Elevator Sociology

Well, this morning I went downstairs to do laundry in our (relatively) new building in Inwood. When we decided to take the apartment, we took a chance on the building. But only a tiny chance. It's a little bit ghettoesque, a little bit rundown (altho you could tell it was a beautiful old prewar with good bones). A few scraps of painted-over grafitti, a vague smell in the elevator, apartment doors propped open for cross-ventilation and blasting music out into the corridor. The usual. But it has new owners now, and we were assured that they were fixing the place up. The real estate agent told us earnestly that the new owners were focused on getting good tenants into the building (this is New York Real Estate Agent for "Young white people are moving in!"). Not that we care; the current tenants, of all possible races, ages, sexual orientations and family structures, have been nothing but friendly and kind to us since we moved in. Friendlier than the other tenants of our previous building on the Upper West Side, in fact. It's just that, as New Yorkers of long standing, we know only too well that landlords, especially absentee landlords, only put money into buildings that they expect to get money out of. I'm sure we're paying four times as much rent as those tenants that have been here for 15 or 20 years, back when the neighborhood wasn't so up-and-coming. (Rent Stabilization laws make for strange bedfellows, but a little variety is good for a building's soul. Live in a building inhabited by nothing but yuppies, and you wind up like Edward Norton in Fight Club.)

The neighborhood is so obviously on its way up, since apartment prices have soared over the last few years, that we figured this building was a pretty safe bet. And sure enough, last month they started fixing up the exterior courtyard/entryway. Instead of just pouring a fresh layer of cement, they're installing nice red brick paving stones in decorative shapes that form a pattern. Hooray, huh? Except for the fact that we can't use the front door for the next week, which our super has duly informed us of through the traditional method of a sign posted in the elevator. And this morning I noticed that someone had scribbled something at the bottom of that sign in blue ballpoint ink: "It's turning a white building."

Damnit. It's not going to be like that, is it?