Growing Pains

The signs of change loom large in East Harlem. Billboards detailing a 200-million dollar complex to be built on 125th Street and Park Avenue; Corcoran-wrapped condominiums with price tags starting at $750,000. Starbucks, H&M and The Body Shop are just a few of the companies that have settled in a couple of blocks from my apartment.

Against the backdrop of these colorful corporate announcements are the lines of homeless people that form on the corner of 127th Street and Park Avenue each morning. They carry huge, clear plastic bags filled to capacity with aluminum cans. All day long, men with grocery carts pound my neighborhood pavement, looking in trashcans for anything that they can get five cents to the dollar on. At the major grocery store on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, mothers with small children pay for their family’s dinner with Food Stamps. These are not the people who are buying a five-dollar cup of coffee, or a 12-dollar bottle of moisturizer.

But these overpriced goods are selling– some of the locals are slurping up the foamy lattes, as are the tourists snapping photos of the Apollo Theatre; transplants like me fueling the on-demand lifestyle so many of us desire. Still, on a recent Thursday evening I called a local restaurant for delivery and ran into a little trouble:

“The car was jacked last night so we can’t deliver your food,” the woman on the other end of the phone said in a thick Caribbean accent. I thought she was joking so I giggled until her silence shut me up.

Getting what we want, how we want, whenever we want is in high-demand here in New York and that philosophy is slowly spreading to this neighborhood. At least that's what the signs say.