Kakutani to Gaines: You Don't Know UWS

NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani finally pulls Steven Gaines' Manhattan real estate narrative The Sky's The Limit off her personal slush pile, only to slap it down in her review today:

"The Sky's the Limit" is littered with small mistakes and outdated descriptions. For instance, Mr. Gaines writes of Manhattan's Upper West Side that "it's guerrilla theater on every block" and that there are "dramatic displays of wealth and poverty everywhere, including many homeless and emotionally ill people on the streets," a description that might have been apt a decade or two ago but that hardly applies to this willfully yuppified neighborhood today.

His description of Central Park West as a "six-lane boulevard" is misleading (it's six lanes wide only if one counts the rows of parked cars on either side of the street) and a picture caption incorrectly notes that Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons are inflated at "a small park across Eighty-second Street."

The lesson: don't fuck with the UWS, people. Michiko's watching.
· They'll Take Manhattan, For a Million or More [NYTimes]
· Book Review: Is Steven Gaines from Kansas? [Curbed]