Remember “Rent”?
That famous Broadway musical by Jonathan Larson, which premiered in 1996, depicted an East Village beset by crime, squatters, drug use and homelessness during the 1990s.
When the show opened, the “La Boheme” riff was an edgy and relevant rock ’n’ roll snapshot of a downtown neighborhood that was in the papers for all the wrong reasons. Many people were legitimately afraid to go there.
But by the time “Rent” finally closed in 2008, the musical had turned hokey and retro. Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Team America World Police” ruthlessly mocked it in 2004.
That’s partly because the area experienced a stunning turnaround over those 12 years. The East Village was suddenly posh. Mary-Kate Olsen and Helen Mirren bought luxe apartments there. No longer worrying about being murdered, residents were more concerned with getting into Momofuku.
The world of “Rent” was in the rearview, and New York was the safest big city in America.
Not anymore. Now, we nervously glance over our shoulder on the way to the recycle bin.
As a current EV dweller, paying more than $3,000 a month to live just a block away from 14th Street and Avenue A — where a a deranged man stabbed three people on Sunday, killing one — “Rent” ain’t looking so silly these days.
My neighborhood is a wreck. And to anyone with eyes, the gruesome attack, which took place near a Trader Joe’s and Target around 5 p.m., was totally predictable.
When a place appears to be a derelict hotbed of lawlessness, chances are it will become a derelict hotbed of lawlessness. And, indeed, the East Village has.
I can attest that this particular pocket is a free-for-all of vagrancy, garbage-littered sidewalks, hard drugs used with abandon and disturbed individuals allowed to run amok.
For blocks, there are pop-up encampments of grocery carts full of junk where druggies openly inject themselves with needles and hit crack pipes. Then they carelessly pitch them on the ground.
Nobody seems to care, even though children and dogs are everywhere. And if they do, they’re afraid to speak up for fear of progressive castigation.
This week I watched two cops staring at piles of someone’s abandoned hoard of trash on 12th Street, next to a public school attended by kids ages 3 to 11.
Almost every day for three years, I’ve seen the same 20-something woman, barefoot, covered in dirt and sobbing, walk up and down the road howling in peoples’ faces.
A local shop employee told me they’ve seen her admitted to the hospital for an overdose, and then let out to go back to doing the exact same thing hours later. It’s heartbreaking.
Another older woman, always reeking of urine, wanders into bars and restaurants begging for money, as everybody pinches their noses.
I was once chased by a crazed man in a bodega who wrongly thought I gave him a funny look.
Fear is everywhere.
A popular juice bar on East 6th Street and Avenue A is mulling relocating because the situation has become so dire.
“There’s more homeless, more drug use, more robberies and some violent crimes around here,” Juicy Lucy owner René Henricks told The Post a few days ago.
“There’s human waste along the whole avenue. There was a fatal overdose in the alcove next to our store about a month ago.”
All true. All obvious. All enraging. And yet the NYPD gaslights everybody with vague stats saying crime in the area is down 30%.
To paraphrase: “Here’s a spreadsheet. Suck it up.”
And out-of-touch columnists at the New York Times — redundant, I know — are worse, always chalking up our horrible, lived experiences to “perception.” Little more than a pesky PR problem. New York is supposed to be like this, their self-serving revisionist history goes. They love nothing more than to insist: It’s not as bad as it was in the 1970s.
Oh, thanks.
So, deadly stabbings in front of the grocery store and being panhandled on your own stoop as you leave for work, as I was last week, are just part of the quintessential NYC experience?
Poppycock. They were not a few short years ago. They’re a result of failed government policies and laissez-faire policing. Everybody — everybody! — knows it.
Yes, downtown New York is back to looking a lot like “Rent” again. What’s the vital difference?
The criminal fortune we’re all paying in rent.
