The $8 Million Crack Haus

My boy C to the D schooled me to this story before it broke and I slept on it so now I'm playing catch up like a fuckin' tomato.

Anyway, everybody is partying like it's 1979 over this recently unearthed concrete slab covered in early-NYC graffiti like it's a fossil of a human foot from the La Brea Tar Pits or some sort of lost Egyptian hieroglyphic lexicon from the unremembered 80's.

It's actually a chunk of a concrete wall which was recently discovered and removed from inside a 10-story limestone at 151 Wooster that was being converted into, what else but, more luxury condominiums. I guess when they were tearing into the place, they found this wall on the 8th floor behind layers of sheetrock and rusted pipes.



The slab of molten bedrock with tags and doodles by original wild style NYC graffiti artistes Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000 and some traces by Jean-Michel Basquiat is now being used to sell said luxury condos! Come live where Basquiat once shot up! Oh, joy!

I guess your boy Basquiat took a few "SAMO," tags in the stairwell, too. Basquiat was friends with Edit deAk, an art magazine editor, who lived at 151 Wooster in the early 80's, when it was probably little more than a squat.

"Oooh look, honey, how urban! How dangerous! Do you think they did drugs here, too?"

The new "luxury lofts" at 151 Wooster going for about $8 million (with a maintenance of $42,000 a year). Not a bad deal for a converted crack house!

What does it all mean, though? I'm certain there is something very deep and telling here about New York City circa now and the way faux-urbanism is being used to sell luxury condominiums so far removed, literally and figuratively, from anything urban whatsoever.



It's like, "Yes, we want so desperately to live on the rugged and raw, anything-goes Lower East Side, have a hip, young, cool address and simply surround ourselves with all this passion and creativity and energy but we want to up really, really fucking high and have one of those car elevators so we can drive our BMW right into our living room and never have to interact with anyone on the sidewalk, ever." It's such total bullshit.

You love that fucking old concrete wall so much? Go live in a squat. There are walls just like it with new up and coming artistes. Get urban. Get dirty. Really immerse yourself in the creative juices of the Alphabet City of the late 70's. Really get in there. Roll up your sleeves and shoot some H and take a few SAMO tags near the Projects. Eat balled up cat food and pretend it's tuna fish. Walk around barefoot. Score some more H. Repeat.

Fuck everybody.