Here’s a response to some article about some writing professor who sent some e-mail denigrating South Carolina and praising New York. Interesting, the perception of the city from outside of it.
I just don’t understand what’s left in New York. It’s a bunch of circles of rich people. Bankers, socialites, reality show stars, housewives, media personalities, celebrities, etc. What is in New York that is original? You can attend the shows and events that this professor recommends…but aren’t a whole host of other writers attending the same things? Writing about the same things? Why must one go to some cultural mecca to become a great cultural icon? Why not forge an original path as a solitary genius? (these aren’t criticisms of you, just general questions)
today’s New York seems insular and self-serving and completely counterproductive to innovation and originality. I honestly don’t know what a writer would find inspirational about it.
Which is why everyone should read Benjamin Schwartz’s article in The Atlantic, “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” Schwartz stresses the temporal aspect of gentrification—of the unspoilt city as a moment in time—rather than the usual rhetoric, which frames gentrification in terms of spatial incursion by outsiders. It’s a much better way of thinking about the issue. Like this:
Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment. Indeed, what has changed since [Jane] Jacobs’s day—and the reason, as these books attest, that gentrification has become so intense an issue—is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression (Zukin is perceptive on this point) and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy.
And this:
Confronted with this unstoppable process, Zukin proposes waving a magic political wand by calling for an assortment of mandates and controls to ensure that certain ethnic groups and social classes and the practitioners of certain livelihoods that contribute to the “authenticity” of the city be able to live there. Surely this is taking the fetishization of vibrant Jacobsian urbanity too far. It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience.
Mostly, though, such political solutions seem quaint: all this bellyaching about authenticity and lost soul. Sorkin and Zukin, sentimental progressives, need a bracing dose of Marx. Manhattan is the primary locus of global capitalism, the most voracious force for change in history. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air.
This Gawker comment hits on something:
As someone who doesn’t live in New York, I’m continually amazed by how much of living in New York seems to be about Living in New York. So, when you’re done Working in New York and Organic Grocery Shopping in New York on the way back to your Neighborhood As Signifier That’s The New Previous Neighborhood, when do you find time to just, well, just…be in New York and clip your toenails and make toast and subtly fart? Say what you will about the concrete slabs of Toronto, I still manage to find moments where it’s not about an obsessively documented narrative of Living in Toronto.
“New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”
