March 19, 2004
…the familiar form of New York development, whose stages are as predictable as those of a professional wrestling match: first, the Sacrificial Plan; next, the Semi-Ridiculous Rhetorical Statement; then the Staged Intervention of the Professionals; and, at last, the Sorry Thing Itself. The Sacrificial Plan is the architectural plan or model put forward upon the announcement of the project, usually featuring some staggeringly obvious and controversial device—a jagged roof or a startling pediment—which even the architect knows will never be built, and whose purpose is not to attract investors so much as to get people used to the general idea that something is going to be built there. (Sometimes the Sacrificial Plan is known by all to be sacrificial, and sometimes, as in “The Lottery,” known to everyone but the sacrifice.) The Semi-Ridiculous Rhetorical Statement usually accompanies, though it can precede, the Sacrificial Plan, and is intended to show that the plan is not as brutal and cynical as it looks but has been designed in accordance with the architectural mode of the moment. (“The three brass lambs that stand on the spires of Sheep’s Meadow Tower reflect the historical context of the site…” was the way it was done a decade ago; now it’s more likely to be “In its hybrid façade, half mirror, half wool, Sheep’s Meadow Tower captures the contradictions and deconstructs the flow of…”) The Staged Intervention marks the moment when common sense and common purpose, in the form of the Old Oligarchs and their architects—who were going to be in charge in the first place—return to rescue the project from itself. The Sorry Thing Itself you’ve seen. (At Ground Zero, Daniel Libeskind supplied the sacrificial plan, and now he is pursuing all of the semi-ridiculous rhetoric, in the forlorn hope that, when the professionals stage their intervention, he will be the professional called on.)Elsewhere in the essay, Gopnik observes that the Times Square redevelopment doesn’t really fit into the usual narrative of “urban renewal”:
…Forty-second Street wasn’t dying but raving. The porno shops on West Forty-second Street weren’t there because the middle class had fled. They were there because the middle class was there. The people who bought from the porn industry were the office workers who walked by the stores on the way to and from work, and the tourists who wanted to take home a little something not for the kids. The XXX video rooms and bookstores and grind-house theatres were going concerns, paying an average of thirty-two thousand dollars a year in rent; peep shows could gross a million dollars a year. Though the retailers were obviously entangled with the Mafia, the buildings were owned by respectable real-estate families—for the most part, the same families who had owned the theatres since the thirties, the Brandts and the Shuberts. Times Square was Brechtville: a perfect demonstration of the principle that the market, left to itself, will produce an economy of crime as easily as an economy of virtue.There’s more, all worth the price of the March 22 issue (look for the “gourmet deli” cover by Bruce McCall). As usual, Gopnik has a nose for irony, such as the way the Municipal Art Society, which fought signage in Times Square a hundred years ago, more recently became the ardent defender of the square’s unique chaos of brightly-lit extravaganzas, leaving the big real-estate developers to argue “the old Beaux-Arts case for classical order, lucidity, and space.” Like Michael Bérubé writing about golf, Gopnik leaves hanging, unsaid, one of the obvious implications, which is that the people who rule us are perfectly happy to practice socialism when they’re its immediate beneficiaries. Market ideology and the sanctity of property are for the little people.This—the crucial underlying reality in the Forty-second Street redevelopment—meant that the city, if it was to get the legal right to claim and condemn property in order to pass it over, had to be pointing toward some enormous, unquestioned commercial goal, larger or at least more concrete than the real goal, which was essentially ethical and “cultural.” For once, the usual New York formula had to be turned right around: a question of virtue had to be described as a necessity of commerce.
UPDATE: The Gopnik essay is now online, albeit only through the weekend, here. [11:52 AM]
The Gopnik article is on line, until midnight Sunday, at http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040322crat_atlarge
Musta gone up after I retyped all that. With my left wrist in a brace, too.
I blame the Bush Administration. And society.
As a member of society, I apologize, and suggest an ice pack.
I was working for Amy's Bread, near Times Square, when this redevelopment started. (Well actually I guess "when I became aware of this redevelopment".) This was in '91 - '93, my key memory of this period is that the city commandeered the signs above the doors of vacant theaters (--what are these signs called??! I am wanting to say "marquis" but am sure that is wrong...) and filled them with weird poetry and conceptual art. Also in the undergroung passageway from the Times Square subway station to the Port Authority, there was a series of Alka-Seltzer signs that said (reading from east to west), approximately "Woke up... So tired... If late... Get fired... Why bother... With the pain... Just get up... Do it again." The final sign did not, however, say "Alka-seltzer!", it just had a strange painting on it. This whole thing is one of the more surreal bits of my time watching the city.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm glad the 42nd Street porn places are gone. I always felt creepy walking down 42nd Street. Now a video porn store has cropped up right next to my office on 35th and I'm starting to feel just as creepy. Whenever I used to go to Jim Hanley's Universe for my comics I had to walk on the other side of 33rd so I wouldn't pass right in front of the strip clubs. I'm not fond of the clientele and I'm not fond of the commodification of women's bodies. Of course, I'm not all that thrilled with Disneyfication either, but given the choice I'll take that over catcalls and sleaze.
I'm too Friday afternoon to argue at length, but I for one preferred the porn shops to the mass-market retail glitz.
The muggers, pimps, and drug dealers, on the other hand, I'll agree that we're well rid of.
Chip Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue has an awful lot to say about issues of real estate development and 'urban renewal', from the perspective of someone who used to use the porn theatres of the area for his escapades.
Reminds me of something that's been going on here in DC (and elsewhere, I'm sure, I just know about DC): The second wave of gentrification (the yuppies who move in after the young trendy folk have already made the area "safer"/more expensive) takes the position that all the things that attracted people to a neighborhood in the first place (good music scene, arts, bars, restaurants) are now Bad Things and Attracting Unpleasant Elements.
So the some people want the ANC to ban live music and deny liquor licenses in my neighborhood (Adams Morgan, for those ho know DC).
I'm all for less cars getting stolen on my street, but turning all the bustling businesses into abandoned buildings doesn't sound like a good plan.
The thing is, you see: in New York, they replaced the porn shops with other things. In DC, they just close them.
Found this amusing:
In Rem Koolhaas’s epoch-marking manifesto “Delirious New York” (1978), the buzz, confusion, danger, and weirdness of New York were no longer things to worry about. In fact, they were pretty much all we had to boast of. To an increasing bias in favor of small-scale streetscapes and “organic” growth was added a neon zip of pop glamour. The new ideology was Jane Jacobs dressed in latex and leather.
The Street found its own use for Jane Jacobs. (Wall Street.)
C.
Jeremy: "Marquees" is the word your looking for.
And the signs in the subway tunnel were still there last I checked, which was no more than a year ago. But they emulate the Burma Shave signs, not Alka Seltzer.
Times Square was Brechtville: a perfect demonstration of the principle that the market, left to itself, will produce an economy of crime as easily as an economy of virtue.
So, what Gopnick is saying is, technology finds its own uses for the street?
Well, maybe not.
Chris -- yeah, of course, Burma Shave... I'm always gettin' my pop culture references mixed up and wind up sounding silly...
Jane Jacobs talks about this process of self-destruction by neighborhoods. You see the same thing going on in the West Village now, where the yuppies who have taken over are trying to get rid of those oh-so-icky transvestite hookers and cruising hustlers.
I have asked myself many times whether this process is inevitable, and I think in large part it is. The lack of security is what draws marginal culture in the first place. Places that are dangerous are also places where one can with impunity engage in behavior considered marginal in the more uptight precincts. They become "temporary autonomous zones" that, like beautiful, exotic flowers, must inevitably wither and fade. As more people are attracted, rents are raised (or property values go up, and buildings change hands), and what made the neighborhood desirable in the first place is driven out.
I wish I knew some exceptions to this. I think perhaps there are, in places in the world that have much stronger tentant protections. But I feel like most of my life I have sooner or later become a refugee from this process, in various neighborhoods in Seattle and New York. I feel like if I'm frozen and thawed out 200 years from now, there will be marginal, bohemian neighborhoods in Patagonia and the Gobi Desert being threatened by developers and their yuppie clients...
Long live sleazy movie theaters, porn shops, and hole-in-the-wall clubs where one can hear loud music and take drugs till dawn.
And incidentally, I know more than one woman who mourns the loss of Times Sq's strip clubs as the source of easy cash...
It won't be Patagonia.
Except for a very few neighborhoods, the gentrification/decay/bohemization/gentrification cycle has run, and will run again. 80 years ago, Harlem was a Nice Place, and Yorkville was an immigrant neighborhood of German,s Hungarians, and Poles. Harlem went down and is now coming up, Yorkville went up, and is now experiencing noisy yuppies without passing through decay. I am sure that in 10 years, the very women dancing on tables at Brother Jimmy's will insist it be made quiet so their children can sleep, and some other place will be sliding down or pulling up.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm glad the 42nd Street porn places are gone. I always felt creepy walking down 42nd Street. Now a video porn store has cropped up right next to my office on 35th and I'm starting to feel just as creepy. Whenever I used to go to Jim Hanley's Universe for my comics I had to walk on the other side of 33rd so I wouldn't pass right in front of the strip clubs. I'm not fond of the clientele and I'm not fond of the commodification of women's bodies. Of course, I'm not all that thrilled with Disneyfication either, but given the choice I'll take that over catcalls and sleaze.
Hey, I ain't a big fan of the porn industry either. But the gentrification of Times Square has not done a damn thing to eliminate the commodification of women's bodies in the area---it has merely resulted in the same thing in flashier, shiny-happy tinsel, from the blatant consumerism examplified by the odious SEX & THE CITY (which ain't nuthin' more than a fucking product placement lollapaloza that harms the self-image of women who ain't got Carrie's body type or mucho bucks), to MTV , which has its main HQ there (forget, for a moment, the endless scantily clad anorexic bodies you see on your average Empty Vee vid, but these are the same cooler folks who gave the world woman-hating and queer-bashing EMINEN).
To me, the ultimate error of the anti-porn feminist movement---at least in NYC---was making an alliance with the elitist theatere owners who didn't want the "rif-raff 'n undesirable elements"---that is, anyone other than white, bougeouis, "respctable" suburbanites---Dworkin/MacKinnion and other anti-porn types unwittingly provided a liberal, "politically-correct" cover for their economic cleansing---which culminated in the Dinsneyification and corporatization of the Square under Mayor Rudy.
A feminist once said that the tools of the master will not tear down his house. And gentrification is one of the tools of the master.
Have you seen this article on Times Square from the NYTimes Magazine?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/magazine/14TIMESSQUARE.html
Pronography isn't what commodifies women. Mother's do that every time they tell you that he won't buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.
The commodity being marketed in porn is sexual arousal, mostly. Not women, and not even women's bodies.
But every single time someone describes porn or even prostitution as "selling women" or "selling women's bodies", they identify women as commodities. They refuse to acknowledge that no such thing is happening; the women are getting paid to do a job, just like anyone else who gets paid to do a job. Some of them like their work and some of them don't.
A worker sells, first and foremost, their time. And along with it, access to a skill or willingness to do something that the employer or client is willing to pay someone to do.
But if you ever define that as "selling yourself", you're defining yourself way, way down.
One of my aunts actually told me that, about the cow (I dont think she realized that my now husband and I had been living together for six months).
The theme of my bridal shower was cows.
I was really disappointed to find out that they were fashionable.
commierad said:
consumerism examplified by the odious SEX & THE CITY (which ain't nuthin' more than a fucking product placement lollapaloza that harms the self-image of women who ain't got Carrie's body type or mucho bucks)
After I stopped chuckling, I lapsed back into a funk self-loathing, since I've no Manolos or money.
-Joy
Cities appear to feel an urgent need to "clean things up," especially if they have urban removal dollars at their disposal. Cities have renovated themselves close to death in this fashion. Chicago is a particularly famous example. Yes, yes, I know that Chicago is corrupt, but frankly, not that much worse than most other places. How many real estate developers are on your city council? How many building contractors?
There's a book the title of which I can't recall, but it's something like "Block 81." It chronicles the history of one block in the center of downtown Chicago. It begins in the sixties, when the city decided that they wanted to "draw people back to downtown." Mind you, there already were people downtown, and spending good money, too, but they were black. What the city council wanted was for white suburbanites to come and spend money in nightclubs and the like, and to do that, the faces on the street needed to be of a lighter color. The buildings had to look cleaner and better dressed. All of this is coming down at a time when there's federal money for urban removal projects of various types.
The city strikes: rezone SROs out of existence, condemn and demolish low rent housing, persecute porn shops, and pressure shoe repair shops out. As the amenities in the downtown area are destroyed or made expensive, the working poor start moving out. This starts a rot within the city core, which panics the city. Buildings go empty, it's difficult to find investors, etc.
I can't possibly remember all the corporate deals that went down for Block 81 (or whatever its name was), but early in the process it was razed. Excuse me, the buildings were condemned and demolished. It went from a functional, thriving block to an eyesore and a vacant lot. Various people got screwed in various ways, trying to redevelop that block. The city got taken more than once. As of this very day, Block 81 is still a vacant lot. I even stopped to admire it the last time I was in Chicago.
This isn't even the worst of it, though. Tawdry but friendly shops were replaced with huge buildings with enormous setbacks and frighteningly sterile lobbies. This depresses the casual shopper rather thoroughly. There are vast plazas of stone, about as inviting as a dentist's chair. And the suburbanites are still terrified of the city.
Much of this nonsense is touted as being part of the fight against crime. What it does is force crime elsewhere -- sometimes into the very suburbs themselves. That's good for a bit of irony, but it isn't any sort of improvement. Gorgeous old buildings destroyed (remember, we're talking about Chicago, here, home of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan). Gentrification is this same process in small. They are lovely buildings, and I am so happy that they get renovated. But to do that, the people who live there are priced out of the market, taxes go up and the corner grocery store can't make the rent, and so a trendy restaurant fills that space. Pretty soon, you have a neighborhood that's all terribly, terribly chic, but with no real amenities.
Oh, have I mentioned that I love old buildings? Especially the fine ones between about 1880 and 1925.
I wish I could organize this better, but my thoughts all trip over themselves on this issue. Urban removal, as it is usually practiced, is an attempt to enforce specific morality on common space. Here in Minneapolis, the great offense was "Block E." It had strip joints, a couple of rough bars, and the undesirable element. So they leveled the sucker, and put in a mini-mall, a prime attractor for teen-aged kids, who are, of course, considered to be an undesirable element. Some buildings try to keep them out, which means they hang on the streets. Such a vast improvement, don't you think? And the kids are hostile because the cops and security guards are hostile, and so after dark has a bit of an edge to it.
Our downtown is dying. Ever since the stock market bust in the 80s, it's been dying. However, the only development projects the city thinks to contribute to are stadia, office buildings, and shopping. There are new, fancy office buildings going up while last year's office space is desperately trying to find tenants. This is because you can get money to _build_ from the city, the state, maybe even the feds, but there's no money for maintenance, and that's where people lose their shirts. You think that the real estate development companies retain ownership of those big complexes they build, and make a bundle? Don't make me laugh. They get out while the getting is good, and leave someone else holding the bag.
Frankly, I think the city'd be damn smart to buy an older office building or two and help finance remuddling it into either subsidized housing or SROs. There are a lot of low-paying jobs downtown, janitor, hotel maid, retail clerk, and it would be a real advantage for people who fill those jobs to reduce their travel time. In return, they'd create a demand for the commonplaces of life. Corner groceries, laundromats, and so on. Empty storefronts might actually have tenants in them, again. I mean, ok, so the tenant is a second hand shop. Shock, horror. Hell of a lot better than emptiness, and besides, it gives the rich people who live downtown someplace to drop off the clothes that are no longer in fashion.
Lydy, it's starting to happen in San Francisco. Halperin, the original architect for Ghiradelli Square, wanted housing units included, but it was difficult to get that approved at the time. The new owners have announced that they are looking at converting some of the office and upper retail space to housing, and the city is encouraging other owners to do the same.
Claude, what kind of housing? If it's affordable for middle to low income workers, then that's great, but if it's high-priced condos, it won't do much to help the center of the city, despite what the stupid city council thinks. If they think.
Lydia Nickerson wrote:
"the city decided that they wanted to "draw people back to downtown." Mind you, there already were people downtown, and spending good money, too, but they were black. What the city council wanted was for white suburbanites to come and spend money in nightclubs and the like, and to do that, the faces on the street needed to be of a lighter color. "
Cities looking to revitalize their downtown core should really take a look at Baltimore. One of the things that impressed me about the Inner Harbor area was that the clientele was a dynamic mix of inner-city blacks and white suburbanites.
Mind you, there are areas within a few minutes' walk of the harbor where it's dangerous to go no matter what your skin color. But the Harborplace development has effectively demolished the fallacy that you can't build a downtown renewal with the patronage of inner-city residents. They live within walking distance, they do have some money to spend, and they won't scare away the visitors from the burbs.
Buld something clean, and fun, and reasonably priced, and the people will come. And the color of their money is all the same.
Of course, it occurs to me that this contradicts my earlier remarks about porn shops versus mass market retail. But I think that any decent sized city should have room for both. Baltimore revived the waterfront but didn't demolish its block-o-sleaze. That just means that people know where to take the family, and where not to.
I'm not sure -- I'm working from this recent SFGate artlcle and discussions with a friend who knows planning in the Bay Area. The most interesting paragraph is:
Many developers in San Francisco, encouraged by city planning policy, are looking into the feasibility of converting empty commercial space to housing or hotel uses as a way to reduce the city's huge office glut. The commercial vacancy rate is 22 percent in the city.
San Francisco has rather extensive requirements for affordable housing set asides, and such measures are often part of negotiations with neighborhood groups when working out zoning beefs. I doubt that you would see to many midrange apartments in the Square, not with that view.
Will Eisner's Dropsie Avenue is a sharp and entertaining depiction of the neighborhood decay and rebuilding cycle in New York City.
Those with nostalgia for the porn and sleaze of Times Square are mostly Manhattanites who could go there by choice.
As a former commuter from New Jersey, I would echo Elayne. When the bus dropped you off at the Port Authority bus station, you had no option but to walk through a gauntlet of open drug dealing and solicitation. I witnessed two separate cases of men dashing through traffic to escape pursuers. I found that unnerving as a 6 foot tall male. I think women would find it more intimidating.
A red light district off to the side, where people only need go there by choice, is not unreasonable. It ought not straddle a major communter artery.
"A red light district off to the side, where people only need go there by choice, is not unreasonable. It ought not straddle a major communter artery."
Of course, as Gopnik points out, the old Times Square was what it was because it "straddled a major commuter artery". The commuters were its customers.
As for where such things "ought" to be, well. Contrary to the stories we tell ourselves, these kinds of districts never actually go away; they just move into somebody else's neighborhood, and the discomforts that attend them become somebody else's problem. All very well to say that commuters ought not be inconvenienced, but it's far from clear to me why one set of commuters has an especially greater moral claim to a stress-free New York experience than do, say, the denizens of Sunset Park under the Gowanus overpass (an area now sprouting porn palaces at a considerable rate). Particularly since it's those very 42nd St commuters who were keeping the sleazy businesses going in the first place.
The fact is that what's "off to the side" for one person is right in the living room of another. That's a basic fact of urban life. Who gets to evict whom is the subject of neverending battle, and one of the perks of victory is the privilege of deluding ourselves into thinking we've relocated the undesirable element off on some "side".
This is not a question of privilege.
Perhaps I have a chip on my shoulder because I'm from Jersey, but I believe it's precisely because New Jersey commuters were impacted that the decline was allowed to go on as long as it did. Being voiceless within the City's political process, the harassment of tens of thousands of commuters from Jersey simply didn't count.
It is reasonable to displace such businesses to areas of low-residency and low-foot traffic. In Boston, in fact, the old Combat Zone is gone, and the porno businesses have been dispersed to locations off highways. People who want it can still get porn, and those who don't need not get harassed.
A porn shop, by itself, is not harassing anyone. As Rick pointed out himself, it was the streetwalkers, pimps, muggers, and drug dealers who hung out in that area who were doing the harassing. These problems could be addressed by more vigilant police patrolling to eliminate the criminal activity, rather than closing down the businesses that were, despite some people's moral objections, carrying on legal commerce.
In fact, a lot of this did take place. I started travleing to Manhattan on a regular basis at the very tail end of the 80's, and caught a few glimpses of the Deuce at its worst. By the mid-90's the street crime in that area was greatly reduced, and by 2000 it was almost nonexistent.
Getting rid of the porn shops on 42nd Street was (as the article referenced above pointed out) much more of an economic issue than one of morals or public safety. Because of the transportation structure of the city, 42nd Street between 8th Avenue and Broadway is, and will remain, a high-traffic area. Businesses are likely to make more money just by being there. Some people decided that the wrong businesses (i.e., ones they didn't own) were making that money, so they bought legislation to kick the existing businesses out.
Certainly not the first, nor the last, time that has happened in New York or elsewhere.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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