I’m not one to go around bemoaning gentrification. A little gentrification is good. Just the other day Ann & I took a lovely walk in Harlem. We ate very good (if not very good for you) food, dropped in on a free jazz concert, shopped at a Trotskyite-Feminist bookshop and saw beautiful row houses, many newly refurbished, and didn’t have to use our thinking caps to imagine what this all looked like before it went to rot.
This is a walk I would not, and could not, do when I first came to NYC in 1992.
I don’t think this makes me part of a wave of blue-eyed white devils come to ruin the hood. All neighborhoods should be clean and safe and active for all citizens.
But fast-forward this a few years and what’s happening downtown might start happening uptown.
I bring this up because the nightclub Tonic is closing. No surprise — all of the clubs on the L.E.S. are being priced out. Gigundo co-op buildings are going up (perhaps you’ve seen them — they are giant and made of glass) and smaller places like Tonic just can’t pay the rent anymore.
This is an example of bad, dumb gentrification. The new people who are moving to the L.E.S. are moving there, I think, because they want to be in the L.E.S. And they by themselves are pricing out the very culture they are looking for. Unless what they really want is Whole Foods and Crunch Fitness — but I don’t think so. They can’t be moving to the L.E.S. for the smell!
The new residents in the glass boxes are gonna’ feel kinda silly travelling into Brooklyn and (eventually) Queens to see the bands that used to play around the corner.
Also amusing: there just ins’t the infrastructure for all these new people! Subways are crowded already. Stores are too small (better build that Whole Foods right quick!) The buildings down there are old — they only go 5 or so floors. The monster buildings simply hold too many people! What you’ll have is an eventual return to the L.E.S. of the tenement days. A neighborhood packed to the gills, unable to sustain itself. Instead of Eastern European refugees it’ll be graphic designers who just can’t get a cab!!!!
Don’t worry — they’ll all move out to the luxury condos now dotting or being built around Roosevelt Plaza. How many are there now? I can see two completed ones from the subway train window, two or three more near completion between that stop and 39th Ave, and at least four more under construction in the general area.
Granted, I’m shocked this hasn’t happened earlier — that’s prime real estate one stop from Manhattan — but it’s really discouraging and off-putting to see this stuff springing up all over Queens. Good article today in the NY Daily News about how the middle class no longer exists in New York — it’s becoming an all-or-nothing proposition for a lot of folks. And I don’t like this!