Shouldn’t we all just be glad that new affordable units were built at all?

Anyone who has dealt with the world of New York City real estate knows that its business is conducted in a euphemistic language second only to Orwellian Newspeak in sheer terminological deceit. “True one bedroom,” “spacious,” “comfy,” “sexy,” “cool,” “amazing,” “super amazing,” even nouns as seemingly uncontestable as “closet” and “light”: all are ruthless attempts to manipulate a population in which the prospect of hardwood floors buffed to a high gloss inspires a degree of lust beyond that of mere human flesh. Just this past weekend, I visited a “studio apartment” for which the word “cell” would be a generous exaggeration. So it felt like a bit of citizen’s justice this week to see the local news buzzing with indignant reports of the “poor door,” a scrap of real-estate jargon coined, for once, in sympathy with the people.

One Riverside Park, the luxury-condominium complex on Riverside Boulevard, at Sixty-second Street, has a separate entrance for its fifty-five affordable units.
One Riverside Park, the luxury-condominium complex on Riverside Boulevard, at Sixty-second Street, has a separate entrance for its fifty-five affordable units. - I paid a visit to One Riverside Park and its poor door on a recent evening. I grew up fifteen blocks away, and went to elementary school a few avenues over, when Trumpville-on-Hudson was only starting to rise. I was curious to see what the Riverside Boulevard neighborhood was actually like, but it wasn’t a neighborhood, not really. A neighborhood is a collection of residents and pedestrians and businesses jumbled together in the midst of various, varied pursuits. Riverside Boulevard juts out of West End Avenue, horseshoe-like, and is cut off from the Hudson River piers and pedestrian walkway by the West Side Highway; it’s a place you have to intend to get to, not easily stumbled upon, and that isolation has turned it into an enclave, the bizarro inverse of the Amsterdam Houses, the project complex just across West End. It’s a weird, forsaken zone, particularly at 5 P.M. on a clear day late in January, when the sun has just set and the Hudson glows a phosphorescent blue. The wind came whipping fiercely up over the water. At the Rushmore, a luxury building two blocks north of One Riverside Park, the outline of gym-going tenants could be seen jogging on treadmills obscured by tasteful window sheers. An ad on the front of the Aldyn, the building one block over, showed a dead ringer for Christian Grey strolling along a vast, empty swimming pool. And then there was One Riverside Park, displaying a generic, high-end hotel version of luxury, at least in its lobby: the chandelier, the marble floor, the fleet of doormen behind their counter, the satin couches and armchairs in earth tones. Someone had put a catalogue for last year’s MOMA show of Matisse cutouts on a coffee table, and that gesture of personality seemed startling and poignant amid so much genteel blahdom. A few feet away, cars rumbled along the West Side Highway in a seemingly infinite stream. Maybe, from high inside the building, their roar sounds like the ocean. I almost missed the poor door, around the corner, where it was obscured by the glaringly red sign of the building’s garage. Finally spotting it, I laughed out loud. It’s not that the façade is dinky or the plain entryway dingy: on a different street, in a different neighborhood, it would be perfectly fine. But as the only entrance of its kind on any of the surrounding streets, it is distinctly marked as a thing apart, as clearly “other” as servants’ quarters. The writer Luc Sante, in “Low Life,” his spectacularly perfervid account of old New York, describes the elaborate ornamentation of nineteenth-century tenement façades, the scalloped curlicues of the tin cornices, the trim and false columns and caryatids, all part of “the tenement’s equipment of fictitious grandeur.” You could see this kind of architecture as having an ennobling social purpose, acknowledging that souls should be fed by the same means that bodies are sheltered. Sante’s point is different. “The façade is all: it is the aspect of the tenement visible to idlers and passersby, to the gentry,” he writes. In nineteenth-century New York, the poor were made to look pleasing to the rich. Now, the city’s true poor are hardly visible, and the middle classes squeezed ever more efficiently out of sight. © Celine Grouard

Allow me to decode. In 2013 Extell Development Company received city approval to construct a limestone-and-glass tower on Riverside Boulevard, a residential strip stretching from Fifty-ninth to Seventy-second streets, on the edge of Manhattan’s West Side. The area had once been a rail yard; two decades ago, Donald Trump, whose job used to be limited to erecting hideous buildings, erected a cluster of hideous buildings at its northern end, establishing the aesthetic standard for the developers who took over to the south. Extell’s new building, at 50 Riverside Boulevard, on Sixty-second Street—One Riverside Park, if you want to call it by its invented prestige-address—was to contain two hundred and nineteen luxury condominiums ranging in price from 1.3 to nearly twenty-six million dollars, along with a gym, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a rock-climbing wall, an indoor playground, a squash court, a golf simulator, and—in order to qualify for 421-a, a tax abatement available to developers who throw a smattering of affordably priced units in with the glossy ones—fifty-five rent-stabilized apartments reserved for people earning no more than sixty per cent of the area’s median income. And here we come to the crux of the issue, because, like the Grimms’ wicked stepmother, who tells Cinderella that she can go to the ball at the palace only if she can pick up every last lentil from a bowl of them scattered into the hearth, there was a catch: a separate, lowlier entrance for the renters around the corner, labeled 40 Riverside Boulevard—a separate, lowlier address.

The “poor door” was hit with a lot of blowback when the plans first got out. A few days ago, the Post went to the building to talk to recently arrived renters, and the outrage started up again. To be restricted from the convenience of playing a round of simulated golf in your slippers in exchange for a nicely priced two-bedroom in a city where the advent of three-hundred-square-foot micro-apartments was greeted with the kind of jubilation last seen when the thirst-crazed peons of “Mad Max: Fury Road” got a little shower is no great hardship. To have entry buzzers that don’t work, as the 40 Riverside Boulevard tenants told the Post was the case, while One Riverside Park comes equipped with a fleet of responsive doormen; or to not have light fixtures at home while the lobby of One Riverside Park is artfully illuminated by a chandelier of hand-blown glass; or to gaze out onto a courtyard accessible only to the owners at One Riverside Park are minor, par-for-the-course annoyances in New York. The tenants of 40 Riverside Boulevard quite literally won the lottery to be able to walk through the poor door; the building received more than eighty-eight thousand applications for its fifty-five spots. The average rent for a Manhattan two-bedroom apartment is more than six thousand dollars a month, while one at 40 Riverside Boulevard goes for about a thousand. Shouldn’t we all just be glad that new affordable units were built at all?