How fast can you say "gone"?

CB3 will hold its monthly Bowery zoning subcommittee meeting this Wednesday (1/16) from 6:30 to 7pm, 184 Eldridge Street.

While the Bowery north of Houston will be permanently transformed by the huge Frank Gehry knock-off destination hotel on 5th Street & Bowery, yet another giant luxury hotel is being built, this one all the way down on Bowery & Hester Street right at the heart of Chinatown.

The Bowery, lined with small commercial buildings that can be bought out overnight, is an easy target for developers. A swank, new museum towering at more than twice the height of the tenements on the Bowery between Stanton and Rivington, a new luxury hotel right in the midst of Chinatown -- these are not isolated aberrations on the Bowery. These are signs of rapid transformation about to occur.

Meanwhile, the mayor is cutting the budgets of all the city agencies that protect tenants, buildings and communities, and the mayor's advisers are leaving the administration for positions in real estate development to carry on the Bloomberg program of developing everything in sight, leaving no ungentrified neighborhood intact, displacing every ethnic community -- West Harlem, 125th Street, the Dominican neighborhood in Inwood, the East River waterfront running along Chinatown and the LES -- all are targeted for development.