New Yorkers, Take Back Your City
This is not normal. It is state-sponsored, corporate-driven and turbo-charged.
Manhattan has become a Corporate Abyss.
There’s no place in midtown where you can place your eyes that doesn’t hit a corporate logo.
The Blade Runner-like ads are just the tip of the iceberg.
The Bloomberg push to “clean up” things have led to a city-corporate one-two punch driving out small businesses for the sake of national brands.
I’m newly disgusted every time I venture into Manhattan. I’m totally disoriented, not finding familiar landmark stores that were once present for ages. Now replaced by shiny national corporate brands and national brand wannabes.
And it’s encroaching on Chinatown too, perhaps the last part of Manhattan that has any actual human life remaining in it.
I don’t know how it can be changed. But it has to be stopped.
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
The “big picture” is the eradication of mom & pop stores and the conversion of big box stores into showrooms for home-delivered products. No place for gang bangers to hold up and steal from, and very little need for low-paid floor staff. And no personality, but that doesn’t matter if you live in a Manhattan penthouse, or on Long Island.
Jobs for the working class? Go south young man, way south, to Mexico or beyond. The IRS can still tax you there.
Manhattan will become what? A tourist destination?
Times Square is an open-air mall now as far as I’m concerned. All personality and individuality drained from it. They really make me want back the days of X-rated theaters and whores.