The Death of a Once Great City: The fall of NY and the urban crisis of affluence

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I think it's actually the poorest neighborhoods that are the most chain-oriented, and I'd wager the residents are happy with the changes. Places like the South Bronx and East NY/Brownsville barely had any chains a generation ago. It was mostly marginal, extortionate independent retail barely hanging on. Now the commercial stretches in the least desirable neighborhoods have high rent, no vacancies, and an endless parade of Duane Reade-Dunkin Donuts-Payless-Old Navy-Red Lobster-Planet Fitness-TJ Maxx.

And the streets are packed. Fulton Street in Bed Stuy and the Hub in the South Bronx have higher retail rents than many prime avenues in Manhattan, because sales volume.

The wealthy neighborhoods are probably less chain-filled than a generation ago. Bleecker Street, Columbus Ave, Court Street and the like don't have that many chains outside of international retailers. Brownstone Brooklyn has very few chains. I live off 7th Ave. in Park Slope and can't think of any national chains nearby except for Starbucks and Chipotle.

Those two are the absolute epitome of chain retail/restaurant post gentrification indicators. If you're where I think you are, then off the top of my head I would add Rite Aid, Barnes and Noble, and Pinkberry, too.

[10023]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Even New York's dive bars have been gentrified. Especially the ones of the Lower East Side, which was once the mecca of dive bars. Nowadays, the "dive bars" still there will charge as much as the deliberately yuppie places, and they attract a similar demographic of clientele.

But the Lower East Side is basically the trendiest part of downtown, which has been the nightlife hub of NYC for at least 25 years. It’s basically what the Meatpacking District was 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, even in a traditionally wealthier area, the Village still has the same shitholes full of NYU students that it had when I moved to New York in 2004.

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

People who are too young just don't understand what New York City was. I feel very lucky to have first visited the place in the early 1990s, and got a scholarship and almost went to college there. People today can't imagine what the energy of New York used to be like. It was a place with its own logic. Entirely singular. No chain anything. Seemingly every business was local.

I'll never forget emerging from a subway station into the heart of Brooklyn for the first time -- it was surreal. Like the album artwork on the inside of Paul's Boutique. Again, no chain businesses of any kind. Everybody doing their own thing. People wearing all sorts of clothes that were only sold there.

Best post in thread for this image alone. I'm not going to make it into an ideology but Gen X realtalk, I fell in love with that new York and feel less of a need to visit the new one.

[JoeMusashi]

Tell me more about this ‘Trump crowd’ in DC. That city is more one-party than Beijing.

[pico44]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Best post in thread for this image alone. I'm not going to make it into an ideology but Gen X realtalk, I fell in love with that new York and feel less of a need to visit the new one.

Hey, fair enough. Though with some of the posters here, I suspect they are mourning the death of something they didn't really know. After all, to really remember that Ludlow St corner as it was in that mid-80s photograph, you need to be about 55 years old. Otherwise you're romanticizing an echo of someone else's memory. Or some cassette tape image.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by pico44

Hey, fair enough. Though with some of the posters here, I suspect they are mourning the death of something they didn't really know. After all, to really remember that Ludlow St corner as it was in that mid-80s photograph, you need to be about 55 years old. Otherwise you're romanticizing an echo of someone else's memory. Or some cassette tape image.

I'm a Gen-X'er and I remember the NY of that era back in the 80's. I was a kid but I still vividly remember just how eclectic and rough around the edges it was back then. I still love the city but it no longer strikes me as the urban social cornucopia it was just a few decades ago.

[jmecklenborg]

You get a sense for NYC in the early 90s from this clip...a German film crew following Iggy Pop around the Lower East Side:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKGeh4cVRZE

A trip on the subway in 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN4ATDfCYmo

I remember when the Robert Meplethorpe photo exhibit came to my city around 1990, that was New York visiting the Midwest. There is no special energy to New York music or art or writing anymore.

[coyotetrickster]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

This is certainly the dominant local view.

You can get an idea why by looking at San Francisco's newest entirely new neighborhood, Mission Bay:


04132018_Mission Bay Warriors Stadium San Francisco_Q5A4692e by Todd Quam, on Flickr


Forumer timbad @ http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...28118&page=108

Compare this to the traditional granity and funkiness of the city beyond the downtown highrise district:




Above 2 images: https://www.google.com/search?q=SF+M...LboTuuPV2nlHM:






Above 3 images: https://www.google.com/search?q=SF+N...ZbGc7aS4AYQcM:

The new stuff just seems so sterile and bland. And while that's most overwhelming in places where everything's new, it's also true where the new stuff is just infill. It's taking the uniqueness away.

Pedestrian's post is misleading. Much of Mission Bay looks like South Florida, that is true. It has nothing to do with the tenants or the residents, but rather is the result of a master design plan created by Catellus (the original landowner of Mission Bay) and the city. It created a set of design criteria, roof-line treatments, and materials. Comparing neighborhoods that grew over generations with a neighborhood that was created from scratch in the 1990s is disingenuous.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by pico44

Hey, fair enough. Though with some of the posters here, I suspect they are mourning the death of something they didn't really know. After all, to really remember that Ludlow St corner as it was in that mid-80s photograph, you need to be about 55 years old. Otherwise you're romanticizing an echo of someone else's memory. Or some cassette tape image.

Out of curiosity, where is it in today's Brooklyn? A quick search yielded nothing.

[cjreisen]

Luckily for everyone here the US is abound with cities that were shitty like NYC in the 70s, and to this day remain shitty. Go to Rochester or Buffalo or Cincinatti, or St Louis, and you'll see all the blight of 70s new york to your heart's content.

And even in NYC, actually leave Manhattan below 96th street, go to 145th street, or east 125th street, and you'll see the new york of yore. Sure, Lower East Side and East VIllage are admittedly not the Wild West where you can buy low grade cocaine and meth like they used to be, but that's two neighborhoods. The rest of NYC outside Manhattan is mostly unchanged.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by lio45

Out of curiosity, where is it in today's Brooklyn? A quick search yielded nothing.

It was actually in Manhattan:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/...pauls-boutique

The Paul's Boutique album had a fake radio advertisement in it for "Paul's Boutique...and they are in Brooklyn". So when we were young we all assumed that the photo was taken somewhere in Brooklyn.

I remember opening the cassette and unfolding that panoramic photo...it was also in the CD version. It didn't seem real, but it was a real place.

When I was a kid in the 80s I remember opening up a AAA travel atlas for all 50 states...in the back just three cities got their own pages -- New York, LA, and Chicago. That's where I first became intrigued by New York City. Chicago was pretty boring on a map but NYC was complicated. That's where I first saw the layout of the names of all of those famous places that we heard about on songs and in movies and in plays. Before that I didn't even know the city was on an island, or rather a series of them.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

That's all gone now. Now New York now is just a bunch of rich kids on their phones. The crowds on the subway are boring since everyone is just looking at their dumb phones.

Ahhhh, paul's boutique, one of the greatest albums of all time.

here's what that intersection (ludlow and rivington on the lower east side) looks like today over 3 decades later:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7200...7i16384!8i8192

i wonder what percentage of the people who now live in and around that intersection today are aware of its historicness?

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

i wonder what percentage of the people who now live in and around that intersection today are aware of its historicness?

So it appears the "Paul's Boutique" is now a "gourmet wrap" place (whatever that means) and right across the street is a Serafina, which is the epitome of Eurotrash glitzy pasta global chains. A taste of Capri or Ibiza on the LES. There's a $500 a night hotel a block away. There's a SoHo House (an intl chain of clubs with celebrity-oriented membership) nearby.

So the Streetview, at face value, kinda supports the article thesis. But the LES is a lot more than douchey restaurants, and is not remotely representative of citywide changes.

And when Paul's Boutique was released, core NYC was pretty heavily gentrified already. The LES, with its tenements and projects, was probably the last Manhattan neighborhood south of 125th to gentrify. It didn't really become "normal Manhattan" until maybe 10 years ago.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

I remember when the Robert Meplethorpe photo exhibit came to my city around 1990, that was New York visiting the Midwest. There is no special energy to New York music or art or writing anymore.

It's hard to say how much of it is a really a product of New York's ongoing gentrification and how much of is just part of a broader cultural shift, but when it comes to everything from music to fashion to design to art, one certainly gets the impression that New York is less nationally or globally relevant now than it has at probably any point in the past century. Which is to say, it's not not relevant - it's too big and too multi-faceted to ever not be - but its role has in part been supplanted by other places (Los Angeles is probably the most culturally "exciting" place in the US these days), and is no longer the incubator of cultural & artistic innovation that it was once known for being.

Of course, we do have to remember that the New York of the 60s-90s was a product of a very specific time & set of circumstances. The confluence of affordable space in the centre of a hyper-urban global megacity, unique mix of cultures (at a time when most other places weren't particularly diverse), and countercultural zeitgeist of the time is something that was never going to last forever and couldn't be replicated today.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

it's too big and too multi-faceted to ever not be

To expand on this: New York is a big, complex metropolis. Always has been, always will be. Singular descriptors it's been given at various times by various people - whether that its become a gated community for the rich, that it's a creative utopia, that it's a decrepit shithole, or anything else - have never really captured the essence of the city in its entirety, if not being outright hyperbolic. In reality, the changes we've seen in the past few decades tend to look something more like this:

Bombed out ghettos have once again become lively, successful, safe areas. This is good.

Comfortable working & middle class areas have seen an influx of creatives and vibrancy, but also rising prices. This has its positives and negatives.

And once vibrant, unique areas have become inaccessible to the non-rich, and have been dulled of a lot of what once made them vibrant, unique areas in the first place. This isn't so good.

But unfortunately, it's moreso the latter areas that are really the "signature" parts of the city that tend to be written about in articles like these. As a whole, New York is probably better off now than at any point in the late 20th-century by just about any measure, but its core is most certainly not.

[10023]

Originally Posted by JoeMusashi

Tell me more about this ‘Trump crowd’ in DC. That city is more one-party than Beijing.

Obviously a lot of them are around. They probably just commute from VA and MD.

And Soho House isn’t really “celebrity oriented”. It’s “creative-oriented” in a really pretentious and insincere way, but it’s not hard to get into or very expensive. Even my wedding photographer is a member.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by cjreisen

Luckily for everyone here the US is abound with cities that were shitty like NYC in the 70s, and to this day remain shitty. Go to Rochester or Buffalo or Cincinatti, or St Louis, and you'll see all the blight of 70s new york to your heart's content.

And even in NYC, actually leave Manhattan below 96th street, go to 145th street, or east 125th street, and you'll see the new york of yore. Sure, Lower East Side and East VIllage are admittedly not the Wild West where you can buy low grade cocaine and meth like they used to be, but that's two neighborhoods. The rest of NYC outside Manhattan is mostly unchanged.

Actually, it sounds like you haven't been above 96th Street in quite some time. There is a Whole Foods on 125th Street. Does anything more need to be said?

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Actually, it sounds like you haven't been above 96th Street in quite some time. There is a Whole Foods on 125th Street. Does anything more need to be said?

Yeah, I don't get that, at all.

The big changes in NYC aren't in core Manhattan. They're everywhere but core Manhattan. NYC had a highly gentrified core 30 years ago. The core is much cleaner and more spit-polished, the retail more upscale, but most neighborhoods aren't fundamentally different. The Village and Midtown and UES are basically the same.

If you lived in, say, Murray Hill or Brooklyn Heights in 1988 it wouldn't be that different from 2018, outside of new construction here and there. The neighborhoods with the absolute most radical changes are South Bronx, Central Harlem, Bushwick, Bed Stuy, Williamsburg, LIC, Flushing, Sunset Park.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by 10023

But the Lower East Side is basically the trendiest part of downtown, which has been the nightlife hub of NYC for at least 25 years. It’s basically what the Meatpacking District was 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, even in a traditionally wealthier area, the Village still has the same shitholes full of NYU students that it had when I moved to New York in 2004.

The LES is the trendiest part of Manhattan today, but it wasn't that way 10-15 years ago. There were far more dive bars and underground music clubs back then than there are now. Today it's mostly office workers bouncing around to places that used to be dive bars. What's left of the old LES culture has mostly migrated into Brooklyn, particularly into Bushwick and Bed-Stuy along the J train corridor.

[10023]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Actually, it sounds like you haven't been above 96th Street in quite some time. There is a Whole Foods on 125th Street. Does anything more need to be said?

Good. That means you can finally buy decent produce in Harlem.