Curbed

For some New Yorkers, it’s been more than three decades since they’ve had to take out their own trash or schlep down to the lobby for a delivery. But in advance of the possible doorman and porters strike scheduled to start Monday at midnight, folks all over town are reviewing building-management contingency plans warning of everything from extra chores to bans on moves. Some just cover the basics.

The prediction-market platform Polymarket recently asked users to guess where New York City’s median home value would fall on March 1. The rules were as follows: “This market will resolve according to the median home value for all property types in New York City, New York on March 1, 2026. If the reported value falls exactly between two brackets, then this market will resolve to the higher range bracket.” Users with names like Outgoing-Canoe and BR43 silently placed their bets.

“There goes our quiet neighborhood,” says a man who lives in my building as we enter our lobby on East End Avenue. A newly installed gated security barrier sits outside in the nearby intersection; the flashing police and ambulance lights of vehicles lining the block create a chaotic scene. Before heading up to my apartment, I stop to pick up a package at our front desk. “They’re saying it’s a suspicious device or something,” my doorman says, shrugging.

About a decade ago, a designer we’ll call Joanne had a cart filled with Thanksgiving dinner for ten as she idly considered the beauty aisle of the Tribeca Whole Foods. It was there that she noticed a $30 pot of Dr. Hauschka eye cream and made an impulsive calculation. She was about to drop a small fortune on organic potatoes and a heritage turkey — pocketing the eye cream seemed somehow … fair.

Eddie (left) with Russell Steinberg (middle) and Roman, his business partner, on the right. The day before I relaunched The Flower Shop as its executive chef, I got a text from my old friend, Stretch Armstrong. “My partner is in commercial real estate and aware of your property hunt. Unsure the status of that but if you’d entertain a convo with a great guy, he’d love to speak to you.” I was in a bad place because ICE had grabbed my lead line cook, Daniel, two days before.

There’s a klezmer singer on the third floor, a saxophonist below, a trumpeter above, and trombonists across the street. In good times, klezmer singer and composer Éléonore Weill makes most of her living playing gigs around the city under her name or fronting the two bands Fada and Tsibele. But when the COVID pandemic began, she got divorced and had to move out of the Kensington house she shared with her ex-husband. Then she was hit by a car, which left her with a traumatic brain injury.

A notable number of Black residents are leaving the city — no longer able to afford it. I might be one of them. West Indian Day Parade in Crown Heights in 1986. West Indian Day Parade in Crown Heights in 1986. West Indian Day Parade in Crown Heights in 1986. I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal.

At the end of every year, we at Curbed like to take a close look at which stories our readers spent the most time with. Luxury Schadenfreude, glimpses into elite enclaves, and in-the-know hacks for thriving in the city were some of the recurring themes. This year, we answered burning questions you might not have known you had: What’s it like to live in an empty Brooklyn supertall?

This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here. By Sam Lipsyte My grandfather Sidney Lipsyte, the son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005, a good run I don’t expect to match.

My grandfather Sidney Lipsyte, the son of immigrants who became a New York City public-school teacher and administrator, lived from 1904 to 2005, a good run I don’t expect to match. He witnessed, and sometimes experienced, a century of mayhem and invention: human flight, human spaceflight, pandemics, vaccines, economic devastation, Nazi conquest, atomic murder, peace treaties, civil rights, pacemakers, penicillin, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.