Why The Meatpacking Area Sucks Now

Once upon a time in the Meatpacking district you could buy a fresh from the oven bagel, smack cream cheese on it and watch transvestite hookers shake their franks & beans on the corner as you ate the hot, gooey mess. These days the bagel place is gone and the hookers are replaced by “Sex And The City” type girls, wobbling out of some overpriced restaurant in high heels that they can’t walk in.

New York as a whole has changed. Gone is the sleaziness of what New York was all about. Tourist with bad jeans use to mess up your walking pace mainly in midtown; now they have descended downtown like locus in search of a Bible prophecy.

With the World Trade Center tragedy came lookie loos asking where downtown was, and if they could walk to the WTC from 42nd street.

In 1900, Gansevoort street was home to 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants, but by the 1980s, it had become known as a haven for drug dealing and prostitution, particularly transsexuals. Concurrent with the rise in naughty sexual activity, the sparsely populated industrial area became the city's burgeoning sex clubs home base. Now you can pay $40 bucks for a hamburger, in the 80s $40 bucks would have gotten you whipped and humilated; pretty much how you feel when you pay $40 bucks for a hamburger.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Meatpacking District went through a transformation. High-end boutiques catering to retail snobs and hipsters opened. By the 2000s, area restaurant institutions like Fleurent, and bars like Hell were closed due to the new fancy boutiques jacking up the real estate. In their places restaurants popped up like hives in the spring. Most of them closed after six months; soon followed by other shitty, trendy food joints that filled young tourist's appetite for what they thought was New Yorkness.

As of 2012, the Meatpacking area is packed with over dressed people from out of the city; all trying to live their “Sex And The City” experience. Any Manhattan people I asked said they gave up going to eat in Meatpacking years ago. Now that the Highline has opened residents like myself never use it, with all the tourist groups getting "wet" walking on the highrise sidewalk with flowers and bushes; what kills me is, most of these toursit come from places with great parks and land, and this gets them hot and interested?

I do like the cleanness of the area now, but I miss the dose of realness that once was. Goodbye urine smell; I don’t really miss you, but somehow you we’re better than cheap perfume that fills the air now.