If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati.ĭespite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft-just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE. The population of Nychaland is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded as too low, since most everyone knows someone living “off lease.” One NYCHA employee says that “600,000 is more like it.” That’s about 8 percent of New York-with 160,000 families on the waiting list. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 “developments” spread from Staten Island’s Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx-178,895 apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an area three times the size of Central Park. New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of its own. My visit to the Linden Houses was part of a self-guided tour of what I’d come to call “Nychaland.” As in NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, a.k.a. Lloyd Blankfein of the world, right here?” the man declared. Currently reside in Manhattan with wife Laura and three kids. It said: “Graduate of Jefferson (’71), Gershwin (’68), P.S. Still, the Goldman CEO apparently retained affection for his childhood home, once sending a post to the East New York Project, a website for people nostalgic for the days of egg creams and spaldeens. That was in the fifties and sixties, before the white people moved out of the projects and East New York became one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Son of a postal clerk and a receptionist at a burglar-alarm factory, Blankfein had grown up right there, at 295 Cozine Avenue, a redbrick building more or less exactly like the other eighteen redbrick buildings at the Linden Houses. “He used to live in this building,” I said. They ruled Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission too, sat at the table with the Illuminati. In the projects, when someone who looks like me comes up to you, it almost has to be bad news: a cop, a process server, a guy from the Housing Authority. Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York MagazineĪsked if he’d heard of Lloyd Blankfein, the man in the Yankees cap standing by 295 Cozine Avenue in East New York muttered, “What he do?”
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