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A new nightmare born out of luxury real estate: adult field trips. The New York Post reports sailing excursions and outings to apple orchards are considered a hot amenity for New Yorkers who “may still find it tricky to mix and mingle in real life” but also have around $3,000 to spend on a ground-floor studio in Midtown East. The activities dreamed up by developers like Brodsky apparently go fast: The trips offered in the last year to residents in those buildings — like wine tasting with 50 strangers who are also your neighbors — sold out immediately.
One Park Point in Windsor Terrace and Maven in Mott Haven are also organizing outings for their residents, including horseback riding in Prospect Park and food tours of the Bronx. A principal at Focus Property Group, which developed One Park Point, told the Post that they were planning to expand the menu of options to include scavenger hunts, sleigh rides, and running clubs. So if you start seeing groups of adults running around in Prospect Park looking for Easter eggs stuffed with clues written by some management-company employee, at least you know what’s happening.
Call me old-fashioned, but in my day, we ignored our neighbors until we all suddenly got mad at building management about the heat going out, at which point we became friendly enough to talk shit in the elevator and water each other’s plants when we’re out of town. If building management invited us to go apple-picking, we would think it was a trick! And it turns out it kind of is a trick! One broker told the Post that the outings were a way for developers to try “to stay competitive” rather than “dropping the price” of rents. And the outings aren’t even free — an apple-picking trip to Pennings Orchard cost residents $70.
