NYC Seaport a 'Ghost Town' Months After Sandy

NEW YORK -- The historic cobblestone streets and 19th-century mercantile buildings near the water's edge in lower Manhattan are eerily deserted, a neighborhood silenced by Superstorm Sandy.

Just blocks from the tall-masted ships that rise above South Street Seaport, the windows of narrow brick apartment buildings are still crisscrossed with masking tape left by their owners before the storm. Store interiors are stripped down to plywood and wiring. Restaurants are chained shut, frozen in time, saddled with electrical systems that were ruined by several feet of salt water that raced up from the East River and through their front doors.

"People have no clue that this corner of Manhattan has been hit so badly," said Adam Weprin, manager of the Bridge Cafe, one of the city's oldest bars that sits on a quiet street near the seaport. "Right now, it's a ghost town and a construction site."

Nearly four months after the storm, roughly 85 percent of small businesses near the South Street Seaport are still boarded up. It could be months before some reopen, while others may never return. On Fulton Street, the wide tourist-friendly pedestrian walkway that comprises the seaport's main shopping district, not a single one of the major chain stores - which include Coach, Ann Taylor and Brookstone - has reopened.

Among local business owners, there is a pervasive sense that their plight has been ignored by the rest of the city. A state senator who represents the area estimates at least 1,000 jobs were lost in lower Manhattan - 450 of them in the seaport neighborhood alone

Of course, for the AP, the blame here lies with the city (run by an erstwhile Republican), but had Bush been president, we all know whose fault it would have been.

BTW, I cannot see anywhere that the NY Times has run this article. A newspaper in Billings, MT picked it up, but not the Gray Lady in whose turf this is happening.

Reading through the article, it seems like it is less the city government that is being blamed and more the city as a community.

Either way, there is not much that can be done about this besides expediting insurance payouts.

The buildings are externally intact because they are made of solid stone and brickwork - from the outside, they look largely unaffected.

The problem is that this is the oldest part of NYC - the electrical grid and communications grid were underground and vulnerable to the surge, and they were wrecked. Many of the shops were basement level and ground level and their inventory and fixtures were flooded and damaged. The residential buildings had boilers, and sewage pumps and PBXs and transformers in their basements. Those key pieces of equipment were zeroed out.

Those buildings are now uninhabitable until the repairs are done, and it has been tough since it has been a fairly cold winter.

So the specialty stores that attract visitors from other neighborhoods are closed. The local bars and restaurants depended upon foot traffic from shoppers as well as locals for business. The locals are also largely gone - living in hotels and with family because they are waiting for their buildings to get their residency certificates back.

It will be summertime before everything is repaired, and by then many businesses will have been forced to close their doors.

It will be years before that neighborhood thrives again.

Every time we have a hurricane on the Gulf the know-it-alls whine about communities not putting our electric undergound to protect it from wind damage. Duh!

Flood repairs take a lot of know-how, money, cooperation and time on a public and private level. If a damaged beach town is a vacation place for most property owners, that makes it double trouble.

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