This line from the increasingly strange Monitor Duty's review of Spider-Man 2 would have made me chuckle even if I hadn't just been to New York:

Forget that amazing loft that he shared with rich kid Harry Osborne; he now lives alone in the typical hellish NYC overpriced closet.

I get the feeling the author has some conception of New York as a Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson that's still stuck in the mid-70s, and you can't step outside without walking into a gang war and stepping over bodies and drug addicts. And thus misses the point that Peter's crapshack apartment shows what a fragile existence he's living because he can't bring any of the parts of his life into balance. Hell, I just spend almost a week sleeping on the futon in the living room of friends, one of whom is in a dues-paying job in the arts and the other is are a public school math teacher. And yet they have their own bathroom, the apartment is clean, well-lit, and freshly painted, and it's basically a heck of a place. The point of Peter's apartment is that it's atypical...