Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing New York is his sad, angry account of the aggressive gentrification over the last forty years that has changed the look and the culture of New York City. Actually, he does not write about the entire city; his focus is on Lower Manhattan and the famous neighborhoods — the East Village, the Bowery, Little Italy. And his name is not actually Jeremiah Moss, which is the pen name he has used as he developed the blog that grew into this book. His name is Griffin Hansbury, and he came to New York in his early twenties aspiring to be a poet. He did not, however, come to the city as a Young Man from the Provinces; he came as a young woman. He says little more about his transition, but it does something to explain his love for the streets and life he writes about — the dive bars and gay bars, the old Italian coffee houses and Jewish delis, the oddballs, punks, and queers, and all the other outsiders on the “bohemian frontier” where he found his place. Hansbury still lives in the East Village and is now a practicing psychoanalyst.
He starts with an account of the East Village and works his way up through the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, into Harlem, and then onto Brooklyn. In a way, he keeps repeating himself, because the story of each neighborhood is typically the story of every neighborhood. The details and local colors change, but not the process: the old residents are priced out of existence, and the renovated brownstones, luxury hotels, and high-rise glass condos are affordable only to brokers and investment bankers. And often the first sign that the old neighborhood is going to hell is the appearance of a Starbucks.
Jeremiah Moss. Photo: Christopher Schulz.
In New York City, this process has not been accidental or organic, but a concerted effort, led by Mayors Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, to redeem the city for the White upper class, whose money is more valuable than New York’s traditional diversity. These changes began in the late 1970s when Koch was mayor. CUNY anthropologist and geographer David Harvey has explained them as “the shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism, meaning that the city government changed its main priority from providing services and benefits for its own people to competing with other cities for outside human resources and capital.” This change inaugurated a new philosophy of local government that stressed “the free-market capitalist ideology of neoliberalism, with its focus on privatization, deregulation, fiscal austerity, small government, and the elevation of Wall Street . . . [and] marked a major departure from the progressive, redistributive, New Deal philosophy of old New York.“ And this obviously reflected the whole country’s shift toward the right, the conservatism of the Republican party, trickle-down economics, and the Tea Party.
Moss’s second chapter is entitled “Hyper-gentrification in the Revanchist City.” “Revanche” is the French term for revenge, and it characterized the right-wing French party in the late nineteenth century that took revenge on the “working class, the liberals, the radical Socialists of the Paris commune.” The term has been used by Neil Smith, also a professor of anthropology and geography at CUNY, who developed “the most detailed and useful theory of gentrification” and its stages of development. Smith is a very important resource for Moss, and he stands for the other dimension of Vanishing New York, Moss’s research. This is a 465-page book with a full bibliography, and its argument is complex, thorough, and historically self-conscious.
Moss writes, “The way I figure it, today’s vanishing New York began in the latter part of the 1800s after the Civil War, when African Americans were emancipated from slavery and a great influx of European immigrants flooded lower Manhattan. Impoverished Irish Catholics, already pouring in through the city’s port, were met by hostile Nativists . . . for whom Catholicism was a threat.” And they were followed by Italian Catholics, Russian Jews, Greeks, Hungarians, and Poles, among others. These populations were subject to American racism which cast them as “temporary Negroes.” And one newspaper wrote: “Europe is vomiting . . . . The horde of $9.60 steerage slime is being siphoned upon us from Continental mud tanks.” (Seems there’s nothing new under the sun.)
Rudy Giuliani’s law-and-order regime followed Koch’s redistribution plan, made the City safer for the gentry, and earned him the nickname Mayor Mussolini.
One unanticipated result of the change was the Red Square building with the statute of Vladimir Lenin on its top, a “Communist themed apartment building.” Its promotional brochure said that “Red Square was designed to appeal to a narrow audience of people with resources who wanted to live in a hip, extreme, even dangerous neighborhood in complete safety.” In other words, they turned the neighborhood into a theme park and the “sweatshop workers, Latinos, musicians, and poets became animatronic characters . . . designed for the world-conquering Mr. Wallstreet and his Dutch model girlfriend.”
Not quite so bad are what I call the “babystroller wars.” The urbanist William H. Whyte has studied city sidewalks and their traffic, and he has concluded that New Yorkers are very skilled pedestrians. “They give and they take, at once aggressive and accommodating. . . . The simple avoidance of collision . . . is really a rather remarkable demonstration of cooperative effort.” However, this is not true of the newcomers to the old neighborhoods, who walk with a sense of eminent domain. The strollers they favor have “rugged all-terrain tires and a sidewalk hugging double-wide girth” — “entitled SUVs,” Moss calls them. And the “stroller mommies” are as aggressive and territorial as street gangs. They may have moved in, but they don’t move over.
New York City is, of course, a special case — no other American city has its old geography, historical populations, its wealth, and its importance as both a financial and cultural capital. But Moss’s urgency and anger make its gentrification seem inevitable everywhere. Money marches on and conquers all. However, the histories and geography of other cities determine different results. In Cite 90 (Fall 2012), I reviewed Alan Ehrenhalt’s book The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. In it he treats gentrification in three very distinct neighborhoods — the Sheffield neighborhood of Chicago near Wrigley Field, Wall Street, and the Brooklyn neighborhood Bushwick. On a quick drive through Sheffield a couple of years ago, I couldn’t see anything that looked like a broad, radical difference, despite the much higher value of the properties that Ehrenhalt reports. And of Sheffield he says, ”It is easier to demonstrate that Sheffield is rich than to explain why.” Maybe more important is his conclusion that “[o]ne thing we have learned about the modern city is that even the smartest of observers, trying to predict the possibilities for revival and change, are likely to be wrong.” Who would have predicted, for instance, the increased domestication of Wall Street after 9/11?
In Houston, we have several efforts underway to manage economic redevelopment in a way that stops hypergentrification. In Third Ward, Representative Garnett Coleman has used money from the Midtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone to bank large amounts of land. The Emancipation Economic Development Council is getting institutions in Third Ward to develop a comprehensive strategy to keep developers from doing to the Third Ward what they did to the Fourth. The Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Council is making substantial investments in mixed-income housing all along Lyons Avenue as well.
Anita Street houses near the METROrail Purple Line on Scott Street. Photograph courtesy Catama Builders.
Ehrenhart also brings up the phenomena of The Woodlands and Sugar Land that have tried to “urbanize” themselves by creating fake downtowns. Is this kind of New Urbanism gentrification too? More urgent questions for Houston are affordable housing and the rehabilitation and then protection of the neighborhoods destroyed by Hurricane Harvey.
In the conclusion of his book, Moss summarizes the arguments of the developers against those of the preservationists. The developers maintain that preservationism is naïve, merely nostalgic, opposed to the city’s natural evolution. I have always been taken by Jane Jacobs’s argument that it is better to preserve than raze buildings, so that we can actually see the layers of our city’s history. Visible history is a good reason so many Americans love Paris, London, Prague. Houston, believe it or not, is making progress on the preservation front. However, when not accompanied by an equitable system of taxes and subsidies, preservation can become a movement that puts nostalgia above communities. The buildings may be intact but the "the community" is gone. Yes, change is inevitable but there can be continuity in the character of a place. A gateway to immigrants can welcome in new groups instead of becoming an exclusive enclave. A place of artistic and social experimentation can welcome new experiments instead of becoming buttoned up. The social capital that allows low-income people to weather health and economic crises can be preserved even as new high-income people move in.
Consider that Jane Jacobs' home at 555 Hudson Street went on sale for $3.5 million in 2009. So much for the sidewalk ballet of butchers and bakers! It's all bankers and big money now. It's tempting to accept this irony with a sneer. The danger in recording the pattern of hypergentrification chapter after chapter is that it seems inevitable and jeering is our only consolation, but there is nothing inevitable about it. We make choices as individuals, as consumers, as neighbors, and as voters that shape the gentrification process. Creating a different way of managing change and redevelopment is not easy, especially when the national and global macroeconomic forces are beyond our control. Nonetheless, I hope Houston figures out another model before it's too late.
