On Gentrification

Every week in the City section of the New York Times, there's an article about some neighborhood, usually in Brooklyn, clamoring to have itself listed a landmark district or to be de-zoned to limit the kind (and height) of new buildings in the area. It seems that these people want to preserve the unique qualities of their respective neighborhoods: the grimy coffee shops, the bullet-proof bodegas, the run-down churches that have become repositories for homeless drug addicts. Many of these neighborhood activists are quoted as remembering the good old days of their neighborhoods, reaching as far back as 1992, when said person moved to New York from Minnesota to be some stupid fucking art director at a shitty trend-laden magazine.

And you know, it's really starting to piss me off. People bandy about the word "gentrification" like it's some imposed cancer on New York society, a softening of the hard-nosed attitude that makes our fair city the butt of lame comedians around the world. Where ya from? New York? Oh, I'd better hold on to my wallet! Polite chuckling. What meaning can a joke like this hold in a post-Giuliani New York where there is a Disney Store in Times Square? How will these poor comedians make a living? I certainly don't want to see mental midgets of their caliber working retail and trying to figure out the cash register.

And the motherfuckers on these Landmark Preservation Society bullshit committees are usually the very kind of upwardly-mobile douchebags that cause gentrification in the first place! Do you think that just because you moved into the neighborhood when it still smelled like rat piss, you can claim some ownership over it? Do you really have the audacity to force a neighborhood ravaged by the 1977 blackout riots to maintain its "gritty character"? Go shove that gritty character up your assholes! New York doesn't give a fuck about your nostalgic revisionist bullshit. The city will jam a high-rise condominium down your throat and make you love it. You want grit? Move to Detroit.

I wonder what "good old days" these assclowns are really harkening to. Could it be the 1970's, when the city was bankrupt and the subway was an unreliable danger zone? Or perhaps they want to bring it back to the 1940's, when Civil Defense drills kept the city in darkness for many nights and you could get picked up and shipped off to war for vagrancy. I know, they want to bring back the gaslight era, when the streets reeked of horse manure and you wallowed in your own sweat-soaked suit by the light of a candle. The reality is that New York has been gentrifying since Peter Minuit copped the island of Manhattan from the Lanape Indians in 1625. He dumped a bunch of disparate crackers at the southernmost tip of Manhattan--a word which many believe comes from a Lenape word meaning "Wooded Hills"--and they immediately began re-fitting the land for their purposes. I don't suppose you've seen many woods or hills around Manhattan lately, huh?

I grew up in a crummy little neighborhood in the ass end of Queens called Flushing. It was by no means a crime-ridden neighborhood, but it was kind of run-down when I was younger. There was a bar or two every block. Most residents were blue-collar workers or people collecting social security or disability payments. The streets were filthy, and it was not uncommon to see drunk adults stumbling around in broad daylight (I know, because we taunted them from the safety of our bicycles).
Around 1988, the neighborhood started to make some serious changes. A tremendous influx of Koreans came to the neighborhood and began to reshape it to their purposes. Flushing became, and remains, an outpost for Korean business in America, and there is a seemingly endless number of Korean stores and restaurants in the neighborhood, with more opening every day. It's no surprise that the dickbags from the neighborhood resented the arrival of these "chinks" and their changes. But my question is, where were you? What were you doing while the pharmacy got security bars on its windows and the neighborhood alcoholics turned to crackheads? You were sitting in this dank, depressing bar, spending your paycheck on poison to kill your brain and your liver. And now that the neighborhood has shaped up, now that the severely cracked streets have been repaved, now that every storefront is occupied with a successful business, now that Main Street is a bustling center of business instead of a haven for batshit senior citizens that piss themselves and head shops, now you want to claim ownership of the neighborhood. Well buddy, if you want to live among the rubbish, then move to the garbage dump.

The one constant I've observed after living in New York for (almost) thirty-two years is change. It is inevitable. Leave a neighborhood and return after five years, and it will probably be totally different. Affluent neighborhoods become run-down crime zones. Derelict districts become high-priced loft space. And there's not a goddamned thing you could or should do about it. If you wanted creature comforts, then you should have stayed back in Minnesota.