This time of year all the new college grads want apartments in the East Village and the Lower East Side. I've been in Manhattan since 1999, which wasn't that long ago, and even then that far downtown and east wasn't exactly the prime destination for the young and upwardly mobile. Apartments were dumps, had bugs, and not every block was as pristine as it was now. That's all thanks to a boom in development that started around 2005.
This piece in The New York Times today talks about how a small group of mothers cleaned up Washington Square Park in the early 1980s, essentially paving the way for making downtown the grown up playground that it is now. If you live in one of the many overpriced units downtown, you can thank them. :-)
