The Gentrifier's Lament

Thanks to the profound influence that The Death and Life of Great American Cities has exerted, the West Village circa 1960 has come to epitomize--really to be the blueprint for--the urban good life. But in its mix of the new and the left over, in its alchemy of authenticity, grit, seedy glamour, and intellectual and cultural sophistication, this was a neighborhood in a transitional and unsustainable, if golden, moment. Which meant that it was about to lose its soul. Two recently published books, Wrestling with Moses, by Anthony Flint, and Manhattan Projects, by Samuel Zipp, detail how the working class was driven out of the West Village, as gentrifiers like Jacobs drove up assessed values and rents. Progressive, reformist city planners, supported by seemingly most of the Village's blue-collar residents, favored a relatively low-impact urban-renewal scheme to build hundreds of below-market-rate homes in the neighborhood--a plan Jacobs and a group of largely affluent residents successfully fought on the grounds that it would destroy the area's character. Whatever the merits of the opposing positions, one of the proponents of renewal was surely prophetic in arguing in 1961, "If the Village area is left alone ... eventually the Village will consist solely of luxury housing This trend is already quite obvious and would itself destroy any semblance of the Village that [Jacobs and her allies] seem so anxious to preserve."

Thanks in no small part to the fact that Jacobs's recipe for livable and vibrant cities--keep the scale small, preserve the physical fabric of neighborhoods--has become, Zipp says, "the lingua franca of planners and city lovers," the physical appearance of Jacobs's old neighborhood (a place where I lived and worked in the mid-1990s) is much as it was. But its character is unrecognizable. The hardware store's building, Zukin reports, now houses the New York branch of a small Chicago chain that describes itself as a purveyor of "hip designer maternity clothes"; in 2008 the ground floor of Jacobs's former home contained City Cricket, which sold "one-of-a kind, hand-made, antique treasures for children."

The same processes created--and, as Sorkin and Zukin would have it, destroyed--contemporary SoHo, Tribeca, and the East Village. In their analyses of each, it's clear that they pine for--and mistake as susceptible to preservation--the same sort of transitional moment Jacobs evokes in Death and Life, when an architecturally interesting enclave holds in ephemeral balance the emerging and the residual. Such neighborhoods still contain a sprinkling of light industry and raffish characters, for urban grit, and a dash of what Zukin calls "people of color," for exotic diversity. Added to the mélange are lots and lots of experimental artists (for that boho frisson) and a generous but not overwhelming portion of right-thinking designers, publishing types, architects, and academics, and the one-of-a kind boutiques and innovative restaurants that will give them places to shop and brunch.

Neither writer seems to apprehend the inherently impermanent nature of this balance, because neither writer comprehends large-scale economic processes. For instance, in railing against the passing of SoHo's exhilarating, creative days--characterized by "the mix of artists, crafts-people, small manufacturers, researchers [!], as well as of commerce oriented to their needs" (a few funky bars for the artists; places like the collectively run restaurant Food)--Sorkin joins in the lamentation for "the rapid decline of the city's industrial economy." He doesn't recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

Zukin declares that she "resent[s] everything Starbucks represents," which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment. Indeed, what has changed since Jacobs's day--and the reason, as these books attest, that gentrification has become so intense an issue--is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression (Zukin is perceptive on this point) and from--relatedly, ultimately--the acceleration of the global economy.