Posted on 06/03/2014 12:17:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
When Barack Obama leaves office on January 20, 2017, he’ll need a new place to live. And like the race to succeed him as president, as absurd as it sounds this far out, there’s already a front-runner: According to Politico, Obama just can’t stop talking about moving back to New York City, where he lived as a young dreamer in the early ‘80s. “I just desperately want to take a walk through Central Park again, and just remember what that feels like,” the president reminisced at a fund-rasier in 2012.
But his life after the White House won’t be all philosophizing in grimy apartments like the first time around. As an ex-president with an active wife, high-school-age daughter, two dogs, and vague plans to start something like the Clinton Global Initiative, Obama will need to find a new niche in a much different city than the one he knew as a poor Columbia student. The options are plentiful, but we’ve got some ideas.
Let’s just go ahead and assume price — and co-op boards — won’t be an issue.
Obama’s old place was on East 94th in Yorkville, and as he remembered in Dreams From My Father, it wasn’t pretty:
It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for the rest of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.
Sure, he could move back — there are luxury high-rises around now — but the Upper East Side is Michael Bloomberg’s kingdom. You’ve got to give him his space.
As a junior in college, Obama tried the west side, in a two-bedroom at 109th Street. A bit south of there could be an option: Massive buildings like 15 Central Park West, home of Lloyd Blankfein, Sting, and many more bold-face names, promise privacy, space for chauffeurs, and of course the park. But even for a president, the Upper West Side seems a bit stuffy. And it could get awkward with the bankers.
They have these in the suburbs, too.Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images Sparking Obama’s rekindled affair with the idea of the city, aides say, was his trip earlier this year to the Gap in midtown, of all places. “What he cherishes and misses is the serendipity — you don’t know who you’re going to bump into or what they’re going to say,” said presidential confidante Valerie Jarrett.
He won’t really get that in midtown. But, duly noted: He likes stores and serendipity! (Also good food, having eaten at hip spots like Blue Hill and ABC Kitchen, Harlem’s Red Rooster and Sylvia’s, and the decidedly less cool Junior’s in Brooklyn.)
Using this knowledge, we plugged some assumed facts about what the Obamas will need into New York’s Nate Silver–helmed Livability Calculator — safety, diversity, green space all ranked high; bars and transit low — and the results favor lower Manhattan:
I read there is a fire sale on Cul de Sacs in Hell. Or Biden may lease his income producing property to O,taking it away from miltary use.
... because there just aren’t enough unemployed hipsters hanging out in Brooklyn coffee shops ...
On the other hand, Brooklyn is full of Jews and he HATES Jews with a passion!
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I was last in Brooklyn in 2007 ,,, full of Arabs ,, saw 3 shops in just a few blocks that had burka’s in their windows.. The other prevalent group were old people who cannot afford their property taxes and are being forced out.
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