Oh how we miss the old New York! Or: What does it mean to be nostalgic for something you never knew?
Hayley Richardson | Wed, Feb 20th, 2008 | Category: Commentary | Tags: hayley richardson, new york city, gentrification, manhattan, sense of place, jane jacobs, nostalgia, the old new york, mary cantwell, authenticity
Maybe it was Nathaniel Rich’s recent lament in the New York Times, or the idle chatter in the NAC office, but it seems that lately, the word on everyone’s lips is that they miss the old New York. I’ve been hearing complaints such as “it’s not real anymore,” “everyone’s been pushed out,” and “it’s like a museum.” Apparently, New York (specifically Manhattan) has become a simulacra of itself.
Sure, I’ve read Mary Cantwell and Jane Jacobs and lament the fact that New York no longer matters in the way that it used to. I’ll never take the 5:15 train in from New Haven and feel like I’ve arrived. But I’m having a difficult time mustering any sort of sympathy for these claims, particularly because this mourning comes from a very specific demographic: middle class white kids who missed out on their a chance to live for 65 dollars a week in the East Village.
I say this because I certainly don’t hear this sort of talk from my Dominican ex-girlfriend in the Bronx, or the kids who sat on my stoop when I lived in Harlem. If there’s one thing my “summer in a rapidly gentrifying area” reiterated it was that people don’t always mind moving, especially if they get flat screen TV and a house in the suburbs out of the deal.
You want diversity? Go to Queens. You want affordable housing? Go to Staten Island. But that’s not what these mourners want; they want the perfect liminal space, one that comes complete with a bougie coffeeshop AND the streets teeming with different looking people AND the happy injectible drug users.
Which brings me to my next point. New York was once a haven for people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. The fact that gay midwesterners can now find refuge in St. Louis, and that there’s a successful black rapper in Jackson, Mississippi means there are less of them on the streets of New York. But this is a development to be celebrated, not eschewed.
And what specifically is no longer “authentic” about New York? People still do real things there, like living and working and consuming. I can only assume this notion of the “real” is equated with struggle; that in New York, things were tough, but everyone was in it together. And to that I would say, come to Philly. We’ve got plenty of struggle, it’s just not so highly accessorized. And furthermore, the fact that New Yorkers are generally a contented lot isn’t such a bad thing—as Simmons Buntin recently pointed out, it’s a wonderful place to visit.
What does it mean to be nostalgic for something you never knew? It’s like listening to Billie Holiday and yearning for the “good old days,” while forgetting she never saw most of her earnings, and died of a heroin overdose with police standing outside her door.
Simmons Buntin
Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 8:21pm
Great post Hayley, and I’m not just saying that because my recent post is linked, as well. ;~)
As Americans, and perhaps as humans, I’d wager we’re always nostalgic for what never truly existed. And yet it’s not hard to find examples of authentic places gone south, or gone plastic; and newly “authentic” places popping out of the ground almost overnight. Maybe it’s a question of “sense of place,” realizing that sense is a value judgment for each person, and place perhaps doubly so.
From an outsider’s perspective, New York has always seemed to have an amazing sense of place, a sense of itself, even as that has changed with architecture and technology and immigration and the like. But many Western cities especially, I think, struggle to find a sense of place, due in large part to widescale homogonous suburban growth and drab modernist office building architecture. Seems I heard once, when I lived in Denver, that most of the highrise buildings downtown were actually designed for another city—Dallas, Houston maybe—but built in Denver. Isn’t the first rule of architecture to design for place? Ah, my academic background is in urban planning, not architecture, and we all should know that planning is not just big architecture.
But I digress. New York is more than just a wonderful place to visit, at least according to folks like Phil Fried, poet and editor of The Manhattan Review, who has lived in Manhattan for more than 28 years and still loves it.
Wendy
Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:07am
Sounds like there is a little “inventing of tradition” about what New York “was” and “is.” That is, building a memory to celebrate around a semi- “fictional” account of the past. (There’s a great edited book called the Invention of Tradition that offers different essays on this process—not so much for cities, but nations, but I think the idea is the same).
Wonderful post, I enjoyed it.