florent, by flickr user DrewVigal

I wasn't a regular at Florent, but had three to four good meals a year there while I lived in New York. (More before I got the day job in '99.) This tidbit from the NYT's coverage of the place closing kind of blew my mind:

On June 29 Florent will close. Its rent was to rise to more than $30,000 a month, said [owner] Mr. Morellet, now 54. He started out paying $1,350. The neighborhood, the city and the people who felt it belonged to them were different then.[full story]

30k a month! Of course, oil was 24 bucks a barrel in October 2002 (the month congress authorized the invasion of Iraq) and it hit 134 bucks a barrel today, so I guess things are tough all over.

On the question of the changes New York has gone through, I think the neighborhoods, the city and the people who felt it all belonged to them are always different than they used to be. My remembered NYC doesn't really exist anymore, but so what? I'm not the guy I was then anymore either. My 90s New York was different from my 80s New York, and if I had been old enough to ride the subways in the 70s I'm sure I'd have yet another contrast to ponder. To badly paraphrase Colson in The Colossus of New York, you're not a New Yorker unless you can walk around talking about how once upon a time a wizened old immigrant man resoled shoes right where that American Apparel store sits today. The city of your memory is always being overwritten and, indeed, the old isn't cemented as authentically New York until it's been plastered over.

The thing I miss most about New York at the moment didn't even exist when I lived there. So it goes.