the downtown arts scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Stousy describes a reading circuit which looked like costume dramas, gross miscegenation between painters and writers, and writers who took themselves so seriously they wound up burlesquing their own hubris. The hip journal of the day - Between C&D - was printed on dot matrix paper, as if mocking any claim its pages made to permanence.
One of the reasons why New York has hitherto been such a wonderful city for writers is that it's always changing. Nothing is sacred - even Stanford White's designs have been torn down for the sake of economic progress. To live here is to feel that incessant jostle for newness, for an angle; commerce's bacchanalian appetite always looking to feed. One needn't write of this directly, as Sinclair Lewis and Tom Wolfe have done, to feel its effect. One senses this mania refracted in the pages of Don DeLillo and William Gaddis - the city as monolith.
But how would this city look if its chroniclers were all looking at it from across the river? Manhattan has not become a ghost town for writers - Jonathan Franzen, Michael Cunningham, Jay McInerney, and Mary Gordan all live here, just to name a few - but there's been an exodus to Brooklyn and Queens in the past two decades which will only continue if housing remains this expensive. Not long ago, I was at a party to benefit a downtown arts space - actually called Housing Works - and a reporter asked me if there was in fact a downtown arts community. I had to admit all the people standing around us lived in Brooklyn.
I don't see this changing. Except for the Mercantile Library, which has a writer's studio that was once used to by O Henry which it gives to novelists, there are very few cheap places to work in Manhattan, let alone live. Starbucks attracts students. Doma, one of the few writer-friendly cafes in the West Village, has become overrun with screenwriters. I wouldn't be surprised to see a trend of writers embracing the deliberately un-hip. Uptown, a cluster of novelists gathers at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. In truth, their linzer torte will give you diabetes, and the coffee's so-so. But it's warm, it's cheap, and you won't be crowded - and that's more than you can say for most of the apartments a writer can afford in this town.
