A housing complex near Ohio State University is calling itself the East Village. By the time this blog is posted, NYU plans to own half of it.
EV Grieve has found out about a new housing complex popping up next to the Ohio State University campus named The East Village, which “is inspired by the city’s once dilapidated neighborhood transformed by the artists, poets, and writers of the 1960s.”
Like our contemporary East Village, this one will be filled with college kids whose parents are wealthy enough to pay ridiculous amounts of money to keep them from having to experience discomfort (some kids just dormed there freshman year, but they really hated those entitled students too, I swear). Unlike our East Village, this place will have no soul. No soul and less drug dealers. Probably less homeless people, too. Once you take away the dealers and the homeless, is there any point in even looking for a soul?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to trash on the school that Wikipedia told me R.L. Stine graduated from. There was a long list of alumni to pick from, but once you see the writer of the Goosebumps series you know you’ve peaked. I’m just saying that attempts like this, which are designed to blatantly feed off the history and supposed character of a certain community, will invariably fail. There will be no history of “artists, poets, and writers” to make this housing complex anything more than a high end dormitory.
A casual glance at their website shows what the East Village really means. The “Amenities” portion has the header “The view is better on a flatscreen.” That bit is probably more true in Ohio’s East Village than it is in New York’s East Village. The best portion of the website has to be the scrolling header which shows about fifteen pictures, mostly of young OSU students and the hip appliances they will find in their new upscale apartments. Hidden in there, though, is just a split screenshot of the Facebook and Twitter homepages. You know how much the Beatniks loved social networking.
anonymous
