The New Bleecker
Dear Editor,
Your man in the street, George Held, has got it all wrong. We who live on Bleecker Street have not “learned to detour around Bleecker Street.” And as for “the cosmopolitan mix along Bleecker Street,” we who live there do not “gladly stroll among the visitors there.” It is too crowded with people slathering cupcakes and dropping crumbs as they stroll. They sit on the stoops, drop papers and boxes, and make it impossible for people to get by the crowds in front of Magnolia and the lines that form at the store.
During the evenings the crowds are loud and the cars now passing shriek with thundering rock music. This says nothing about the giant buses disgorging tourists who block the sidewalks, nor of the newly opened Bleecker Park Sitting Area which when I walked through it on opening day was already full of wind-blown garbage. True, Magnolia from time to time sends a man to clean up the sitting area, but it is at night not during the unsightly look of daytime.
I am afraid none of this is very “Gallic”, nor as clean as you will find Madison Avenue, which I might add is closed at night. Westview News has done splendid work in covering the ugly plans by the Rudins to build on the St. Vincent’s plot and the ones proposed by NYU for the south village, but there are other areas which are being badly affected by the new commercialization of Greenwich Village. Attention should be paid.
Pierre Epstein, a resident of Bleecker between llth and Perry.
Pierre is wrong to accuse me of being “all wrong” just because he is offended by strollers dropping crumbs on Bleecker St. (Sacré Bleu!).
My wife and I live on busy West 4th, parallel to Pierre on Bleecker, and we love to stroll on both streets. Does the plethora of tourists cause occasional inconveniences to us locals? Yes, but it’s the price of living in an historic district cum shopping magnet. C’est la vie.