Once Upon a Time in NYC

Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. New York City wasn’t the inventor or progenitor of wealth inequality, the great national trend of the last dozen years, but we do it best. It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.

Our network’s very own Choire Sicha wrote about how the Bloomberg administration changed New York in the last decade for New York magazine. Stay for the beautifully written descriptions of the way the city used to be, or, at the very least, to learn how Choire once earned $200 in exchange for witnessing a sex act when he was broke and in need of money.

Photo: Johan Hanssen

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