Filth On Fifth Avenue - NYC Luxury Shopping & Manhattan Hotels

When you think of Fifth Avenue, you're supposed to envision this:

     When you think of unsophisticated sections of New York City, you may think of Chinatown's grimy Canal Street (named after an 1815 waterway that the city irrevocably polluted and paved over in 1820), Herald Square's squalor, the slovenly Port Authority building, filthy Times Square, and images like this:

     You don't expect to find that same type of clutter on expensive Fifth Ave (with the highest rents and prices in America), but it's there.  It's similar to how the city allowed Shanty Towns to populate Central Park in the 1930s.      

     The difference is that this new filth on Fifth Avenue is CREATED: permits, fees, revenue, and rents are accrued from it.  A worldly person is not surprised: NYC historically excels at greed--sucking it from whatever sleazy means possible, at an increasing psychopathic rate.
     Compare the ugliness of Fifth Avenue to the elite shopping streets of London, Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid, Amsterdam, St. Moritz, Monaco, Boston, or Beverly Hills.

     If the year-round stench of uncleaned horses and horse manure wasn't bad enough (from dirty horse carriages), why would hotel guests or luxury shoppers also want to smell the stench of cheap smoky "street food"?  Why would they want to pay 5-star prices for that smell/cloud of smoke--just beyond their hotels?  Not to mention the unruly crowds of tourists that congregate and block the sidewalks.  Why would luxury shoppers want to cross such a mess in the most expensive part of the city?  Why would they want this view as they walked along the main part of Fifth Avenue? 

Only the greedy and déclassé power-brokers of New York City would allow such dirty/cheap concession carts to be parked around Fifth Avenue's top-tier hotels.  
     Those types of food carts string along 5th Ave, from Grand Army Plaza to 59th Street!  More of them cling like fungus around the Metropolitan Museum, further up on Fifth Ave.
     Outside one of the city's premiere luxury stores, Bergdorf Goodman (who's heritage pedigree echoes around the world), there are dirty street vendors and the smell of cheap food carts.  

     Does that picture, above, look like "luxury"?  Would you guess that you're in the city's "luxury district"?  Seen below, Cartier spent millions of dollars to renovate its Mansion on Fifth Avenue, yet it is marred by the city's slovenly street vendors.  Is that what world-traveling shoppers want to see as they arrive?  Smoke, grease, and stench?  

Speaking of smoke, the city's unimproved infrastructure randomly causes steam pipes to plague the streets.  This unsightly one is currently on the other side of the Mansion.

     After their done, the food carts dump their "cooking juices" onto the sidewalk/street, leaving a stench underfoot.

     Should a big city have nonsense like that?  Does the presence of such peddlers--condoned by zoning and the sale of permits--do justice to Bergdorf's famous store windows?  

     Do high-end customers--who can shop in stores all around the globe--want to dodge such spectacles to enter stores?  NO!!!!

     The same goes for the greasy smoke from 10 food vendors at the General Motors building and Apple cube store.

     Is that what a luxury customer--who just invested $40,000 on emotional jewelry--wants to encounter, upon leaving one of the world's leading jewelers?  No!  

NYC is like a low-class carnival, attracting vagrants...

clueless tourists, and the kind of people who spend hours in filthy Times Square (see my prior entry about that)...

https://halfwindsorfullthrottle.blogspot.com/2015/11/dont-visit-times-square-nyc.html


     The city's most luxurious brands pay BIG BUCKS for rent along Fifth Avenue.  Why would they (and their Business Improvement District) allow such a blight on their expensive sidewalk?  It works against their images, window displays, brand fanciness, and advertising.  

     Many stores are desperate to pay their exorbitant NYC rents because they're brainwashed to believe they need a Fifth Ave address.  Certainly, the typical shopper on Fifth Ave is less sophisticated than 50 years ago...

... but THIS is an atrocity!  

It punctuates that the value of the neighborhood has uncaringly declined.  

     Look at NYC's St. Regis Hotel; clean and tidy outside its door.  Yet, on its corner are homeless beggars and men who hock fake watches.  Things haven't changed for NYC since the 1970s!

Look at the crappy food cart outside the Sherry-Netherland Hotel ($400 a night for a basic room).

As if those guests want to inhale such "street meat" smoke, as they await the doorman to hail them a cab?  

     Why doesn't the city repair that district-wide blemish?  Aren't there enough peddlers and food carts crowding 42nd Street and the tourist traps?  Meanwhile, such a mess--and the unsightly, rumpled crowds that it draws--deter luxury shoppers/visitors, who can visit these same brands in other (more elegant) cities.