March 28, 2009
real estate
“Now I’m trying to write about an area in ‘Lush Life.’ The projects are still rough places—and some of them are still bad, real bad. But the ones I’m writing about on the Lower East Side, it’s still rough, but it’s nowhere near as rough. I don’t know if it’s because the economy has changed or what. What I’m trying to write now—the irony of a place that was Hell’s Hundred Acres in 1988, and you got whatever passes for yuppies, the hipperatti living there now. The great crime-fighter is real estate—it was a combination of Giuliani and real estate.” — Richard Price, January 30, 2008