Here are two different visions for what a city ought to be. Vision 1: the city ought to be a hub of growth and innovation, clean, well-run, high-tech, and business-friendly. It ought to attract the creative class, the more the better, and be a dynamic contributor to the global economy. It should be a home to major tech companies, world-class restaurants, and bold contemporary architecture. It should embrace change, and be “progressive.” Vision 2: the city ought to be a mess. It ought to be a refuge for outcasts, an eclectic jumble of immigrants, bohemians, and eccentrics. It should be a place of mystery and confusion, a bewildering kaleidoscope of cultures and classes. It should be a home to cheap diners, fruit stands, grumpy cabbies, and crumbling brownstones. It should guard its traditions, and be “timeless.”
It should be immediately obvious that not only are these views in tension, but that the tension cannot ever be resolved without one philosophy succeeding in triumphing over the other. That’s because the very things Vision 2 thinks make a city worthwhile are the things Vision 1 sees as problems to be eliminated. If I believe the city should be run like a business, then my mission will be to clear up the mess: to streamline everything, to eliminate the weeds. If I’m a Vision 2 person, the weeds are what I live for. I love the city because it’s idiosyncratic, precisely because things don’t make sense, because they are inefficient and dysfunctional. To the proponent of the progressive city, a grumpy cabbie is a bad cabbie; we want friendly cabbies, because we want our city to attract new waves of innovators. To the lover of the City of Mystery, brash personalities are part of what adds color to life. In the battle of the entrepreneurs and the romantics, the entrepreneurs hate what the romantics love, and the romantics hate what the entrepreneurs love. In the absence of a Berlin-like split, there can be no peace accord, it must necessarily be a fight to the death. What’s more, neither side is even capable of understanding the other: a romantic can’t see why anyone would want to clean up the dirt that gives the city its poetry, whereas an entrepreneur can’t see why anyone would prefer more dirt to less dirt.
Vanishing New York: How A Great City Lost Its Soul, based on the blog of the same name, is a manifesto for the Romantic Vision of the city, with Michael Bloomberg cast as the chief exponent of the Entrepreneurial Vision. “Nostalgic” will probably be the word most commonly used to capture Jeremiah Moss’s general attitude toward New York City, and Moss himself embraces the term and argues vigorously for the virtues of nostalgia. But I think in admitting to being “nostalgic,” he has already ceded too much. It’s like admitting to being a “preservationist”: they accuse you of being stuck in the past, and you reply “Damn right, I’m stuck in the past. The past was better.” But this isn’t simply about whether to preserve a city’s storied past or charge forward into its gleaming future. If that were the case, the preservationists would be making an impossible argument, since we’re heading for the future whether they like it or not. It’s also about different conceptions of what matters in life. The entrepreneurs want economic growth, the romantics want jazz and sex and poems and jokes. To frame things as a “past versus future” divide is to grant the entrepreneurs their belief that the future is theirs.
Moss’s book is about a city losing its “soul” rather than its “past,” and he spends a lot of time trying to figure out what a soul is and how a city can have one or lack one. He is convinced that New York City once had one, and increasingly does not. And while it is impossible to identify precisely what the difference is, since the quality is of the “you know it when you see it” variety, Moss does describe what the change he sees actually means. Essentially, New York City used to be a gruff, teeming haven for weirdos and ethnic minorities. Now, it is increasingly full of hedge fund managers, rich hipsters, and tourists. Tenements and run-down hotels have been replaced with glass skyscrapers full of luxury condos. Old bookshops are shuttered, designer clothes stores in their place. Artisanal bullshit is everywhere, meals served on rectangular plates. You used to be able to get a pastrami and a cup of coffee for 50 cents! What the hell happened to this place? (...)
Moss loves a lot of places, and because New York City is transitioning from being a city for working-class people to a city for the rich, he is constantly being wounded by the disappearance of beloved institutions. CBGB, the dingy punk rock music club where the Ramones and Patti Smith got their start, is forced out after its rent is raised to $35,000 a month. Instead, we get a commemorative CBGB exhibit at the Met, with a gift shop selling Sid Vicious pencil sets and thousand-dollar handbags covered in safety pins. The club itself becomes a designer clothing store selling $300 briefs. The ornate building that once housed the socialist Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, the exterior of which featured bas-relief sculptures of Marx and Engels, is converted to luxury condos. Its ethnic residents largely squeezed out, bits of Little Italy are carved off and rebranded as “Nolita” for the purpose of real estate brochures, since—as one developer confesses—the name “Little Italy” still connotes “cannoli.” A five-story public library in Manhattan, home to the largest collection of foreign-language books in the New York library system, is flattened and replaced with a high-end hotel (a new library is opened in the hotel’s basement, with hardly any books). Harlem’s storied Lenox Lounge is demolished, its stunning art-deco facade gone forever. Rudy Giuliani demolishes the Coney Island roller coaster featured in Annie Hall. Cafe Edison, a Polish tea house (see photo p. 32-33), is evicted and replaced with a chain restaurant called “Friedman’s Lunch,” named after right-wing economist Milton Friedman. (I can’t believe that’s true, but it is.) Judaica stores, accordion repairmen, auto body shops: all see their rent suddenly hiked from $3,000 to $30,000, and are forced to leave. All the newsstands in the city are shuttered and replaced; they go from being owner-operated to being controlled by a Spanish advertising corporation called Cemusa. Times Square gets Disneyfied, scrubbed of its adult bookstores, strip joints, and peep shows. New York University buys Edgar Allen Poe’s house and demolishes it. (“We do not accept the views of preservationists who say nothing can ever change,” says the college’s president.) (...)
The greed of landlords and developers is a prime reason that New York is steadily transforming into “Disneyland for billionaires.” But government policy also bears direct responsibility. Throughout New York history, city officials like Robert Moses have either neglected or waged active war against the ethnic populations that stood in the way of development. (“Look on the bright side… the city got rid of a million and a half undesirables,” a mayoral aide observed about the fires that destroyed countless tenements in the 1970s, allegedly partially due to the city’s intentional neglect of fire services.) But Michael Bloomberg was explicit in his commitment to making New York a city for the rich. Bloomberg’s city planning director, Standard Oil heir Amanda Burden, stated the administration’s aspirations: “What I have tried to do, and think I have done, is create value for these developers, every single day of my term.” Bloomberg himself was even more frank, calling New York City a “luxury product,” and saying:
“We want rich from around this country to move here. We love the rich people.”
“If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend… Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”
“If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap.” (...)
The effort to replace poor people with rich people is often couched in what Moss calls “propaganda and doublespeak.” One real estate investment firm claims to “turn under-achieving real estate into exceptional high-yielding investments,” without admitting that this “under-achieving real estate” often consists of people’s family homes. (Likewise, people often say things like “Oh, nobody lives there” about places where… many people live.) One real estate broker said they aspired to “a well-cultivated and curated group of tenants, and we really want to help change the neighborhood.” “Well-cultivated” almost always means “not black,” but the assumption that neighborhoods actually need to be “changed” is bad enough on its own.
In fact, one of the primary arguments used against preservationists is the excruciating two-word mantra: cities change. Since change is inevitable and desirable, those who oppose it are irrational. Why do you hate change? You don’t believe that change is good? Because it’s literally impossible to stop change, the preservationist is accused of being unrealistic. Note, however, just how flimsy this reasoning is: “Well, cities change” is as if a murderer were to defend himself by saying “Well, people die.” The question is not: is change inevitable? Of course change is inevitable. The question is what kinds of changes are desirable, and which should be encouraged or inhibited by policy. What’s being debated is not the concept of change, but some particular set of changes.
Even “gentrification” doesn’t describe just one thing. It’s a word I hate, because it captures a lot of different changes, some of which are insidious and some of which seem fine. There are contentious debates over whether gentrification produces significant displacement of original residents, and what its economic benefits might be for those residents. The New York Times chided Moss, calling him “impeded by myopia,” for failing to recognize that those people who owned property in soon-to-be-gentrified areas could soon be “making many millions of dollars.” But that exactly shows the point: Moss is concerned with the way that the pursuit of many millions of dollars erodes the very things that make a city special, that give it life and make it worth spending time in. A pro-gentrification commentator, in a debate with Moss, said that he didn’t really see any difference, because “people come for the same reason they always have: to make as much money as possible.” That’s exactly the conception that Moss is fighting. People came to New York, he says, because it was a place worth living in, not because they wanted to make piles of money. (...)
I have to confess, I differ a lot from Moss in my conception of what a good city should be like. I have always found New York City to be something of an armpit, and not because it’s full of high-priced condos. Many of the people Moss adores, the bohemians and artists, I find fairly intolerable. Moss is a poet, and wants a city of poetry. I am not a poet, I generally detest poetry. Moss has a strange fondness for mean New York, the New York that told everybody else to fuck off. I thought that New York was kind of an asshole.
But that’s okay: the philosophy of Vanishing New York is that cities shouldn’t all be the same, that they should have different attitudes toward life and different cultures. If I am more New Orleans than Brooklyn, that means we have a diverse world in which New Orleans and Brooklyn are very different places. The one thing that we should all be scared of, wherever we live, is the collapse of those differences, the streamlining and homogenizing of everything.
And yet the logic of capitalism sort of demands that this occur. If efficiency is your goal, then you’re going to have chain restaurants. They’re just more efficient. If you must perpetually grow and grow, then you’re going to have to demolish a lot of things that people dearly love. If everyone embraces the pursuit of financial gain, then landlords are never going to cut tenants a break merely because their business is a neighborhood institution. In a free market world, everything you love will be eaten alive, unless you’re rich.
It should be immediately obvious that not only are these views in tension, but that the tension cannot ever be resolved without one philosophy succeeding in triumphing over the other. That’s because the very things Vision 2 thinks make a city worthwhile are the things Vision 1 sees as problems to be eliminated. If I believe the city should be run like a business, then my mission will be to clear up the mess: to streamline everything, to eliminate the weeds. If I’m a Vision 2 person, the weeds are what I live for. I love the city because it’s idiosyncratic, precisely because things don’t make sense, because they are inefficient and dysfunctional. To the proponent of the progressive city, a grumpy cabbie is a bad cabbie; we want friendly cabbies, because we want our city to attract new waves of innovators. To the lover of the City of Mystery, brash personalities are part of what adds color to life. In the battle of the entrepreneurs and the romantics, the entrepreneurs hate what the romantics love, and the romantics hate what the entrepreneurs love. In the absence of a Berlin-like split, there can be no peace accord, it must necessarily be a fight to the death. What’s more, neither side is even capable of understanding the other: a romantic can’t see why anyone would want to clean up the dirt that gives the city its poetry, whereas an entrepreneur can’t see why anyone would prefer more dirt to less dirt.Vanishing New York: How A Great City Lost Its Soul, based on the blog of the same name, is a manifesto for the Romantic Vision of the city, with Michael Bloomberg cast as the chief exponent of the Entrepreneurial Vision. “Nostalgic” will probably be the word most commonly used to capture Jeremiah Moss’s general attitude toward New York City, and Moss himself embraces the term and argues vigorously for the virtues of nostalgia. But I think in admitting to being “nostalgic,” he has already ceded too much. It’s like admitting to being a “preservationist”: they accuse you of being stuck in the past, and you reply “Damn right, I’m stuck in the past. The past was better.” But this isn’t simply about whether to preserve a city’s storied past or charge forward into its gleaming future. If that were the case, the preservationists would be making an impossible argument, since we’re heading for the future whether they like it or not. It’s also about different conceptions of what matters in life. The entrepreneurs want economic growth, the romantics want jazz and sex and poems and jokes. To frame things as a “past versus future” divide is to grant the entrepreneurs their belief that the future is theirs.
Moss’s book is about a city losing its “soul” rather than its “past,” and he spends a lot of time trying to figure out what a soul is and how a city can have one or lack one. He is convinced that New York City once had one, and increasingly does not. And while it is impossible to identify precisely what the difference is, since the quality is of the “you know it when you see it” variety, Moss does describe what the change he sees actually means. Essentially, New York City used to be a gruff, teeming haven for weirdos and ethnic minorities. Now, it is increasingly full of hedge fund managers, rich hipsters, and tourists. Tenements and run-down hotels have been replaced with glass skyscrapers full of luxury condos. Old bookshops are shuttered, designer clothes stores in their place. Artisanal bullshit is everywhere, meals served on rectangular plates. You used to be able to get a pastrami and a cup of coffee for 50 cents! What the hell happened to this place? (...)
Moss loves a lot of places, and because New York City is transitioning from being a city for working-class people to a city for the rich, he is constantly being wounded by the disappearance of beloved institutions. CBGB, the dingy punk rock music club where the Ramones and Patti Smith got their start, is forced out after its rent is raised to $35,000 a month. Instead, we get a commemorative CBGB exhibit at the Met, with a gift shop selling Sid Vicious pencil sets and thousand-dollar handbags covered in safety pins. The club itself becomes a designer clothing store selling $300 briefs. The ornate building that once housed the socialist Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, the exterior of which featured bas-relief sculptures of Marx and Engels, is converted to luxury condos. Its ethnic residents largely squeezed out, bits of Little Italy are carved off and rebranded as “Nolita” for the purpose of real estate brochures, since—as one developer confesses—the name “Little Italy” still connotes “cannoli.” A five-story public library in Manhattan, home to the largest collection of foreign-language books in the New York library system, is flattened and replaced with a high-end hotel (a new library is opened in the hotel’s basement, with hardly any books). Harlem’s storied Lenox Lounge is demolished, its stunning art-deco facade gone forever. Rudy Giuliani demolishes the Coney Island roller coaster featured in Annie Hall. Cafe Edison, a Polish tea house (see photo p. 32-33), is evicted and replaced with a chain restaurant called “Friedman’s Lunch,” named after right-wing economist Milton Friedman. (I can’t believe that’s true, but it is.) Judaica stores, accordion repairmen, auto body shops: all see their rent suddenly hiked from $3,000 to $30,000, and are forced to leave. All the newsstands in the city are shuttered and replaced; they go from being owner-operated to being controlled by a Spanish advertising corporation called Cemusa. Times Square gets Disneyfied, scrubbed of its adult bookstores, strip joints, and peep shows. New York University buys Edgar Allen Poe’s house and demolishes it. (“We do not accept the views of preservationists who say nothing can ever change,” says the college’s president.) (...)
The greed of landlords and developers is a prime reason that New York is steadily transforming into “Disneyland for billionaires.” But government policy also bears direct responsibility. Throughout New York history, city officials like Robert Moses have either neglected or waged active war against the ethnic populations that stood in the way of development. (“Look on the bright side… the city got rid of a million and a half undesirables,” a mayoral aide observed about the fires that destroyed countless tenements in the 1970s, allegedly partially due to the city’s intentional neglect of fire services.) But Michael Bloomberg was explicit in his commitment to making New York a city for the rich. Bloomberg’s city planning director, Standard Oil heir Amanda Burden, stated the administration’s aspirations: “What I have tried to do, and think I have done, is create value for these developers, every single day of my term.” Bloomberg himself was even more frank, calling New York City a “luxury product,” and saying:
“We want rich from around this country to move here. We love the rich people.”
“If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend… Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”
“If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap.” (...)
The effort to replace poor people with rich people is often couched in what Moss calls “propaganda and doublespeak.” One real estate investment firm claims to “turn under-achieving real estate into exceptional high-yielding investments,” without admitting that this “under-achieving real estate” often consists of people’s family homes. (Likewise, people often say things like “Oh, nobody lives there” about places where… many people live.) One real estate broker said they aspired to “a well-cultivated and curated group of tenants, and we really want to help change the neighborhood.” “Well-cultivated” almost always means “not black,” but the assumption that neighborhoods actually need to be “changed” is bad enough on its own.
In fact, one of the primary arguments used against preservationists is the excruciating two-word mantra: cities change. Since change is inevitable and desirable, those who oppose it are irrational. Why do you hate change? You don’t believe that change is good? Because it’s literally impossible to stop change, the preservationist is accused of being unrealistic. Note, however, just how flimsy this reasoning is: “Well, cities change” is as if a murderer were to defend himself by saying “Well, people die.” The question is not: is change inevitable? Of course change is inevitable. The question is what kinds of changes are desirable, and which should be encouraged or inhibited by policy. What’s being debated is not the concept of change, but some particular set of changes.
Even “gentrification” doesn’t describe just one thing. It’s a word I hate, because it captures a lot of different changes, some of which are insidious and some of which seem fine. There are contentious debates over whether gentrification produces significant displacement of original residents, and what its economic benefits might be for those residents. The New York Times chided Moss, calling him “impeded by myopia,” for failing to recognize that those people who owned property in soon-to-be-gentrified areas could soon be “making many millions of dollars.” But that exactly shows the point: Moss is concerned with the way that the pursuit of many millions of dollars erodes the very things that make a city special, that give it life and make it worth spending time in. A pro-gentrification commentator, in a debate with Moss, said that he didn’t really see any difference, because “people come for the same reason they always have: to make as much money as possible.” That’s exactly the conception that Moss is fighting. People came to New York, he says, because it was a place worth living in, not because they wanted to make piles of money. (...)
I have to confess, I differ a lot from Moss in my conception of what a good city should be like. I have always found New York City to be something of an armpit, and not because it’s full of high-priced condos. Many of the people Moss adores, the bohemians and artists, I find fairly intolerable. Moss is a poet, and wants a city of poetry. I am not a poet, I generally detest poetry. Moss has a strange fondness for mean New York, the New York that told everybody else to fuck off. I thought that New York was kind of an asshole.
But that’s okay: the philosophy of Vanishing New York is that cities shouldn’t all be the same, that they should have different attitudes toward life and different cultures. If I am more New Orleans than Brooklyn, that means we have a diverse world in which New Orleans and Brooklyn are very different places. The one thing that we should all be scared of, wherever we live, is the collapse of those differences, the streamlining and homogenizing of everything.
And yet the logic of capitalism sort of demands that this occur. If efficiency is your goal, then you’re going to have chain restaurants. They’re just more efficient. If you must perpetually grow and grow, then you’re going to have to demolish a lot of things that people dearly love. If everyone embraces the pursuit of financial gain, then landlords are never going to cut tenants a break merely because their business is a neighborhood institution. In a free market world, everything you love will be eaten alive, unless you’re rich.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Jeremiah Moss
