Out here in Real America, we live an existence that straddles the line between embracing car culture, and rejecting it especially hard if there’s money involved in it. The pendulum has swung very, very far towards the latter, to the point where as the Observer reports, Manhattan below 23rd Street is basically bereft of gas stations, because the owners are selling the land to make way for luxury condos. “Why should I care?” you might be asking. Ordinarily, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask about Disney Presents: Manhattan!, but in this case, the drivers used to gassing up in lower Manhattan are going to start coming here.
Remember The Road Warrior, and how the plot revolved around a small band of survivors with some of the last gasoline left on the planet? We don’t mean to sow panic or anything (well, maybe we do), but all those people parking their cars on the sidewalks waiting for gas lines are gonna have to get their gas from somewhere. So that means more early morning traffic jams from people lined up and waiting for gas, more cabbies coming here to gas up, which OK, we can deal with that probably. It’s only a matter of time before the people of Lower Manhattan who need gas realize where it all is and pull one of these:
Think we’re being paranoid? That’s fine, go ahead and think that. We’ll just be over here getting spike strips and improvised cannons ready for when the luxury hordes of the Lower East Side come calling, telling us to handover Atlantic Avenue to them and no one gets hurt. You laugh now, but you people being comically foul-mouthed is just the beginning, because motherfuckers get CRAZY when they don’t get their gas.