What on Earth is going on with thrift stores in NY? 

How the death of long-standing mainstays in NY's fashion and cultural history have been replaced by, well, 10 of the same thing. Or 100. 

I remember walking by Jodamo on the day they posted the construction permit approvals on the walls of their store on Orchard Street. Jodamo, a men's clothing store that most will remember in the past 10 years as being a place to see the flipbook through time of men's apparel, with its classic but chaotic mixture of old designer styles and more affordable clothes if you needed a suit ready in a day, was put out of business and less than 60 days later replaced with a niche boutique. The weeks before its near century-long tour ended one could find a man getting dangerously close to the edge of Grand Street with a metal rolling rack of men's business casual clothes, saying "everything's on sale, what are you buying" to everyone within 3 meters of him. Seeing Jodamo go, and hearing everyone in the local's local bar complain about it, says a lot about where the fashion and consumer industry is going in NY, but perhaps even more about the culture of the people who have to live with it.

I wish I could say I was good at thrifting. My favorite places in the city have always been the ones closest to my house and those that didn't try to sell me the "retro" Lee jeans that my mom still wears for upwards of $300. My friends, who are probably a lot more fashion-involved than I am, restored a nice portion of my faith by helping to take me on a tour of the L-Train Vintages that litter East Brooklyn and the edges of Queens, and the ($2 dollar T-shirt) deals that can be found on the Upper West Side just on the fringes of student affluenza and the reliable and improving Manhattan Valley projects. The people (and not just very young people) who have long been enamored by the beautiful clash of designer density of 5th Avenue and the much needed sustainability of fashion and most parts of daily living that can make long term residence tolerable and possible in NY, are not the people looking for eight boutique clothing stores that double as coffee shops to pop up everywhere.

A close friend of mine who has lived in Manhattan as an adult for nearly 31 years straight restored my faith in their prudence when they mentioned they needed to get Big Reuse to pick up their 12 year old furniture that needed rehoming and refabbing. Eco-friendly and accessible resources to the NY community have been an enduring and constant need for people in all bouroughs. With the likelihood of the necessity in building a seawall in the western side of the city coupled with the indifference to the impending loss of biodiversity and straight-up real estate to those who live further out on the coast towards Long Island (read: Far Rockaway), finding a way to make the city less of a trash and money pit could just be the start.