Maybe you've seen Richard Florida's Atantic article on meltdown geography, or the New York Times on LA's beleaguered hipster suburb . Both effectively say suburbs will eat it in this recession. Why?

Well, the L'Occitane-scented waters of the gentrification wave are already rolling back, as predicted: megarealtor Corcoran is closing its Harlem office. Is anyone thinking of the white people?

The angry old building super/tabloid star over in Bay Ridge with a penchant for posting crazy-ass notes threatening to kill his tenants, Richard Martin, has been fired. We're sad!

"Some years ago, when Elizabeth Street began to change, I began to avoid it," blogs Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. "I used to go out of my way just to walk on it... In 1998 Bella's Luncheonette became Cafe Habana. And then a shop opened. It blared ear-splitting music and expelled obnoxious people who stepped over the Italian ladies peeling potatoes on the sidewalk... [Today], Elizabeth Street will break your heart." It sure will. Our new offices—which someone surely paid out the snout for—are located on Elizabeth Street. A high-end men's shaving store just opened up down the block—and then there's the fancy Public next door (try the kangaroo meat!) It's possible that a 150-person niche media company setting up shop is the apotheosis of the gentrification of this "Nolita" street—a made-up neighborhood name that the Little fuggin' Italy locals hate, by the way.

The Palazzo Chupi penthouse, part of artist Julian Schnabel's giant pink building on West 11th Street, has cut its asking price again, from $29 mil to to $24 mil. (It dropped to $29.5 mil from $32 mil last May.) The story isn't just that an artist can't sell a big pink mansion in the West Village, though. The slashing of the price tag on Palazzo Chupi represents not just a reverse for the building's colorful creator; it marks the end of an era for New York artists.Palazzo was the most recent and ambitious artist-designed real estate project, so it makes sense that it'll be the one to fall first, with its inability to sell and hubristic asking price. For 50 years artists have supplemented unreliable income from their work with real-estate gains. Now New York is likely to experience the first significant decline in real-estate prices in decades. Artists may or may not find the city's neighborhoods more affordable; but Schnabel and others can no longer expect to share in the appreciation of neighborhoods they make hip. It's fair to say that there won't be large projects like this in the future, and that Schnabel will be regarded as the peak of the heady days of the artist-developer.

On Friday, lease negotiations broke down between the owner of Astroland, Coney Island's honky-tonk, 46-year-old amusement park, and its landlord, Thor Equities. It was abruptly announced that the scruffy Brooklyn park would shut down forever on Sunday—a month ahead of schedule. Damn, gentrification! Would it really be the last day? Who knows—the future of Coney Island in recent years has been as topsy-turvey as the Tilt-a-Whirl. There was nothing to do but board the F train and visit Astroland one last time. Step right up—into the wild and weird world where you, too, can purchase panties off the boardwalk.The subway ride was a level of hell I have not recently experienced on the MTA. An exhausted-looking man with three kids sat across from me the entire ride, alternately changing his shabbily-clad childrens' diapers and barking at them to "Shut the fuck up!" I kept hoping he would get off at the next stop, but he didn't: of course, he was going to Coney Island. When the train pulled into the Surf Avenue station, bloodcurdling screams went up from the 9 to 12-year-olds on board. "Last day!" they cried, running towards the door. Mami already needed a beer. The Astroland environment immediately transformed every child into a whirling, shrieking wraith. Everything was as it should be: a woman on the boardwalk sold jewelry and a pile of worn-looking panties off a table, four for $10. The the games, rides—which may be sold to the Middle East when all this is over—and shooting ranges were popping. There were assorted camera crews there to document the park's probable death, as well as many lone white dudes with cameras. Maybe they all had photoblogs. So, WTF was going on? I asked the man who manned the "Shoot Em Win" booth on Surf Avenue, near Astroland's gaping maw. "It's going to hurt a lot of people. It's going to hurt a lot of working people," said Mike, who has worked this booth for "a lotta years." The Daily News reported Astroland as employing 75 year-round workers and 275 seasonal ones. "Two shots, five bucks, win a stuffed animal," he told a young boy who approached the stand. The kid was dragged off by his older brother, who told him, "Don't spend that ten, boo." Mike isn't sure if Shoot Em Win will return next year—it's all up in the air. So was it really closing? I asked the Black Scorpion, a Texas gentleman who had just performed as part of the Circus Sideshow—which will not close, as Coney Island USA own the building. His act involved tying his shoelaces with his so-called "lobster hands"—he was born with only three fingers on each one. "Looks that way," he sighed. People were lining up for a "Future of Coney Island" peep show in which we peered into dioramas that depicted what Coney Island might look like post-rezoning. It was not pretty. So was Astroland gone for good? Probably. Maybe. Nobody quite knew, not even the park's employees. Your answer depends on how much of a cynic you are. Like the game where you squirt water into a ceramic clown's mouth, it's all just a crapshoot anyway. I tried to win a dirty stuffed clownfish from the Claw machine, and lost two quarters. [Photo: ElissaSCA's Flickr]

Hey, did we know that some neighborhoods have corner stores, which sell foodstuffs? The Bodega Party in a Box is a tool from the Neighbors Project, which is "is a growing movement of a generation of people living in cities who want to connect with their diverse neighbors to improve the neighborhood for everyone." OK, let's withhold judgment until we take a look inside Pandora's bodega-box, shall we?

There's nothing like a flea market to bring out the religious sectarianism in people. Last night, the Queen of All Saints Church in Fort Greene held a meeting — the third of its kind — to discuss how the Brooklyn Flea was destroying the community. Racked's Paul Caine was there (he wasn't supposed to be; see picture) and reports that the issues before the house included the pile-up of garbage, parking and bathroom headaches, and the strange fact that Jews never seem to get inconvenienced on their days of rest. Kathleen Walsh, one church parishioner said: "Sunday is a very special day for us, [and] we look forward to that day. It is a day that has been impeded on by the commercialism and hubbub of the flea... I muse aloud, would such an entity be allowed across from a synagogue?" And then they came for the antiquers, and I did not speak because I wasn't an antiquer. More seething Bronze Age hatred couched in Brooklyn gentrification worries after the jump:

Bushwick, Brooklyn was once a minority neighborhood. Really! Recently, a bunch of hipsters have moved in there. But here's a secret: Bushwick is still a minority neighborhood. It even has ten separate housing projects, which are not full of whites! But Brooklyn's minorities are boring, because they're hardly on the cutting edge of art, culture, or cheap imported beer. So when Paper Magazine set out this month to answer the head-scratchingly inane question "Can the hipster ghettos of Brooklyn really replace Manhattan?", they took the logical step of including only the relevant people in the neighborhood: tattooed nilla hipsters. Check out these scans of the magazine's photo shoot and play "Guess the area's demographics":

They're building tons of new condos and high-rise apartments in and around Williamsburg, the hipster neighborhood that has been mostly gentrified but still has some rough edges. Like last night: a "machete-wielding mob," as the the Daily News called it, stabbed two teens on S. 3rd St. in what's thought to be a gang-related beef. An hour and a half before that, a man was shot near Roebling and S. 9th St. [via Curbed]

"In Bedford-Stuyvesant, a glitzy housing complex has risen in a neighborhood where cigarettes often get sold singly. It's a test of coexistence." Yuppies and loosies together? That'll be the day. [LAT]

The first-ever IKEA store is opening in the borough of Brooklyn tomorrow, a development which has the local media all atwitter. Close to 40 people have lined up for the chance to be the first ones in the rapidly gentrifying Red Hook neighborhood to buy mass-produced Swedish furniture. To celebrate the occasion, the gruff and hilarious Park Slope guy who goes by the name of Blognigger (just to make you uncomfortable) has posted his own Onion-esque take: "Red Hook Blacks Line Up to Rob First 100 IKEA Customers." But he doesn't forget to make the scheduled robberies a multicultural endeavor for the Curbed.com-reading gentrifiers themselves, too:

We stumbled onto the words of an angry, succinct blogger who calls himself Blognigger; he's black and a software engineer and lives in Park Slope. He's at the forefront of several wars: he's black in America, and in a mostly-white neighborhood, which he will soon have to leave: "I make $106,000 a year, and I'm a pauper in Park Slope. No, literally - we have to leave. I have two kids and my rent has just been raised to $3500 a month. I've lived here since 1999 (when 5th avenue was still a total shithole), and now I'm going to have to uproot my family and move out of brooklyn... I can't afford to live here anymore without my wife doing online surveys and shit to supplement our income." But what are his thoughts on the Real World decamping to downtown Brooklyn for their upcoming season?

We'll be laughing at the fools sitting up in 8-story building soon to be built on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. The site of a former paint factory, it's supposed to be poisonous. Or was. This will also displace many people—well, just one person: Angel Hess, who lives there in his van, called Purple 53, at least part of the year. [Curbed]

It is spring, the season of fecundity. With that in mind, parenting website Babble presents us with 45 reasons to have a child—now! (I can think of only one: tax write-off.) We've highlighted four and added one of our own. Hey, did you know? These days, you can "buy a breast pump the size of a stopwatch."

An ad for some new condos advertises "Rooftop Cabanas," Lofts," "Open Space," and "KILL YUPPIES." Whoops, that last one was just some graffiti, and it's popping up everywhere on obnoxious ads for the luxury condohotels that will soon price the residents forced to look at them right out of their neighborhood. City Council Member Peter Vallone wants the construction site owners to be responsible for removing the graffiti from their sites, or pay a fine. [via Curbed, who has more fun photos like this one.]

The Lower East Side is changing! You blink once, and the neighborhood has gone from an immigrant-packed hovel of tenements to a rich jerk-packed hovel. Of condos! The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just named the entire freaking neighborhood one the nation's 11 most endangered places:

What are "co-housing enthusiasts," asks the Brooklyn Paper? They're "a group of Brooklynites who want to buy a nice building near Prospect Park and share common areas with like-minded friendly people." They are sad living alone in tiny apartments and want friends! A co-housed building is a cross between a "commune and a condo." One place starts at around $600,000 a unit. There are communal meals, but no free love. (Sure, that's what they say now; we'll check back in six months.) [Brooklyn Paper]

The longtime manager of bohemian artist enclave the Chelsea Hotel, Stanley Bard, was ousted last year, leaving the door open for total capitalist tightasses to take over and evict long-term tenants. Today, the Chelsea Hotel blog reports that the new management team might be on their way out. Who to blame?

Overparenting. The green movement. Gentrification. Obsession with organic food. The result was perhaps inevitable: "Le Petit Paradis," a new organic preschool to open on the Upper East Side. Activities will include building a gigantic bubble in which to live during adulthood, effectively shielding oneself from the outside world. Seriously, though, it'll be run by a Frenchwoman and will feature "environmentally friendly wall paints, bamboo floors, and low-flow toilets," for those who know how to use them. Said headmistress was inspired by "'the Al Gore movie" and "dying polar bears." [Intelligencer]