The Honk Kong-ification of Manhattan

SO: the NYT reports today that Philadelphia is the new Brooklyn, and since Brooklyn was the new Manhattan it seems that the Big Apple is now twice removed and a 75-minute train ride away from itself.

The real point, of course, being that City real estate prices have driven out the artists and the hipsters that follow them and the gentrification surfers that follow them.

In a sense, NYC is slowly turning into a Hong Kong. Where business is the business of the town. Where expat euro bankers parade through the local clubs and the hotel concierges recommend shopping as the highlight of a weekend.

Philly might not be the sixth borough yet, afteral it's the place the encouraged Benjamin Franklin to conjure the "Early to bed and early to rise" couplet, but without the poets and the troublemakers, NYC will start to feel like HKG without the hills.