NEW YORK CITY

Buffy the dog walker (an argument against gentrification)

 

So I don’t normally write like this. My writing is about travel. I’m not an expert in any location I travel to. If I were, then it would no longer really be a travel destination for me. It would become something else. Something I likely lost my wonder and curiosity for. After all, familiarity breeds contempt. What I am an expert in are bookings, research and problem solving (so I think). I can put together almost any trip no matter how complicated and I can do so reasonably without breaking the bank. That’s my talent. It’s also time consuming.

I’ve found myself in New York City several times. Angie actually has some roots there. While I haven’t lived in NYC, I’ve had the chance to do some decent exploration, albeit often through Angela’s eyes. NYC is a simple, complicated, cultural, antiquated, modern, alive and dead city. It’s where dreams are made and dreams are crushed. I’d be lying if I claimed I knew it intimately. Pittsburgh, where I come from, is a small country town by comparison. They call it the Big Apple because there’s supposed to be enough for everyone to take a bite from it but when you explore a little more deeply, it becomes apparent that the city bites back. Not everyone makes it out alive. Nowhere else I’ve visited compares. The city teeters in the light and the dark. It’s not just about the have and the have nots… that’s everywhere you go. It’s much deeper than that. The city is profoundly scarred from it’s past. While it’s made a lot of people stronger it’s also left quite a few behind. Maybe in my future travel I’ll find cultural and philosophical equivalents. Scars, after all, are not something I shy away from. In my own past, I’ve been through some dark times. I believe we can all make it through the darkest of times but I also had some help from people who I knew had my back. What happens when people stop helping and you lose everyone around you who ever believed in you? Not everyone is strong enough to make it through all that. Not everyone has large families. Some simply have no family left or they’ve long burned too many bridges for anyone else to risk putting out their hand in friendship and support. There’s a stark line between tough love - and fuck off.

9/11 produced a significant amount of PTSD. At the time of this writing (I post the date I visited at the top of a post) the COVID-19 epidemic has killed more people in NYC than anywhere else in the U.S. By the time it’s over, NYC may hold the distinction of more deaths than any country in the world. Odds are more than one person there just lost their only family member or their only real friend. To make it worse, the medical professionals are often the last person the sick see before they pass. That’s additional PTSD for those medical workers and families in a city already scarred… and yet New York City is still proudly America’s powerhouse.

New York is like the fighter you haven’t fought yet. Sure you’ve beaten everyone else but you haven’t beaten the champ. You know you’ll never be the best until you’ve beaten the best. It’s like scoring the big clients at work but the biggest still remains elusive. Sinatra sang, “If I make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”. New York holds that legendary distinction. It makes or breaks you. 

Most of the pictures I’ve taken of the city are not as intimate a portrait of the city as I wish. I’ll try and change that in future trips. I can only share in words my understanding of my experiences in the city. I've never lived there but as I mentioned earlier, Angela lived there back in the 90’s when she attended NYU. That was long before Giuliani cleaned up much of the city. The 90’s were a just a much different time. You had your nice areas and your bad areas and if you lived in the nice areas you didn’t go into the bad areas. Now, so much of those questionable areas have been gentrified. The strip clubs, punk hangouts and seedy bars are now replaced with trendy shops, gyms and $8.00 a cup coffee shops. Needle parks now all cleaned up so nicely that you can confidently have family outings. Solid places you can safely bring your children. Now people talk about areas in New Jersey as the place you might not want to walk at night although maybe they always talked about Jersey to be fair. The Bronx, certain areas of Brooklyn and upper Manhattan still have rough reputations, but even those tough areas keep getting slowly modernized essentially pushing those that can't afford the new reality into a neighborhood they have no attachment to. There's a lot of money to be made in revitalization projects. Greed and compassion don't often share the same bed.

Decades ago, artists helped create the scene in many neighborhoods. They don't call artists starving for no reason. The newly gentrified areas bring much higher rents that many artists can't afford. There are not too many artists left in the communities they helped influence, at least not the grittier ones. Coffee shops don’t make an area trendy when every corner has one. Eclectic bookstores can actually help with the coolness factor but Amazon now delivers them right to your home or electronic device so those too are disappearing. The few remaining locations where you still find unique art are now found mostly in the newly pristine parks. Musicians will come on the weekends in the summer, small artist stands will set up where permitted to hock their goods but you'll still never bring back the infamous punk scene of the 80's and early 90's. Even if you could, punkers wouldn’t be able to afford living anywhere even close to St. Marks Place and the East Village today. It's ironic that many places that artists make trendy seem to eventually get swallowed up forcing the artists to move into more affordable locations while simultaneously the suckers who buy in at premium prices, move in expecting that same eclectic flair only to find out their new neighborhood lost its identity and is now just a carbon copy of the last gentrified formula neighborhood. Without neighborhood input and foresight, developers will follow where the money leads them. I've seen very few revitalization projects that do a good job maintaining a neighborhoods soul and identity. There are examples out there, if everyone is willing to compromise between money and compassion. Finding the right development companies and having sound planning with good neighborhood participation is vital for neighborhoods to maintain reasonable identity.

 

There will be ongoing debate and varying opinions if gentrification changes communities for the better or for the worse. The truth may be a little more complicated than that. It’s all about perspective. Pushing out entire communities so Buffy can walk her dog in a safe manner and her dog can shit on the few patches of grass left in an otherwise concrete city might be appealing to some, but what happens to everyone that got pushed out? The people who couldn’t rise up in a city that always beat them back. The only thing familiar to them was the neighborhood they grew up in. It was like another family member and while some people see the newly gentrified neighborhood as coming back to life, for many that grew up there, we just killed off a family member. It’s like someone put an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type of pod outside their community and by the time they finally woke up something clearly seemed off and felt wrong... but it was too damn late. Those smiles now seem too plastic. The pain and wisdom that once oozed from its pores is still there but seems more foreign and is much more camouflaged. It’s like the soul had been ripped out of the community and its now been replaced by Buffy the dog walker who doesn’t care if you step in her dogs shit because she doesn’t have time to clean it up. She still has to get to the new trendy gym that just opened up to show a rental unit to a new prospective client. A property that’s now 4-5 times the cost that it was just a few short years ago. I’d argue that the more diversified a community is, the stronger it is. It shouldn't always be about how much money you have or don't have.