The New Gentrification
The Friday Times took another look at the work of Jane Jacobs, who “waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks.” According to Sharon Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,…
The Friday Times took another look at the work of Jane Jacobs, who “waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks.” According to Sharon Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, saving the cobblestone streets and old architecture may retain a neighborhood’s character superficially, but is doesn’t do much for the community who gave the neighborhood its soul. Zukin paid a visit to Williamsburg (“the East River gold coast”), where she pointed out “a low-slung old granary with a MacBook-speckled coffee bar” and said, We’ve gone from Jacobs’s vision to the McDonald’s of the educated classes. Are you buying what Zukin’s selling?
A Contrarian’s Lament in a Blitz of Gentrification [NYT]
Benson, everyone, including the tax man, seems to have gotten past Bread Stuy having a fund raiser to help them out. Since no one was forced at gunpoint to support the place, yet many did, BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO, you really need to get over bringing it up every ten minutes as an example of some kind of “Brownstoner orthodoxy”, or evidence of the kind of horrible state of depravity neighborhoods have sunk to. Since you will never go there, anyway, why spend your copious scorn on the place, which has never affected you in any way? It really is getting tired.
Jackson heights and Busheick are pretty safe.
Jackson heights and Busheick are pretty safe.
Crown Fried >>>>> Connecticut muffin.
*rob*
Why is white synonymous with suburbanite?
If we’re going to lament Conn Muffin, let’s lament Crown Chicken and Duane Reade and the 99 cents store too, because it’s just the flip side of the same corporate national chains.
quote:
If she wants real working class neighborhoods in New York, there are quite a few to choose from.
the only problem is that these days the only “working class neighborhoods” left (pretty much all across the USA btw) are violent and drug-filled cess pools that most sane people dont want to be around.
*rob*
rob is right. the UWS is more diverse than soho, UES, and brooklyn heights. you can’t get anymore white in those 3 neighborhoods. total suburbanites.
Maly,
I’m not arguing with beautifying neighborhoods. God speed. I’m glad I live in a beautiful hood. But I think too often the definition of what is beautiful is narrowed to include only elements of a particular socio-economic experience. Ms. Zukin called it the bourgeoisie.
To me it’s Starbucks and Connecticut Muffin. Whatever. I think she’s talking about the sameness of what the process produces. Suburban sameness.