Two years ago, when we were plotting the launch of this magazine, the towers rising over Williamsburg’s McCarren Park obsessed us. We photographed them with drunks sleeping in the foreground; we drove by them with video cameras at night; we made music videos to slow pans over the graffiti scrawled on their construction fencing; we stole their advertising slogans to title our short films. It felt important to keep an eye on them, as they seemed like the first in a succession of great waves that was coming to crush our New York.

Today, one massive housing and financial market meltdown later, we see these towers for what they really are: the high water mark of the latest boom of wealth, just one more relic of another time. In this issue, we explore the aftermath of this boom specifically, and, more generally, the nostalgia that grips us all as we watch time — and, more often, money — sweep away the world that we know.

Last Exit co-editor Paul Menchaca examines what is happening to the New York art world as the flood of new money that washed over the city in recent years begins to dry up.

For his essay on the former East Germany’s nostalgia for its communist past, David Grocott rode the trams of Liepzig in search of what is left of the “ostie” way of life 20 years after the deluge of capitalism.

Bryan Joiner mourns the imminent loss of Shea Stadium, a “spectacularly nondescript” relic of another era where, despite being built in 1964, it’s always 1986.

In her review of review of Spanish photographer Miguel Trillo’s latest show at Abu Dhabi’s Ghaf Gallery, Last Exit co-editor Keach Hagey examines how the deluge of oil wealth into the UAE washed in the country’s first wave of bepierced and bespiked counterculture.

In our travel story for this month, M.L. Johnson explores how Frank Lloyd Wright’s many renovations to his Wisconsin home of Taliesin haven’t managed to exorcise the ghost of his murdered mistress.

And we conduct a video interview with radio reporter Paul DeReinzo about the 20th anniversary of the Tompkins Square Riot—considered by many to be a boiling point for the gentrification of the East Village in the 80’s.

— The Editors