[Marxism] The suburbanization of New York City

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/the-suburbanization-of-new-york-editors-take-questions/index.html
August 17, 2007,  9:58 am
The Suburbanization of New York? Editors Are Taking Questions

By Sewell Chan
book

Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett, the editors of “The 
Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just 
Another Town?” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), will be taking 
questions from City Room readers next week. Readers are invited to 
submit questions in the comments box below.

The book is a collection of 14 essays about the economic and social 
changes that have swept the city over the past two decades. (Reviewing 
the book in The Times, Liesl Schillinger wrote: “Some essays are 
coolheaded, some shake with hysteria, some are memoirish, others 
didactic. But all of them provide great fodder for argument if you’re 
looking to inflame your next dinner party.”)

The Hammetts, who are husband and wife, run DESIGNER/builder magazine. 
They argue that gentrification has transformed once-unique Manhattan 
neighborhoods: Harlem, Little Italy, Hell’s Kitchen, the Lower East 
Side. In their preface, they wrote:

     Today New York is on its way to becoming a ‘theme-park city,’ where 
people can get the illusion of the urban experience without the 
diversity, spontaneity, and unpredictability that have always been its 
hallmarks. Like the suburbs New Yorkers so long snubbed, the city is 
becoming more private, more predictable, and more homogenized.

The essays in the book are provocative, but not monolithic; several of 
the contributors note that gentrification has occurred at the same time 
as vast improvements in public safety and quality of life.

Neil Smith, an anthropologist, and Deborah Cowen, a geographer, traced 
the gentrification of the city through seminal events: the opening of 
the Manhattan Mall at Herald Square in 1989, Disney’s entry into Times 
Square in 1994, and the exhibition of “The Gates,” the public-art 
project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in 2005.

About half the essays in the book examined particular places that have 
been transformed.

Maggie Wrigley, an Australian writer and artist who moved to the city in 
1984 and was part of the Lower East Side squatters’ movement, wrote: 
“Change is inevitable — it is how the city lives and breathes. And I 
don’t begrudge a safer neighborhood — no one wants to dodge bullets or 
have to fight off a mugger with a two-by-four or a kitchen knife or a 
gun (as I did).” But she added:

     I feel sad and angry that the only newcomers to Manhattan from now 
on will be those rich enough to buy their way in. No new immigrants will 
bring their ways and flavors and styles to our neighborhoods. No poor 
artists or writers or musicians will come here and fight to prove their 
worth. No struggle, no adventure — just pay to stay.

Eric Darton, a cultural critic, wrote that the opening of the Time 
Warner Center in 2004 “announced that the suburban ethos, long 
ascendant, had finally breached the core of Manhattan.” Lucy R. Lippard, 
an art critic, maintained that Lower Manhattan’s “downfall began when 
‘loft living’ became fashionable and doctors and lawyers arrived in the 
early 1970s.” The political theorist Marshall Berman reminisced about 
the gritty — if sexy — Times Square of his youth, while Katrina 
Lencek-Inagaki, a student, decried the disappearance of the 
“villagelike” atmosphere of TriBeCa, where she grew up.

Amy Zimmer, a reporter for Metro New York, described the changes along 
Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, where her great-great-uncle Teddy 
Eckstein opened a dry-goods store in 1916. (The store closed in 1998.) 
She wrote that the neighborhood “devolved from a gritty bargain center 
into a largely abandoned haven for drugs and prostitution, only to 
emerge in recent years as a target for speculators anxious to turn this 
ethnic enclave into another upscale neighborhood.”

Several of the writers focused their criticisms on the demise of small 
and independently owned businesses.

Robin D. G. Kelley, a historian, noted that as early as 1925, the poet 
and critic James Weldon Johnson asked, “Are the Negroes going to be able 
to hold Harlem?” Dr. Kelley wrote that “there is nothing inherently 
wrong with rising property values,” but added that without an 
affordable-housing strategy, the increase in prices and rents “leads 
inevitably to massive displacement.” Dr. Kelley argued that small 
businesses were devastated as an indirect result of two events in 1994: 
the creation of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, which gave chain 
stores and retail corporations incentives to open in Harlem, and the 
Giuliani administration’s decision to remove street vendors from 125th 
Street, which reduced pedestrian traffic on the thoroughfare, harming 
mom-and-pop stores.

Susan S. Fainstein, an urban planner, assailed the Bloomberg 
administration’s plan to open “big box” retail stores at the New 
Deal-era Bronx Terminal Market, even while conceding that the deep 
discounts associated with such stores are popular among the low-income 
communities that live nearby.

Using the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Red Hook as examples, 
Matthew Schuerman of The New York Observer argued that the city’s 
remaining industrial businesses are being crowded out by residential 
conversions and an insufficient commitment by the city to retain 
manufacturing jobs. “The paradox of New York’s economic resurgence since 
the 1975 fiscal crisis is that as more people want to live here, more 
employers want to move to the suburbs,” he wrote. The city hands out 
subsidies to big investment banks while ignoring the plight of small 
businesses that employ low-skilled minority workers who need jobs.

Another group of essays pointed to aspects of gentrification that are 
less commonly discussed.

Suzanne Wasserman, a historian and filmmaker, contended that street 
fairs had become generic and bland. Robert Neuwirth, an author, blogger 
and community organizer, asserted that immigration, not gentrification, 
was the true engine of the city’s rebirth in the 1990s and that 
immigrants are now at risk of being driven out by pricy housing. Michael 
Sorkin, an architect, argued that the chain stores, bank branches, 
fast-food outlets and Starbucks coffee shops that have filled Manhattan 
are proof that preservationists have been too narrow in their focus: “We 
save the faces of our buildings but have little concern for their human 
content.”

The book’s final essay, by Francis Morrone, a writer and architectural 
tour guide, asserted that the proliferation of cellphones and iPods has 
led to the collapse of etiquette, as preoccupied pedestrians bump into 
each other, eroding the quality of public space.

The ideas in “The Suburbanization of New York” evoke varying responses. 
To some, the collection might seem like a reasoned analysis; to others, 
a scolding diatribe. Readers are invited to discuss and debate the 
themes of the book with the Hammetts.

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