The Lower East Side is a pretty great place to spend time, regardless of how you plan to spend that time. Tasty foods at all price points, nightspots ranging from unapologetically dive-y to velvet rope-intensive, diversions from high-brow to low, history for days and a very booming present to boot -- the Lower East Side has all that. Which makes it that much stranger that the L.E.S. has taken so long to emerge as a powerhouse in the Manhattan luxury condo marketplace.
Yes, much of the neighborhood's housing stock is of the reformed-tenement variety, and there are zoning hangups among other complicating factors, but given how many people spend their evenings on the Lower East Side, it's somewhat strange how few of them can spend the night there in new luxury condominiums.