Submitted by Sir Joshua, Feb 6, 2007 07:58

The Upper West Side was for decades a bastion of economic torper. It is where non achievers dwelt when they'd had enough of the Lower East Side. Their cousins who had made it on Wall Street and now lived on the Upper East Side or the trendier streets of the Village only saw them on holidays, but the tweed bound schleppers of the UWS would stay in their Riverside/Jersey view haven most of the year and keep quiet about their heaven on the Hudson.

For several years, the Columbia looked like the Citicorp building in Long Island City, the lone sequoia in the wheatfield, the times, they are a changing. Any area like the UWS with the development potential of obviously crumbling urban acerage which hides just south of Columbia (the NYU, development-wise, of the UWS) is going to start sprouting...and soon. The UWS in the 70's and 80's is over crowded because the buildings are bigger. You can't walk a dog on the sidewalk without a confrontation on every block. And now that grammar school teachers have stopped telling students to walk on the right, sidewalk chaos has reached unmanageable levels, especially considering most people are hostile about bumbping into so many other pedestrians...it is a hopeless situation. And now, with the development of these new buildings the population is only going to grow. Soon, New Jersey is going to start looking good.

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