Wow, what a screed. I thought I ought to stop halfway through and put on my asbestos gloves.
He does have some reasonable points. I would agree, for example, that the privatization of public spaces is not a good thing. Rampant speculation in real estate doesn;t appear to have a lot of benefits for most New Yorkers. I’m told by people who live there that rents have gotten truly ridiculous, and that’s clearly a hardship for a lot of folks. Gentrification is a messy process at the very least, and it certainly displaces an awful lot of people at a significant human cost. And I’m sympathetic to the notion that something is lost when you can’t buy basic goods in a newly expensive neighborhood, due to rising rents and the influx of “specialty stores.” (On the other hand, this is nothing new, as I remember some of my Toronto relatives complaining back in the nineties that you could (literally) no longer buy a hammer in their neighborhood, and a similar story, possibly involving children’s clothing, when we visited Berkeley, CA around the same time.) And when I visit a city, I do like looking around and saying, “Yes, this is a distinctive place.”
But the article as a whole is just silly. His rose-colored glasses were obviously special ordered from the Nostalgia Depot (an independently operated business hiring only genuine ethnic craftsmen from the old country). He hates modern architecture and thinks everything old is worth preserving…even if he’s right, and he isn’t, that’s tangential to the case he’s trying to make. He starts off with a laundry list of things that were bad about NYC in previous generations (he means mostly the late seventies to the early nineties, I think), but I wonder how well he actually remembers those things, and I’m guessing not well at all. I recall visiting Manhattan in 1980 and walking around Times Square and over to the Port Authority, and being accosted every twenty steps by people looking to sell me drugs (or occasionally buy them). It wasn’t a happy place.
Other things, too. It’s hard to see how it’s a terrible thing that a store “had” to move from 57th Street to 43rd Street. His discussion of how NYC has become a series of gated communities is more than a bit flawed–Manhattan always has been full of “gated communities” in a very real sense, what with apartment buildings with buzzers, doormen, and so on. In his discussion of manufacturing I wondered if he was aware that manufacturing jobs are down everywhere, not just in NYC, and whether he understood that there are good reasons why they might be down more in NYC than in other, less expensive, areas of the country. I was surprised that he only used “Disneyfication” once (but he made up for it by the number of times he used “glass” as a pejorative), and it seemed entirely in character that he wound up concluding that the 1950s were the best time in NYC history.
Two things in particular that I noticed, both of which strike me as being absolutely typical of Screeds Written by an Urban White Liberal Intellectual:
- A fetishizing of Small Business. Look, small business has a lot to recommend it, but it 's got a lot of problems too. Take independent pharmacies. They’re often not open on Sunday (the day our kids tended to get ear infections) and they often close before you get home from work, and if they don’t have a medication in stock they have to order it and you have to wait till tomorrow, whereas at Rite Aid or CVS they’ll call around and see if the store in the next town has it. I know people love the bodegas in NYC, but many of them are inaccessible to my wife, who uses a scooter because of mobility issues; she can generally get into the chain stores. And chain stores often (not always) are cheaper, which might be a plus in an expensive city like New York. To this author, the decline of small business is a disaster!!! I’m not so sure. (It’s also an old thread. Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant, published in 1957, involves a corner store in NYC losing business to a larger one. So much for the halcyon days of the fifties.)
And 2) A firm belief that the only certain people are Real, and only certain kinds of goods and jobs are Real. Rich people are not Real. Real estate investors and speculators are not Real. People who work for firms based in California or France are not Real. People who are (probably) going to move out of New York City within a couple of years are not Real. Branch banks are not Real. On the other hand, colorful neighbors are Real. Blue collar workers are Real. Ethnic people, like Dominicans or “Irish-Latinos,” are Real. Auto parts stores are Real. Chinese food is Real. It’s patronizing, it’s condescending, and it’s stupid.
Too bad. As I said, he had some good points, but they get lost in the surrounding fury and illogic.
