1981 to 2009: progress, or not so much?

When I moved into the American Thread Building in 1981 (the first great condo loft conversion in Tribeca?), I was in that (relatively) new Manhattan demographic, Young Urban Professionals, and we were "welcomed" into the building by the graffito "die yuppie scum", apparently left by the former squatters (artists??) in residence. If it is not too grandiose to put it in these terms, we were in the first non-artist wave into Tribeca (how many waves have there been since? five??).

 

A blog with which I am unfamiliar (h/t Curbed.com) posted what are presumably current photos from Staple Street in Tribeca that seems to merge my former demographic with a demographic I would have thought was opposite to the yuppies: http://beehivehairdresser.com/2009/01/28/tribeca-warns-yuppies-hipsters/  I guess the point (as if there is one) is that neither group is welcome today, not that the two groups have anything else in common (age, perhaps, but I am over-analyzing here). Whatever … the folks doing the un-welcoming are different in 2009 than they were in 1981, for sure, for sure.This is not so much progress as evolution.

 

Nice photos on that blog, btw.