No Bernie for You, but Bizarre Even By NYC Standards

Earlier this month the NYT unfolded over three days this story -- two men propped their dead friend up in a computer chair and wheeled him along W. 52st Street to a check cashing business on 9th Avenue. There they left him in the chair on the sidewalk and went inside in an attempt to cash the deceased's Social Security check of some $300. That stretch of 9th Avenue is a snapshot of old and gentrifying Hell's Kitchen, new Thai and other restaurant locations sharing blocks with empty store fronts and shoddy drug and convenience stores. It is very crowded with both foot and vehicular traffic. You don't leave a dead person in a chair in broad daylight and not attract attention. And so it was this sunny January day -- passersby, a police officer having a slice of pizza next door, and the suspicious check store clerk himself all wondered about the guy in the chair. The arrest was made as the two friends were attempting to move the chair into the store to satisfy the clerk's request to have the check recipient present. Not quite sure how they planned to have him endorse the check.

That was day one's story. The next two days brought the names of the three friends and their sad, close to the edge lives -- drug problems, prison terms for petty larcenies and frauds, complicated health probelms, physical weakness that made it difficult for the dead man and his roommate to climb even one flight of stairs to their apartment. Neighbors, as they always are, were quoted, "good people," "kept to themselves," "down on their luck." They also said the dead man lived his whole life in the 52st St. apartment. I've been on that street on my bicycle. It's gritty now and probably always has been. It's Hell's Kitchen after all. But like that life that ended a day or so before becoming a very public spectacle, Hell's Kitchen will pretty much be over in the next few years of far West Side midtown boom, and its rough streets and (sometimes too) quirky characters will be smoothed out by expensive restorations to interiors of existing buildings or replaced by luxury apartment blocks like the bland one around the corner on 53rd.

Here just over two years and already joining the bemoan chorus of Lost New York.