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]
Can we go back to the topic of the parties in Bushwick where arty liberals fornicate? Contrary to what Mopar stated, I’d love to be there. I’d love to screw an arty liberal!!!
Oh, the gauze. They’re the worst. With those little dogs and scented candles and the rainbow flags and all. Totally destroyed the village.
😉
A lot of complaints about homogeneity in retail (juicy/urban outfitters/what have you) seem to have less to do with gentrification and more with the overall change in the business model in the US toward franchises. They’re one of the main things (along with the architecture) that makes so much of the country so very very gross.
> This thread is making my brain bleed.
Brother, can you spare some gauze?
This thread is making my brain bleed.
West Village NIMBYs are the worst.
White con ed workers, cops and firefighter lived in very different hoods than their Black colleagues. NYC was first and foremost a sharply segregated city. A much more interesting story for today is how the de-segragation of the city will effect us in the future. To me, that seems more timely than the notion of gentirfication in places like the Village, which as someone stated, was a current topic about forty years ago.
As an aside, i think it’s hilarious that everyone thinks they’re middle class. They live in a loft in the village. The chances of them being anything other than rich are, uh, low.
My friend’s family owns a house on Bleecker Street in the middle of all of the expensive crap and it is truly terrible now. I mean, yes, the property brings in high rents, but the local deli is gone, the laundromat is gone, the diner is hanging on by a thread and there’s only so many james perse and juicy couture stores that one needs within a stone’s throw of one’s home. Or maybe one needs none. What was a charming and absurdly expensive neighborhood fifteen years ago has morphed into a television lifetime movie version of itself.
On the other side of the coin, what can be interesting and may happen to stretches of Brooklyn is what happens when the gentrification doesn’t “take.” West Philly has been gentrified at least five or six times since, as an example. It gets better, and then it gets worse again. All the cute little shops close and crime goes back up. I think that’s happened here too, in some places. My bet is that’s what will happen to Bushwick.
because the type of people who shop in boutiques, coffee shops, and gourmet markets ARE most of the time inauthentic, bland, and the same.
the cast of characters one meets in check cashing places, liquor stores, and bodegas are often quite intriguing, funny, and sometimes off the wall straight out bonkers. i will take this group any day over the other group.
*rob*
Posted by: Butterfly at February 22, 2010 11:30 AM
Yes, because in life you must choose a group, and these are the only two options. Seems weird huh? But yep, only two. and you have to join one.
*eye rolling*