The New York Times ran a well orchestrated, (yet utterly uninteresting), article yesterday presenting Stuyvesant Town as a semi-OK place to live. Aside from that, we're not quite sure what the point of the PR blunder was.To save you from reading the dry-as-toast piece.
Maggie Weber and Joey Arak. Maggie is a school teacher. Joey is an editor at Curbed.com, a website we love, whose online advertisers include Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.
Maggie and Joey lived in the East Village but they wanted to move. Maggie leases a car. Maggie likes to drive. Maggie couldn't find parking. Maggie found parking! Drat! The community garden opposite the building where she wanted to park, "functioned more as a raucous gathering place than a vegetable plot."
The point of the article is here somewhere.
Maggie and Joey's old apartment had roaches. After some minor apartment hunting this past April, Maggie and Joey ended up in Stuyvesant Town. Stuyvesant Town doesn't have roaches. Huh?
Maggie and Joey have a dog. Their dog is named Frank. Frank is cute. Frank barks. The neighbors complain when Frank barks. Maggie and Joey buy a collar that gases Frank when it barks.
The point? Oh, that's right, the point!
Mr. Arak said he is a "devout reader" of the Stuyvesant Town tenants' message boards. Mr. Arak says, "I am amazed at the anger against market raters and Tishman Speyer. If I didn't live here, I would assume it is a living hell."
That "living hell" was featured last week in The New York Times, one of the many articles describing the chaos in the complex, but, OK.
Mr. Arak continues, "But I love living here." (Wait 12 months.) "Now we have this big apartment that is nicer than anything I thought I would be able to afford. I never thought I would have a dishwasher in my whole life."
Big and nice. Never in his whole life? A sentiment so sweet, it's like Tishman Speyer wrote it themselves.




























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