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The
Suburbanization of New York: Is the World's Greatest City
Becoming Just Another Town?, edited by
Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett.
In the fourteen essays written for this book, the predominant
sense is that today New York just ain't what it used to
be, be it twenty, or thirty, or fifty, or even one-hundred
years ago. The first- and second-hand accounts of, among
others, SoHo in the seventies, TriBeCa in the eighties,
and Times Square in every decade since the Depression paint
a vibrant picture of New York City -- particularly Manhattan
-- that was equal parts lively and dangerous. While many
of the writers here pine for the former, they could easily
do without the latter, and this desire is just one of the
many difficulties confronted by New York's current incarnation
as a fashionable, service-oriented, global city that is
slowly being infiltrated by many of the mechanisms it helps
create or oversees.
A nostalgia for the pre-gentrified SoHo or Tribeca, or
the pre-Disneyfied Time Square -- or even the pre-Ipod,
pre-cell-phone manners of pedestrians -- isn't the only
feeling that pervades these essays; if it were, it would
make the book more memoir than critical study of an important
moment in the city. We also feel the presence of the automobile
on the streets of New York, in the documentary-like photographs
of Martha Cooper, in the yearning for privacy that the automobile
provides even while walking the crowded streets of Manhattan.
We feel the malling of the boroughs, as big box retailers
infiltrate the city they used to avoid, and as independent
stores are pushed out by national and international chains
until Fifth Avenue resembles a high-end mall or 125th Street
slowly loses the essence of what makes Harlem, well, Harlem.
We feel the homogenization of race and class, as minorities
and lower classes "flee" to the edges of the boroughs,
pushed out by a "reverse flight" of middle and
upper class, white collar suburbanites and others willing
to pay the astronomical rents of Manhattan and, increasingly
even, the other boroughs We feel the police presence that
gives residents the safety they yearn for, at the expense
of certain democratic freedoms.
Reading these essays, it's clear that New York is at a
moment when it could become a fortified playground for the
ultra-rich, serviced by low-wage workers living at the periphery.
Of course this scenario isn't the only one, but it's one
favored by current and previous political administrations
and the powerful financial sector. But reading these essays,
it's also clear that New York, in one way or another, has
always been faced with challenges that have pointed towards
it becoming something it (supposedly) doesn't want to become.
The art scene in SoHo that is reminisced in these pages
could not have been foreseen by 19th-century dockworkers
or even those sitting high in Tammany Hall. But its existence
is just one of the many exceptional parts of New York that
happened for various reasons.
What's most upsetting, and difficult, about the current
"happening" is how much it's being underwritten
by other people in other places, by retailers from the American
Midwest, by Hollywood studios, by oversees financiers, by
people and organizations that might never enter the city
or, worse yet, don't like the city to begin with. It's a
situation that is bound to experience some backlash, and
this book, I think, is but one part of that. It's a call-to-arms,
if you will, that we don't have to accept everything "as
is," that things should be questioned, that people
still have a role in how their environment is shaped, how
it unfolds. Perhaps this book, while focusing on a specific
place and time, can be seen -- like New York itself -- as
a microcosm of the rest of America, (the rest of the world
even?), which finds itself struggling to contain and control
this beast it's unleashed in the name of individual freedom
but at the expense of community.
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