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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Monday, June 30, 2008
Stuyvesant Town's Staged Press is a Disaster too.
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28 comments:
Maybe if he took his tongue out of Tishman Speyer's ass long enough he could see the rats and the roaches, and have a stroll though the complex and see what a mess it is.
BTW the market rate tenants - such as my wife and I - have no issue with the stabilized tenants so don't start trouble.
No surprise they advertise with him.
Thank goodness for them, the rest of us, and poor Frank, that they will never suffer the interior of the complex as they intend to scoot across 14th back into The East Village.
So he took it in the ass to get a dishwasher, huh? Well, that's NYC in the 70's you know.
Deal with it.
Joey wants to keep his apartment.
Joey wants to keep his advertisers.
Joey is trying to save his ass for mentioning your blog. lol
Dear Mr. Speyer,
Thanks for choosing to place your full page ads with us. Welcome aboard!
Best,
Todd
V. P., Business Development for the Times
Who does the real estate reporting for the Times now, Judy Miller?
If you watch the video of Joey, Maggie and Frank on the Times website, Frank is blinking a Morse code message, "Call the ASPCA. I am being gassed." Frank is not stupid.
Maggie and Joey's dish's are brown after using their dishwasher.
Frank Likes to eat the asbestos leaking out of their front door.
Maggie and Joey are not following the 80% carpet rule and have also broken the rules by painting their wall green.
Rob Speyer was a Journalism major at Colombia (not University).
Maggie and Joey are disconnected from the outside world because they have no cell phone reception and their intercoms dont work.
Maggie and Joey are living in sin.
Joey rides a unicorn to work.
Joey's magical horse prevents him from seeing the real ST as displayed in your Flickr account.
Can the rest of us have unicorns?
Thought-bubble over their smirking dog, Frank: "Sure, my owners are ass-licking suckers, but I'm grateful to them for allowing me to play in Stuy Town's many overflowing muddy (cess)pools, bark as much as I please until security pays us a visit, and best of all, take my daily pees and big poops on the grassy areas where children play, while hopefully spreading disease into the rent stabilized tenants' apartments! It's not a dog's life here...but Lux Living at it's best!"
You can't make this up!
MAGGIE AND JOEY IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
“We both had a problem originally with the idea of Stuy Town, because it looks so blech,” Ms. Weber said. “It is just some brick buildings with a lawn in the middle and a fountain.”
Its 80 grassy acres were wasted on her. “I am not a person to go out in nature or wilderness,” she said.
There was also plenty of tension surrounding the change to market-rate rents after decades of rent regulation. “You walk around, and it is all older people and families with kids,” Mr. Arak said. But in the leasing office, “it is all 20-somethings.”
Joey has ugly feet!
Agh ! my eyes! that is the creepiest photo on this blog ever!!
Maggie and Joey are obviously not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Duh! Guess who has the most intelligent face of the three mutts? Step forward and take a bow, Frank! A bow and a bow wow!
Worst PR/damage control ever.
Dear Joey, Maggie and Frank
Good night, sleep tight,
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
And if they do
Then take your new Speyer lease
And knock ‘em ‘til
They’re black and blue
“We both had a problem originally with the idea of Stuy Town, because it looks so blech,” Ms. Weber said.
She's speaking with The New York Times and this is how she converses? Thank god she doesn't teach my kids.
"Stuy Town might be decent, they figured, as long as they could find a desirable urban location, on the First Avenue or 14th Street sides."
I think they're missing the point of living here.
Since Maggie doesn't like to go out in nature, Frank is a prisoner of the apartment. No wonder he's barking.
Joey and Maggie were relieved to see a lot of "twenty-somethings" in the renting office to compensate for all the tedious kids and old farts they saw walking around inside Stuy Town.
Us old farts ( and our kids) have lived here without air conditioning or dish washers since back in the day when below 14th Street wasn't terminally hip.
Frank looks sweet in a goofy kind of way. He reminds me of that dog in the New Yorker cartoons. No offense meant, Frank, I really do think you are cute.
Right on to the last poster! We were here when Alphabet City was not a trendy yuppie/yunniedom. Then, we used to have to put up with junkies who prowled round looking for victims to rob for their next fix. I was such a victim on 2 occasions and my neighbors all had the same experience of being held up at knifepoint or gunpoint in the vestibules of our buildings. There were so many shooting galleries on Avenues A & B that at night the streets would be crowded with junkies (a lot of them with little kids in strollers) lining up to get their fix. MetLife didn't advertise Stuyvesant Town as "luxury" then! The un-airconditioned apartments weren't worth a nickel more than we paid for them, but we didn't grumble because we loved our homes then as we do now. We owe Tishman Speyer nothing more than our rent stabilized rents. We put up with the place when it was what it honestly was and the "improvements" don't impress us. Neither do our money hungry landlord and the pretentious clientele (mostly from the flyover states) it markets to because it wants to suck their money and treat them like the fools they are for falling for their spiel.
Joey,
Is that your MOM ? ?
He's lived here for three months and feels he can accurately describe what it is like living in Stuy Town and dealing with management?
How naive.
Wait 'til they get their first rent increase next year and rent jumps to over $3200 a month. They just don't realize they're paying luxury prices for a place just barely one step up the ladder from their old tenement. Their neighbors must be very happy to live with these self-centered losers - just hope that the neighbors are not families or old people. Frank definitely looks like the brains of the family - perhaps he'll be able to make his great escape through the wilderness while Maggie is tanning in the Oval.
the people posting here are some of the angriest, crankiest people ever. the apartments are a million steps up from anything in the east village. maybe you should go take a look around...a lot has changed since the 70s. all you do is rip ST apart and knock people who would want to live here...but YOU live here. and you fight to live here. go out and take a walk in the oval -- all this stress and negativity can't be good for your health.
Maggie, we would love to walk in the Oval but we can't find it behind the fences.
Maybe one of the flip-flop girls could be so kind as to take a break from their cell phones to show us the way. Actually I think management finally killed the last one the other day with their Mad Max golf carts.
Aw, c'mon guys! Let's cut this couple a little slack. They're not the first to fraternize with the enemy. A little tarring and feathering should show them that we rent stabilized old farts aren't that bad.
I have no animosity towards this young, white (upwardly mobile?) couple with dog. After all, it's their decision to spend their hard earned money on an over-priced rental apartment. I have no doubt they'll be one of the first to petition management for a dog-run in the Oval. I am, however, envious that they can easily and happily afford the ever-growing rents and seem to have no issues (noisy neighbors or noise complaints against them for their less than 80% covered parquet tiles, vermin, poorly working over-loaded laundry facilities, future key-card concerns, MCI's and more.)
These are the young, white and upwardly mobile that management is clearly focusing on in their advertising campaign. Some things haven't changed around here. But many of us have been here for many more years and have had to bear burdens no longer in place: long waiting lists to get in, MCI's, strict rules about carpet and noise, our children admonished for sitting sideways on a swing, stolen bikes from the carriage rooms, stolen items from our laundry rooms, loss of neighbors we've known and trusted for years due to death or a move to affordable homes and so much more.
Yes. I feel envious that I have remained a loyal and decent resident having overcome so many obstacles. I would like to be as "happy" about life here now. I would like to be worry-free about the stability of my complex and my own little apartment which I call home.
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