John Butleron being careful what you wish for.
It's a commonly held belief that the three most important factors in judging the desirability of a property are location, location and location. But for young hipsters those three words are edgy, edgy and edgy.
The conversation du jour among those that populate the bars of the Lower East Side, in Manhattan, is about how high rents and draconian policing have eliminated the edginess that made Manhattan such an interesting city back in the day. Not only can you not see squeegee operators wiping windshields at the traffic lights any more, but you can't smoke in bars, you can't score weed on the street and there is no sense of danger or adventure. There's no edge.
Of course, this is nothing more than one generation of gentrifier complaining about the next, and until recently I was among them. Then I witnessed something too edgy for my taste, something that made me realise it might be time to move to the suburbs.
I was walking to work at five in the evening when I noticed four kids running down Allen Street at top speed. It's normal enough to see young men running, but I noticed this group in the first instance because two of them were girls, and girls don't tend to run in public unless they are playing sport.
The other notable thing was the speed at which they were running. They were sprinting, snaking down the busy sidewalk in single file, weaving in and out of old women with shopping bags, knocking people over and jumping into the road at some points. They must have run from one of the call centres or fast-food restaurants that line the street.
Allen Street is a classic "Moses arterial", four lanes of belching traffic on either side of a bleak, dirty island, running between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Apart from the occasional drunk sleeping it off on one of the white-flecked crusty benches, I never saw a living soul using the island on Allen Street until the first of these kids suddenly cut into four lanes of city traffic at top speed.
To this day I have no idea how he made it on to the island without being run over, given the time of day and the volume of traffic, but he did. The pigeons scattered as he reached the island and ran through muddy puddles, scanning the next four lanes with wild, crying eyes. Because I was listening to an iPod, these events had the distant quality of a music video.
Scanning past him, I now saw what they were running from. Ten metres behind the other three kids was a man with a machete, gaining on them second by second. The kids ran into traffic and skipped through the cabs, yet by the time they reached the island the man with the machete was maybe five metres behind the last of them.
At this point the first boy had made it across the other four lanes and disappeared into the warren of Chinatown, and now the second boy was weaving through traffic and sprinting off behind him, safe. The two girls were stranded on the island, on their own - and they knew it.
I was standing on the other side of the road, facing them. The man with the machete was sprinting towards them, and they threw themselves into the whizzing traffic. The first girl made it across to my side, but the second was instantly hit by a car, which knocked her to the ground before screeching to a halt.
The man with the machete never even broke his stride as he ran out, grabbed her by her long ponytail and dragged her back on to the island behind him, in New York, in 2007. Seeing her friend caught like this, the first girl
abandoned her position near me on the other side of the traffic and ran back to help the second girl, who was lying in a puddle on the island, crying and begging in a language I didn't understand.
As the first girl wove through the traffic again and approached him, the man with the machete shouted something at her. She stopped, and I dialled 911. The man raised his machete above his head, holding the second girl at his feet by the ponytail.
I presume everyone else on Allen Street also shut their eyes as the machete dropped, and when I opened them again the second girl was lying on the ground and the man was holding her ponytail in his hand and shouting at the first girl. The girl on the ground had been scalped, and I could see she was bleeding from the head.
At this the first girl ran towards the man, screaming wildly, and he slashed at her leg with the machete. She fell to the ground. The man turned and ran into Chinatown with the scalped ponytail, which still had its rubber band on, near the top.
Now - and not before now - did I step into the road to help them. Seeing me, the girl with the slashed leg climbed to her feet, then dragged the scalped girl into a standing position. The two of them crossed to the far side of Allen Street and disappeared into Chinatown, in the same direction as their attacker.
As I watched them go, the sound of sirens finally materialised, but by now all evidence of a crime had vanished except for a few specks of blood on the sidewalk. Fat, cocky pigeons strutted around my feet, under the shade of sooty trees. The traffic began to move, the world spun on its axis and, in bars not 100 metres away, hipsters compared skin art, kept it real and bemoaned the lack of a real edge on the Lower East Side.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com