Luxury Real Estate

Courtesy of Frederick Peters, President of Warburg Realty

I grew up on the Upper East Side. There was no mistaking it. It was a village, as I have written about before. My village was bounded on the south by Grand Central Station on 42 Street, on the north by 96th Street, on the east by Third Avenue, and on the west by Central Park. And when I entered the real estate brokerage business in 1980, those same boundaries still held. My mother had no friends who lived outside our village. When my father moved to Stuyvesant Town, it seemed like a different, unfamiliar city. My grandfather had grown up in Brooklyn, but I certainly had never been there!

The evolution of neighborhoods over the past thirty years has been nothing short of extraordinary, a revolution caused by dropping crime rates, new lifestyle choices, growing populations, and evolving definitions of cool. I will never forget the day, when I was in my teens, that my mother accommodated the kids of English friends by agreeing to go walk around in the Village. My mother? In the Village?! I became aware that those neighborhood boundaries which had defined my early life were stretching. But I could not have imagined the degree to which those boundaries would atomize in the decades to come.

Today everyone lives everywhere. My kids and many of their friends want only to live in Brooklyn; they love its low rise cozy feeling, family–run stores, and relaxed vibe. Tribeca, once so hip, has turned into a neighborhood filled with parents vying to get into Public School 234, which has become so crowded that it needed an offshoot. Tribeca’s proximity to Wall Street and its fabulous restaurants have also made it a Mecca for bankers. The Upper West Side, which I considered arty when I moved here in 1977 (after a truly eye-opening stint on Broadway and 92nd in my first year out of college: Omigod, I discovered, people actually LIVED there!) is no longer a world away from 66th and Park where I grew up. In fact, many of our customers routinely consider CPW and the Museum-facing streets on 77th and 81st Streets as extensions of their Upper East Side apartment searches. A number of our friends now live in the West 100s, and to be artsy today, you need to move to Harlem. Or Bushwick.

In fact, while there is still a lot of music in the Village, and a lot of galleries in SoHo (and Chelsea), there is not much meat in the Meat Packing District and not much crack or heroin in Needle Park. All of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn and Queens are both safe and pretty, and they are essentially one giant neighborhood with regional characteristics. Ladies from the Upper East Side move to Chelsea, hip Tribeca couples move to the Upper West Side to raise their kids (or vice versa), and the kids then move to Long Island City. This is the new New York.

You can read more on www.warburgrealty.com/blog.