Last May, thousands of curious customers lined up along Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, braving an unseasonably cold and rainy Friday night to witness the grand opening of Apple computer’s first 24-hour retail store. According to a Wired magazine article, dozens had camped out overnight, many had come from places as far away as Scotland, and the line eventually grew so long it snaked around the block and added hours of dull anticipation to the lives of literally thousands.
These weren’t just tech-hungry teenagers either, or geeky Apple fetishists living on the margins. By all accounts, it was a perfectly mainstream event consisting of perfectly normal, mainstream professionals – two of my friends among them. “Back in the 80’s,” one friend overheard someone say, “we used to wait in lines like this to see rock bands. Now we do it to get into stores.”
Most New Yorkers understand this thought implicitly. It captures most people’s ironic ambivalence toward a process that the editors of a new book call, accurately if unoriginally, “The Suburbanization of New York.”
On the one hand, we like the abundance of restaurants and stores on almost every major street and avenue in Manhattan, as well as the revitalized Steinway Streets and Flatbush Avenues in the outer boroughs; we like the lower crime rates that come with more street activity and the lack of noxious fumes emitted by a dwindling manufacturing sector. On the other hand, we’re concerned about skyrocketing real estate prices, gentrifying neighborhoods, and the slow disappearance of mom-and-pop stores in favor of brand name outlets owned by multinational corporations.
But it’s worth thinking more about why these things bother us so. To some, like Mayor Bloomberg, complaints like these are bound to sound a bit rich, like the moanings of a 3-year-old who has a sour stomach from eating too many sweets. “If you want to solve the problem of gentrification,” he and Doctoroff like to say, “then you should have crime go up, the schools get worse, and the parks get dirtier.” And they’re right, at least, to suggest that the burden of proof is on those of us who have a problem with high real estate values and an abundance of capital investment. Think of the alternative.
This is the explanatory gap that “The Suburbanization of New York” seeks to fill through 14 essays by a varied group of authors. Artists such as Lucy Lippard and Maggie Wrigley give first-person accounts of the gentrification of Soho, the East Village and the Lower East Side (and their own unwitting participation in it), while cultural theorists and urbanists such Neil Smith, Marshall Berman and Michael Sorkin – heavy hitters all – provide a more analytical perspective.
Sorkin, director of the graduate urban design program at CUNY, points out that New York has done a better job than most cities of protecting historic buildings and keeping its urban fabric mostly intact. And if Manhattan is steadily decreasing in density – as measured by the number of people of who actually live there – its vibrant street life is not likely to diminish anytime soon.
“If suburbanization – or globalization – threatens the city,” writes Sorkin, “the main danger comes not from the physical side of the equation, the introduction of specific alien architectures from suburbia – big boxes, ranch houses, shopping malls, etc. – but from the content side, which has proven adaptable enough to remain independent of the constraints of its setting.”
