I know it's the ultimate post-college cliché, but I'm doing it: I'm moving to New York City.
The glass and steel of Manhattan, while appealing in it's own right, isn't why I want to move. Nor is it the frantic pace on the street. I won't be there because I want a high-paying, high-ranking job in some gleaming office tower or to fulfill some goal of personal "success." I'm going because of the City. There's something about the Citiness of New York - all 5 boroughs - that is absolutely enthralling. The neighborhoods are the important prospect for me. Not the banal rows of single-family homes I'm accustomed to in the suburbs of Miami, where everyone keeps to themselves, where there's no real need to make any kind of connection with the people in your neighborhood. New York, especially the outer boroughs, is all about neighbors and neighborhoods. It's about connections and interactions - almost forcibly so.
When I look at downtown Miami, with the cranes erecting huge structures that are slowly conquering the skyline, I can't help but think of the effects those soulless buildings have on the culture that thrived below. On the street, people interacted. They went to corner coffee shops, met people, got on trains, and exchanged something vital, they exchanged a culture that was vibrantly unique in Miami. A people culture. With downtown Miami quickly becoming a Midtown Manhattan, with buildings acting as great overseers, I'm concerned that in many respects, Miami (or at least downtown and it's surroundings) is loosing what it already only minimally had. It's loosing an essential component that was robbed from most of Manhattan decades ago. It's ceasing to be a cultural city, and becoming a corporate city. So, I'm going to New York - the real New York, New York City, to experience city culture first-hand. Far from the strip malls and single-family houses of the suburban Miami. Far from a Miami that is shallow and utterly deprived of a city.
In going though, I realize the inherent contradictions. New York, especially Manhattan is the epicenter of this great loss of the cultural city. Maybe, I fear, I'm chasing the ghost of New York City, rather than something that still exists. For a long time, I've racked my brain (and craiglist's servers) searching and searching on where to live. For a while, I had my heart settled on somewhere on the Upper West Side, only to read about the ridiculous rents and the closing of many mom-and-pop stores (the real institutions of cultures) in the area. Somewhere in Brooklyn, I thought - Fort Greene is beautiful - only to find out about the proposed Brooklyn Nets Arena coming to nearby Bed-Stuy that will hugely contribute to the area's already problematic gentrification.
My sentiments about these things are rooted in, basely, my strong sense of what gentrification and corpratization does to the essence of makes New York City, and other great American cities, cultural places. From Wikipedia: "Gentrification, or urban gentrification, is a phenomenon in which low-cost, physically deteriorated neighborhoods undergo physical renovation and an increase in property values, along with an influx of wealthier residents who may displace the prior residents."
While an increase in neighborhood affluence may initially seem appealing, the human cost to the neighborhood's lower-income residents is often staggering. The increases in property value, and subsequently in rent, make previously affordable neighborhoods expensive and, quite frankly, turn them in bourgeois, homogeneous neighborhoods. Aside from the massive displacement of lower income families, the architecture of gentrified areas often changes radically; eradicating beautiful brownstones and low-rises and replacing them soulless monstrosities that utterly sever the cultural artery of any area. That's exactly what I don't want - to move somewhere with no culture, no real New York essence. I like the dirty urbanisms, the crazy people you meet, the quintessential (maybe romantic) New York of Goodfellas, not the bourgeois of You've Got Mail. It's blatantly apparent in Manhattan. The Village, once an area almost burdened with culture, is a vestige of what's happening not just in New York City, but in major urban centers across the globe, all shining examples of the corporate world making hollow something that should be hallowed. Commercializing, stereo typifying, gentrifying an area until it is essentially dead.
"By the early 1960s, the Beat's enclave of Greenwich Village had
been... commercialized by middle-class onlookers... Between 1964 and 1968,
dozens of specialty shops that catered to the hippies had opened along St.
Mark's Place... In addition to students and hippies, the neighborhood's
countercultural atmosphere attracted copywriters, editorial workers, fashion
designers, and commercial artists... Although the youthful movement criticized
middle-class values and lifestyles, its members, nonetheless, were of largely
middle-class origin living in one of the poorest working-class districts in the
city." (Mele, 159-169)
I used to blame the hipsters and bohemians, but I really can't. They're after what I'm after - somewhere affordable, with the authentic city vibe. Unfortunately, and seemingly without fail, the commercial infrastructure that follows the appeal these people bring to neighborhoods results in a boring, homogeneous place that may be physically nicer, but is culturally more run-down. Which of the two is valued more? The answer is there in every high-rise luxury condo.
Don't get me wrong. I like a safe, nice looking neighborhood as much as the next guy. I'm not saying I want to live somewhere rat-infested or crime ridden for the sake of culture. What I want, like the hippies of yore, is somewhere that is culturally authentic. Somewhere that feels like a neighborhood, where real people interact and converse and where there is a shared sense of "this place is the shit and there's no other place like it." I want to feel connected to the place I live, to walk outside and encounter it in a very real way. This essence, what has made cities like New York so great for so long, is slowly (or rapidly in some places) dying. what's being put there in it's stead is essentially a gated city, one in which only a select few have access and those that do not are pushed to the fringe of.
This is happening in New York as we speak, that is undeniable. And perhaps the ultimate irony of this is that by moving to New York, I will be contributing to the very things I've just railed against. The only I can do, I think, (after long considerations) whether in New York or in my native Miami is fight it. Be more a cause of the reversing of this trend than a cause of it. No matter what part of the city I end up in - the only thing I can do is fight the developers and other corporate forces that are robbing New York of....well...being New York. Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn't be so concerned but the where of New York, but of the how. How am I going to make the best of this move? How can I get involved to fight these seemingly overwhelming forces? How can I (to quote a famous anarchist phrase) 'create the world I want to live in?' These questions, the how, I've realized, are the only real concerns I should have.
And so, the search continues......
"I moved to New York City for my health. I'm paranoid and it was the only place
where my fears were justified.” - Anita Weiss
