One recent Mother’s Day, while driving on the Long Island Expressway around 7:00 pm, I noticed that the heavy traffic was coming from the island toward the city. Why? Because the urban gentrifiers were coming back from visiting their mothers. These mothers represent the earlier generations that, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, left the apartment buildings in the city for a piece of heaven in suburbia. During those decades, every Mother’s Day they made the reverse trek to see their elderly moms in the city. Now, in 2011, they were old and their children had moved to the city while they stayed behind in the suburbs, empty nesters in places that they no longer considered dream houses and communities, waiting for their next major migration. This time they were going to what is called by them, in bittersweet terms, “God’s Waiting Room”—Florida, or perhaps Arizona or California.
Therein lies the major story of gentrification in New York City. We begin this chapter with a discussion of who moves into gentrifying communities. The past twenty-five years have seen a large population shift as hundreds of thousands of young people have streamed back to the city that their parents abandoned. In this they have been augmented by large numbers of gentrifiers from all over the country. Both groups have been attracted by the opportunities in the Big Apple as it has shifted from an industrial economy to a service economy. Coming at first as single, unattached adults, in recent years young people have been putting down roots, deciding more often than not that they want those roots to be in the inner city. From living spaces, to restaurants, to services provided by municipal government, these demographic changes have transformed the city in many ways. And although low-income residents can be found in all five boroughs of New York City, this drift toward city living is part of a larger trend in which the poor are increasingly found in the city’s outskirts and suburbs.
The places where people put down stakes differ greatly. East Harlem isn’t Park Slope, and Brooklyn Heights isn’t Ditmas Park. The areas themselves are part of a hierarchy of preference, where people who can’t afford one community grudgingly accept living elsewhere, using cognitive dissonance to rationalize their decisions.
The reasons why people move into these changing neighborhoods—their own arrival is, in fact, the major change—are varied. Amenities vary from one locale to another, both in kind and in degree. There are the usual considerations: transportation, schools, shopping, noise, air quality. Most of the newcomers also look for a certain level of cachet, of “coolness,” that will give them the feeling that they have moved into someplace different, cutting-edge, and special. Sometimes it’s the wine bars, chic restaurants, and funky shops, but it can also be places that remain from the old days that suggest an effort to preserve the neighborhood’s original character. And then there are those in search of diversity, a community where they can meet and mingle with others whose backgrounds differ from their own.
The gentrified area one chooses to live in could be an existing residential neighborhood that is improving or an industrial section of the city that is becoming more residential. It could even be a stable community where the homes or location appeal to those who are looking for a quiet, centrally located, and affordable place to live. Being near the water, parks, or a beach may also play a role in how such decisions are made.
The places to which the gentrifiers move are by no means empty. Large numbers of poor people reside there, many of them in public housing projects or tenements that they have called home for generations. These areas are often in the process of gentrifying—still somewhat dangerous and run down but beginning to improve. The young professionals must make a decision. Are they willing to live cheek to jowl with people who will not exactly welcome them—indeed, who may resent them as better-off interlopers? Are they willing to risk being mugged and robbed? Are they ready to put down a million dollars for a condo a block away from tenements that are home not only to those less well off but also to drug dealers and other unsavory characters? It turns out that most people who choose gentrified neighborhoods feel the benefits of living in these communities outweigh the risks.
In this chapter we deal with a number of core issues. First, what is the impact of the poor on gentrifying communities and vice versa? Have the gentrifiers really displaced the poor? When is it displacement and when is it not? The areas that gentrifiers move into often have poor residents. Some leave, others don’t, but why and the extent to which this happens are often unclear. And when the poor vacate apartments, it’s difficult to know if they have stayed in the area or moved elsewhere, and whether or not where they have moved to is better than what they left behind. The research on these questions is often inconclusive.
Next we tackle how, when, and why neighborhoods change. Change, as we will see, doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a gradual and uneven process, depending on economic and social factors. It also depends on which neighborhood you’re looking at. Here we look at different parts of the city and the degree to which they’ve changed. How do we know a neighborhood has changed? Can any neighborhood change? Are there parts of the city that cannot change, or is everything on the table? Are there certain factors that make gentrification almost impossible? A look at recent history in the city will confirm that many areas that seemed unlikely to gentrify have done so or are in the process of doing so. Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Washington Heights are good examples. But this has not been the case with other neighborhoods.
City government plays a huge role in how change is effected, through tax abatements, support for a plethora of nonprofit organizations, and through the work of many city agencies like the Landmarks Preservation Commission; the Housing Development Corporation; and the Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development. The presence of nearby colleges and universities is also a factor in the equation.
In addition to the poor, the other major element living in gentrifying communities is the entrenched population of working- and middle-class people who have lived in these areas for generations. Do they oppose the newcomers, and are the gentrifiers able to establish relationships with them? On what basis? Where do their interests come together, and where do they diverge? Listen to what representatives of both groups have to say when they express how they feel about where they live.
This is a great neighborhood, East Harlem. Here I am, living in a beautiful condo building where a one-bedroom apartment goes for $480,000. We’ve got people from California, Seattle, everywhere. It’s young professionals. Up the block there’s a Creole restaurant and a nightclub with good eats and music, mostly jazz. The waitresses are mostly young women from Poland and Russia who don’t have green cards and want to earn good money off the books. And while it’s not perfectly safe, they have shuttle buses that will take you to the subway at night. I love it. I’m in Manhattan for half the going rate.
—A twenty-nine-year-old hedge fund manager from Chicago
The young people who live here today, they’re not that friendly, a little arrogant. If someone moved in here today, I’d invite him over. “What are you cookin’?” the guy would say. And I’d shoot back, “Spaghetti.” “That’s great, I’ll be there,” he’d say. What bothers me most is these people put all sorts a stuff in the trash cans on the street that they should throw away in their own cans—newspapers, bottles, and their household garbage. And then they’re the first ones to complain that there are rats around. But I stayed here because it was my mother’s house and so the rent was reasonable. I like it here. It’s still home.
—An eighty-five-year-old lifelong, Italian American resident of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
These two views reflect the wide gap between those who share space in many of the city’s neighborhoods. Nowhere is the distance more evident than in the gentrifying parts of the city. In most cases neither party wants to leave, even if they have little in common. The people who are moving in are often urban pioneers armed with optimism, hope, and more than a little moxie. When their welcome is mixed, they at least have each other to lean on. Those who view them skeptically nevertheless appreciate the benefits that accompany their arrival—safer streets and better services. The question, which we’ll explore, is how and to what extent these groups relate to each other.
This chapter doesn’t deal with areas like the Upper East Side, Tribeca, or Forest Hills, Queens, because these locations are long established. People move there all the time, but their doing so does not give us the best chance to better understand the city. It’s only when various aspects of a neighborhood are changing that issues, problems, and innovations develop. Since most of the options under discussion involve communities in flux, how a neighborhood is changing is of great interest.
And now let’s take a closer look at all the questions raised here and see how they play out. When we do so, it will become clear that gentrification is one of the most critical issues facing New York City.
New York’s gentrifiers come in many guises and forms. The most common are people looking for a nice, safe, convenient place with some pizzazz and, naturally, in their price range. In short, they want to live in a modern or refurbished apartment or house that also retains, if possible, some elements of the way the city used to look. They are often pleased with the idea that they’re making the city a viable and vibrant place. Most are looking for upscale restaurants, nice bars, theaters, boutiques, good schools for their children, and other amenities. Economics generally determines where they end up. And that can occasionally lead to some pretty strange decisions.
On September 19, 2010, an article appeared in the Real Estate section of the New York Times offering praise about a neighborhood.1 A couple, both teachers, described their block as “beautiful.” They admitted it wasn’t their first choice, but rather a fallback option after house purchases in Brooklyn and Queens had fallen through. They had rejected Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick as not safe enough for the money. However, their “beautiful” block was none other than Undercliff Avenue in the West Bronx, where, as discussed earlier, a particularly violent gang had taken over the street, terrorizing the inhabitants until just five months earlier. Moreover, the River Park Towers—a Mitchell-Lama- and HUD-assisted apartment complex right around the corner—is possibly one of the worst of its size in the city, one that requires a constant police presence, often in the form of an NYPD cherry picker with lookouts peering out from it.
A second group of gentrifiers is similar to the first but places emphasis upon the history and character of the neighborhood. These “historic preservationists” have views similar to those of intellectuals like Jane Jacobs and Sharon Zukin.2 Bedford-Stuyvesant is a changing area and is home to numerous cafés, like one on Nostrand Avenue. “In the place that we built,” says one of the female owners, “me and this African American woman who’s my partner in the café discovered that this location may have been a station for the Underground Railroad.” This young white woman is clearly a gentrifier with a sense of place, culture, and history who likes the area because it makes her and her partner a part of history and gives them a feeling that they’re in a community with deep and meaningful roots. It may even make her believe that in moving to Bed-Stuy she’s accomplishing something important.
And where does this desire emanate from? Perhaps her own knowledge or experiences. For this woman, the interest was a basic part of her persona. “I was a Harlem Renaissance major at the University of Maine, a weird place to study this topic, but I did.” She isn’t really interested in complete gentrification, because when that happens the community loses its character. She’s into the “blackness” of the place and wants to preserve that. And so she’s on the side of the preservationist blacks and whites who live there. Incidentally one sometimes sees connections between one neighborhood and others. Farther up Nostrand Avenue, near Lafayette Street, I pass the Sugarhill Supper Club/Restaurant and Disco, a reference to the famous Sugar Hill area of Harlem.
As Zukin demonstrated in her book Loft Living, artists have often preceded wealthier gentrifiers. This is still the case. One new area for artists’ studios is Bushwick, especially near the Ridgewood border, referred to by locals as “Bushwood.” One artist with whom I chatted explained, “Bushwick, unlike Ridgewood and North Williamsburg, has more open space for studios. There aren’t many artists here yet, and sometimes I miss not having a coffeehouse on Myrtle, but it’s worth it price-wise. Besides, I can still go to a great German bakery.” At first you might say that for some people it’s difficult to accept that they’ve “settled,” that they’re not living in the place of their dreams, the “in place.” And then, when the artist goes on to talk about the lack of amenities—Starbucks, bookstores, clothing stores, art-movie houses, you realize that there’s substance to the complaint, that in order to be satisfying, a neighborhood must have many attributes. Outliers like this artist hope these features are imminent.
While a recession may slow down gentrification in terms of major projects undertaken by developers and government, there are other factors that work in different directions—to wit, a willingness to move into less desirable digs. Young people starting out on their own are often strapped for cash in the best of times. Abe Cavin Quezada, a twenty-two-year-old music producer, lives in a five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant near Marcus Garvey Boulevard. As he put it, “Before this I was living in a loft in Bushwick…. This apartment is nicer and has more amenities, but the neighborhood is noticeably fishier. In Bushwick, I never really felt threatened. Now, the sounds around here are more aggressive. I’ll see 20 guys ride by on a motorcycle, or hear gunshots outside my window…. And one day, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, I saw a guy on a motorcycle with a handgun. It was not a reassuring sight.”3
And more and more people, according to figures compiled by the New York City Planning Department, are doubling, tripling, and even quintupling up. Let’s remember, these are often young people who are not picky. Ben Craw lives in a tiny bedroom on Lorimer Street in North Williamsburg. “I have a bed, a desk wedged between the bed and the wall, a folding chair, a window with a great view of the skyline. That’s really all I need,” he observes. Craw, a Connecticut native, earns about forty thousand dollars a year as a video editor with the Huffington Post and gives the following rationale for putting up with this, one that has motivated millions of New Yorkers through the past: “I always loved New York. I couldn’t wait to get out of my house. In terms of the jobs I wanted, the social life I wanted, I didn’t care where I lived as long as it was in the city. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that whatever it was, it would be most possible here.”4
This almost mystical belief represents the energy that fires up New York’s inhabitants, that enables them to endure challenges and hardships. One can just imagine the thoughts going through Craw’s mind as he looks at the city’s silhouetted buildings and its twinkling lights across the river and dreams about what his future may be in this city of magic, mystery, and opportunity.
In the eyes of many people, gentrification equals whites moving in, but that’s not always the case, certainly not in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, and Harlem, where many middle-class blacks have made a go of it. What makes these communities attractive to them is that they don’t have to feel self-conscious about being black, that they can express—even celebrate—their black identity and transmit that to their own children.
In every borough of the city there’s a hierarchy of areas, with some in greater demand than others. Gentrifiers are keenly aware of this system and know that their address can communicate a message about themselves—such as how much money they have as well as their tastes and preferences. Let’s look at Brooklyn, for example, where there are two broad tiers of desirability. The top tier would be Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, North Williamsburg, Dumbo, Greenpoint, and Park Slope. The next would be East Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Greenwood Heights, portions of Gowanus, Boerum Hill, the “Back” part of Red Hook, Ditmas Park, Windsor Terrace, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, and Prospect Park South. Within the second group there are differences in racial composition and types of housing, convenience to transportation, and the like. Overall, however, all of these areas are part of a mass movement of mostly whites, interracial couples, and black middleclass families who are reshaping the demographics of North and Central Brooklyn.5
These areas are distinctive in various ways. Prospect Park South is made to order for those who prefer large, rambling homes that have charm and grace. Dumbo is definitely for the avant-garde. Some people will look at the converted industrial buildings and ask, “What’s the big deal?” about one of Brooklyn’s most coveted neighborhoods. If you want a miniature version of the UN go to Ditmas Park, where residents point with pride to the number of ethnic groups living side by side in apparent harmony.6 If you want a place that’s heavily Catholic with a still sizeable, if aging, Irish population, you should consider Windsor Terrace. Want Manhattan-brownstone chic? Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill are likely to do it for you. And on and on.
Some of New York’s gentrified sections are distinct but not easily defined. Red Hook has fairly cheap rents. A one-bedroom in a renovated building is about fifteen hundred dollars a month. But you have to bike or take a bus to Carroll Gardens for a subway. In a way it’s like a cheaper Dumbo. There’s industrial authenticity by dint of the buildings, and there’s grittiness, the water, cobbled streets, quaint townhouses, and great views of the Manhattan skyline. Red Hook has character, bars, plus a huge Fairway grocery and an IKEA. It’s a really interesting area. Van Brunt Street is the main thoroughfare, where the stores are. And there’s a lot of working-class history here. It’s about a third gentrified, a third industrial, and a third really poor housing projects. It’s a work in progress, and one day it will really be discovered. Yet even now Red Hook has a vibrant spirit, as many people here feel they’re pioneers on the verge of something.7
The intellectual debate on why and where gentrifiers move falls between two broad groups: the production or supply-side hypothesis, and the consumption or demand-side hypothesis. The former, led by human geographer Neil Smith, focuses on his rentgap hypothesis. This concept asserts that gentrifiers are drawn to neighborhoods by the lower rents that result when developers can rehabilitate or build at a cost low enough to allow them to make a profit. The latter group, following the lead of David Ley and others, argues that gentrifiers are attracted more by the cultural appeal of the big city—the arts, the mix of people, and living with others who value such things as diversity and cultural activities. Richard Florida, while agreeing that economic factors like firms located in urban areas matter, believes that the driving force toward cities is creative people in search of diverse and tolerant communities.8 As we’ll soon see, that force actually involves many of the factors noted here. Let’s look at them in detail:
Once housing is taken care of, other amenities become relevant to new residents of a neighborhood. One of the most important of these is the availability of nearby restaurants, cafés, and wine bars. Most of the gentrifiers are young, and nightlife is the hub of their activities. These people love to gather in eateries, especially those that have outdoor seating, just like they do in, say, Paris. The fact that so many people flock to them underscores the safety of the neighborhood, and indeed the presence of such places outside reduces the likelihood of crime. In the morning hours the Internet cafés both reflect and enhance the area. For many, doing their work in these spaces is much more attractive than being holed up in a cramped studio apartment. That’s why they’re sometimes called “coffices” by patrons.
But the locals don’t always see it that way at all, even if such establishments do make the neighborhood less dangerous. For them these places emphasize the class divide. As one Harlemite who has lived in a public housing project for his entire life said about a new café, “We don’t eat there. I went in there for a piece of cake and it was like four bucks! I can get a whole cake for four bucks. Obviously they don’t want too many of us in there. We don’t get down like that spending four dollars for a piece of cake, know what I’m saying?”9 The resentment in his statement is visceral. He cannot ever feel comfortable with such people. He’s disapproving and disdainful.
In her book Harlem Is Nowhere, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts describes this feeling well: “I couldn’t help but wince when noticing my elderly neighbor Mr. Edward standing outside the door of that new café, but never going in. He hovered next to the entrance, drinking a seventy-five-cent cup of bodega coffee.” As a black person the author is sensitive to how the gentrifiers see the situation. She reports on a conversation she overheard between two white men, one of whom was visiting his friend’s new neighborhood, Harlem: “ ‘This is fabulous,’ he exclaimed…. ‘Really, you have to do something to get the word out. There need to be more people up here.’ ”10 More people? Harlem has lots of people. Obviously, the man meant people like himself.
Boutiques are another important feature, whether they’re art galleries or clothing stores. The rapidly evolving Lower East Side is practically awash in such establishments. According to one study, in December 2010 there were sixty-four art galleries in that area, with more in the planning stages. The main reason art galleries pick up and move to the Lower East Side is because they are priced out of Soho and Chelsea. Some complain that these areas are “too commercial.” But can one really say that with a straight face when the galleries charge thousands of dollars for paintings and a menswear boutique charges the reduced price of $210 (down from $299) for a “chambray button-down shirt”?
Sometimes artists on the Lower East Side combine their art with depictions of the local population, which is heavily Chinese. Mark Miller, owner of an art gallery and whose family has, interestingly, owned a uniform store next door since 1903, had an exhibition of art that emphasized aspects of the Chinese community. It featured such objects as Chinese and American currency, fake luxury-brand bags, and empty Chinese-brand cigarette packs. Mark asserts that he’s reaching out to the Chinese community, but Fang Xu, a sociology graduate student who has researched the area, suggests that these images of fake bags and smoking are hardly flattering to the Chinese. Mark happens to be a local influential, serving as president of the current Lower East Side Business Improvement District.11 In any event this is a revealing example of how syncretism occurs as the Chinese, Jews, and hipsters all come together in one setting. Xu also observes that the cultural clash usually associated with residents occurs in rather similar ways on the commercial streets as hipsters vie for space and zoning benefits with the oldtime stores.12
For the gentrifiers, shopping isn’t only about boutiques. After all, many can’t afford these crazy prices, maybe not even the new age restaurants, where high prices and minuscule portions often unite. They need major shopping centers, not Payless, but something affordable and of reasonable quality. Enter the 117th Street shopping mall in East Harlem, near FDR Drive. Called East River Plaza, it’s a brand-new beautiful shopping area with a nice view of the river, a key factor in making an area attractive. The mall offers a Costco, Bob’s Furniture, Target, Best Buy, Marshall’s, Old Navy, Pet Smart, Starbucks, and other well-known stores. It also offers more than enough indoor parking. Customers come from the Upper East and West Sides, but the shopping center is a particular boon to those living in East Harlem, including the gentrifiers. People usually take the subway, a bus, or a cab to get there. If shoppers don’t want to carry their purchases home, for twentytwo dollars they can have them delivered to their home or office anywhere in Manhattan.
Easy transportation is very important for anyone who lives in New York City. That’s why in North Brooklyn neighborhoods near the L line are quite gentrified. The same is true of certain parts of western Queens, like Sunnyside and Astoria, where various subways run. But now, increasingly, there’s another option. People who live in North Williamsburg can take a ferry to Manhattan for a quiet, scenic fifteen-minute ride and dock at Thirty-fourth Street and First Avenue or on Wall Street. The ferry is cleaner and often quicker than the subway, and it comes every twenty minutes at a cost of only four dollars. Walt Whitman, author of the elegiac nineteenth-century poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” would be shocked at the view of the Brooklyn and Manhattan skylines of today.
The New Yorkers I spoke with said they feel completely connected to Manhattan, in large part because it’s so easy to get there. The ferries stop in various locations, including Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn Bridge, Hunters Point, and Greenpoint, and this method of transportation will undoubtedly increase in importance as time goes on. In fact it’s already happening, as current demand far exceeds availability. Almost 350,000 riders have paid to travel on the ferry since it began service in June 2011, far more than the 134,000 users originally predicted.13
While the gentrifiers are not an especially religious group, for those who care about religion, nearby churches of their own faith are yet another amenity some people seek. One of the new ministers in the city is actually the son of televangelist Jim Bakker. The churches typically have both old-timers and newcomers, many of whom often find common ground in social activism. They are also aware of the possibilities of connecting spiritually. At the Chabad/Lubavitch Center in North Williamsburg, “every Friday evening, a black coated and bearded rebbe stands on crowded Bedford Avenue inviting young, inactive Jews to the Sabbath meal…. During the meal, humor and generous amounts of alcohol are punctuated with impromptu blessings and prayers and serious questions posed to the rebbe about Judaism and religious observance.”14 Of course, there’s no way to tell from this description how many of the visitors return, how many become more deeply interested, and how many are just looking for a free meal and an interesting experience.
Similarly, according to longtime real estate agent Stu Rubinfeld, there’s a rabbi at the Max Raiskin Center in the East Village on Sixth Street who uses jazz concerts to attract the young and hip, with the goal of showing them how Judaism is relevant even if they’re secular. There are also mixers and singles events for this crowd. And their buzzword is often tikkun olam, Hebrew for “repairing the world,” or, if you will, social activism. “These people will identify with Judaism, but not in the traditional sense. They’ll be hipster Jews,” Rubinfeld told me. If so, it’ll be yet another form of Judaism, one whose dimensions are not yet known.
Serving as a bridge between the locals of long standing and the new arrivals is not that easy. As the pastor of Ascension Episcopal Church in Greenpoint observed, “I hear from old-timers, ‘You’re just trying to appeal to Yuppies.’ There’s real resentment underlying their attitude to new people. You have a lawyer who just moved in and then you have a construction worker who grew up in the neighborhood. The [result] could be explosive. I think there will be some confrontation. But older members will lose in numbers. You have to run two congregations and hope they get along.”15 Regardless of the difficulties, the church provides a unique opportunity for exposure and learning, because these two types would not ordinarily meet and interact anywhere else.
Research that has been conducted on this topic found that the gentrifying areas of New York have not, on the whole, become more secular. Rather, a number of congregations revitalized and other new ones were created. Clearly, those that are more capable of adapting to what the newcomers want or need will do better. Besides social activism, a key element is that as these people marry and start families, they will see the church as a possible option for providing their children with day-care centers, religious training, and values that may reflect their own upbringing.16
There are no statistics on it, but many young professionals throughout the city do identify religiously. A visit to any number of churches or temples will verify that. For example, increasing numbers of young Modern Orthodox Jews are moving to Park Slope, Prospect Heights, as well as Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. Many of them hail from the Upper West Side and were looking for less expensive apartments. One new synagogue, the Prospect Heights Shul, has programs that typify what younger people are looking for—social action, joint activities with non-Orthodox congregations, emphasis on women’s participation, and the like.17 And the churches on the Upper West Side and in Hudson Heights are attended by many young professional worshipers, with multiple services available to their congregations.
What gives a neighborhood cachet? What makes it “cool,” “in,” or “hip”? It’s an elusive, almost will-o’-the-wisp and intangible quality that defies easy categorization. Yet you know it, or at least think you know it, when you see it. Whatever it is, cachet can mightily influence gentrifiers’ decisions about where to move. And once a location acquires that status, it can lead people to lose all perspective about what the area has to offer, even to the point of irrationality. “We absolutely have to find a place in Park Slope,” one says to the other, “no matter what it costs.” As such, the subject of cachet is worth looking at.
A study of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, by sociologist Philip Kasinitz demonstrates the complexity of how neighborhoods earn cachet. You need a catchy name that you can tie into a history, an organization of people determined to raise the neighborhood’s image through house tours, boundary adjustments to make the neighborhood attractive, residents who are politically involved on the local level, and landmark status to protect the neighborhood from overdevelopment and changes to its character. After doing all of this, Kasinitz notes, the residential blocks in Boerum Hill were a perfect Jane Jacobs–type fit. They were short, with buildings that were “unified and consistent,” and small enough to encourage cohesiveness. Black residents did not approve of these efforts and perspectives, detecting racist overtones in the linking of the area with Anglo-Saxon roots in the nineteenth century and with separating the area from the nearby projects.18
One area of New York City that is gentrifying is the part of Washington Heights west of Broadway, from 181st Street to the Cloisters, where Inwood begins. The neighborhood was first established in the 1920s and 1930s and was renamed Hudson Heights by a local community group, the Hudson Heights Owners Coalition. By renaming the area the organization has done something that is usually initiated by real estate agents, who always appreciate the cachet a catchy name can bring. Name a place after a beautiful and famous river and—bingo!—it becomes a great sales pitch. Why? Because people love to tell others they live in a place that sounds upscale, that has gorgeous views (even if their own apartment doesn’t), and that, even if relatively few have ever heard of it, is in Manhattan.19 Another good example is the designation of Southern Harlem as “Soha.” If it conjures up the image of Soho, that’s because it’s meant to, so that the neighborhood can acquire cachet.
Dumbo/Vinegar Hill is a neighborhood that treasures and promotes authenticity. It is its cachet. And despite the fact that there are other areas like Red Hook that also have authenticity by way of factories, very old houses, and cobblestone streets, Dumbo has become a much “hotter” place. Why? It’s far easier to get to (using the F or A trains) than Red Hook, which has no subway. Plus, the shiny skyscrapers across the river and the projects and remaining tenements along the waterfront make for a fascinating juxtaposition between the old and the new—you can see all of Gotham’s history with one glance. Dumbo has projects, but they are much safer and smaller than those in Red Hook. The area still has factory buildings, some of which have been converted into luxury or middle-class apartments while retaining the outer factory-structure look. And in the subsection of Vinegar Hill there are many row houses dating back more than a century. A Con Ed power plant, complete with smokestacks reminiscent of earlier days, overlooks the waterfront. Brand-new buildings pop up from time to time as demand soars. Finally, people judge the area to be safe. One late afternoon I’m walking by a brick apartment building a block from the Farragut Houses when I stop to talk with a forty-something woman dressed in black jeans and a beige acrylic sweater. “I’ve lived here for ten years and it’s fine,” she tells me. “I’ve also got two kids. There’s a boundary here that isn’t crossed.”20
In her book Naked City, Sharon Zukin describes how North Williamsburg, Brooklyn, became “hip” in the 1990s. Private, illegal, music parties like the underground Rubulad were held in deserted lofts, warehouses, and even Polish bars. They were advertised on the Internet and through email and were open to the public, provided, of course, you looked cool enough to be approved by the burly bouncers standing guard at the door. Then, after the place was seen as “in,” commercial establishments and upscale living spaces followed. In becoming cool, North Williamsburg followed the path of 1970s Soho and the 1980s East Village.21
Artists, writers, and artisans looking for space in Brooklyn went to North Williamsburg and took over abandoned lofts there, because the older areas like Cobble Hill and Park Slope were too expensive. At first the authorities chased them out, saying manufacturing, with its jobs, was what mattered. But the jobs were gone, and, besides, many artists were living there legally, in both lofts and apartments. According to Zukin about 2,000 of them were living there out of a total population of 115,000.22
North Williamsburg’s combination of artists; boutiques; and entertainment scenes, both large and small, located in an area with decaying industrial buildings, small apartment houses, and dwindling or slowly growing populations of natives and immigrants—Mexicans, Poles, blacks, some Italians—plus the danger of adjacent Bushwick, all combined to give the area a feeling of what Zukin calls “nouveau grit.” It was gritty and hip, two types of authenticity. It had the look and feel of the old, but it also had new artistic spaces and hangouts, as well as music venues run by musicians, often difficult to find, which added to their cachet.23
While there’s no question that people are in search of, and value, cachet, there’s a danger to actually finding it. Once change of this sort happens in too many neighborhoods, it’s no longer a phenomenon; rather, it’s a trend that shapes a city. Thus, when people look at North Williamsburg, they’re looking at a type of cachet created earlier in Soho and the East Village. In this way what was once a one-of-a-kind phenomenon loses its uniqueness and its feeling of specialness. It’s sort of a glut of culture. On the other hand, developing cachet in many areas is a good problem for a city to have.
There’s also commercial cachet, when areas capitalize on a community’s national reputation. Harlem is world famous, and as it gentrifies, real estate agents and residents alike seize on that status. As I am standing outside Harlem’s largest multiplex theater, on 124th Street, I spot some camera crews setting up. “What’s going on here?” I ask a tall man dressed in black and wearing dreads.
“It’s a premiere for an Indiana Jones flick. Harrison Ford and, I heard, Fergy are coming here tonight.”
“Really,” I say.
Clearly interpreting that as skepticism, he shoots back, “Yeah, this is like the seventh premiere we’ve had here recently. What you think? Harlem is local? We’re international. Tom Cruise has been here.”
We see here that as much as some Harlemites resent the newcomers, there’s pride in the fact that the ultimate trendsetters, famous movie stars, are actually coming here.
Today some fifty thousand people a year visit the Apollo Theater in Harlem. However, the awakening is more “bricks and mortar” than the cultural explosion that marked the famed Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly the theater’s once-a-week amateur night has nothing to do with the Apollo’s storied past. Other places in the neighborhood also piggyback on history and culture to create a connection with the old that was gold, one that serves the area’s economic goals. Take, for example, the creation of the Strivers Gardens complex located from 134th to 135th Streets and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue). It features new condominiums named after Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. The real, original Strivers Row section was on 138th and 139th Streets, between Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards. And why not? It sounds good and there’s nothing illegal or wrong with it. The area around 125th Street, Harlem’s commercial nerve center, now features underground parking, upscale shops, two new high schools, a Harlem Walk of Fame, and an IHOP restaurant nearby.
A good number of gentrifiers like the idea that in their midst lie restaurants, bars, and private clubs that have been there a long time. But even if they don’t like it, such relics remain, stubbornly resistant to rent increases and the newcomers’ different tastes. Each neighborhood has community institutions that have been around forever. In Prospect Heights it’s Tom’s Restaurant, a joint that’s been there since 1936. In a way it grounds the neighborhood, giving it some semblance of a past. Greenpoint has Polish restaurants, like the tiny place Łomzynianka on Manhattan Avenue owned by natives of Łomza, Poland. It’s filled with young people who enjoy the traditional food at rock-bottom prices. The Emerald Inn, an Irish bar on Columbus Avenue near Sixty-ninth Street, is another relic. But these are exceptions. Most simply close or follow the pattern of the Second Avenue Deli, forced out of the Lower East Side and into another area by steep rent increases.
Often overlooked in discussions about preservation are the aging residents, oral historians who literally embody the past. A senior citizen living in a three-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue near 109th Street reports that his landlord offered him $500,000 if he would move out. The landlord could then rent the apartment for $6,000 a month instead of the $880 the man is now paying as a rent-control tenant. He could also sell it for over $1 million. The man wouldn’t consider moving out, because he likes it there and would only have to pay more elsewhere. If this group, as a class of people—namely, elderly lifelong New Yorkers—left the city, something essential to its nature would be lost.
I speak with a middle-age German Jewish man in Washington (now Hudson) Heights, who shares with me some of his neighborhood’s history as we walk through it.
This is a post–World War Two building, and it was first populated mostly by German Jews. There are still some of them, along with young singles, many of them Orthodox. It’s called the “Adenauer Building,” after the German chancellor who did the Wiedergutmachen [Holocaust survivor reparations] deal. Running from Overlook Terrace up to Fort Washington Avenue is a long stone staircase—132 steps to be precise—called the “Kissinger Steps,” because Henry’s parents lived in a building near the top of the staircase. Henry used to take these steps as he went to George Washington High School over on Amsterdam Avenue. He started at City College of New York and then transferred to Harvard after being discovered in the army intelligence unit.
Without such knowledgeable individuals, preserving history becomes much more difficult. We also see here that gentrifiers aren’t the only ones for whom cachet matters. The identification with a world-famous political figure makes this man feel special. The community where he grew up also produced a world-famous figure. (See figure 25.)
These tidbits remind us that so many areas have a distinct and even distinguished history that sometimes sets the stage for gentrification. For those gentrifiers inclined to think this way, like the preservationists mentioned earlier, it means they are now a part of it and that in its rebirth they are its latest incarnation, usually after an intermediate period of decay. Part of the narrative almost always is “This place used to be so terrible.” In that way it’s an egosatisfying tale. “They,” the gentrifiers, turned it around; they did it. “And now look how much an apartment here costs,” they crow, especially if they arrived in the early stages and got a bargain.
Another remnant of the past is the Catholic Worker, a newspaper co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and active in the political struggles of the 1960s. The paper still exists, with offices located on Third Street just east of Second Avenue. An employee tells me they now have about twenty thousand subscribers “and the list is growing.” The paper costs a mere one cent. Antiwar activist Father Daniel Berrigan, now in his early nineties, lives not far away in a church on Houston Street. These institutions anchor the East Village historically and give it a certain cachet that may or may not be appreciated by the newcomers, depending on their perspective and knowledge of history.24
Just a bit farther down the block, at 77 East Third Street, is the historic headquarters of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, established in 1969. “No Parking Except Authorized Hells Angels,” the sign outside reads. Seven gleaming motorcycles are parked out in front, and there is a plaque dedicated to “Vinnie: 1948–1979.” His motto was “When in Doubt Knock ’em Out!” I catch up to a young man wearing a navy blue blazer and rep tie, who is leaving his apartment next door. A plate on the building says, “New York Law School,” and the owner rents it out to students from other law schools as well. An odd juxtaposition, I think, since the Hells Angels weren’t exactly considered model, law-abiding citizens. The students’ take on them is quite egalitarian. “They’re pretty good people,” one tells me as his friends nod in agreement. “I have no problem with them. They keep the neighborhood safe, because nobody messes with them.” Once again, especially in the current era of terrorism and a safety-first mentality, whatever works seems to be fine.25
Sometimes historic districts are not gentrified but exist in a “gentrified state” amid neighborhoods that are considered to be undesirable, or are even in a pre-gentrified state. One good example is the Belmont/Arthur Avenue section of the Bronx, also known as the Little Italy of the Bronx, which is surrounded by a poor, overwhelmingly black and Hispanic area. After the Italians began to leave, Albanians and Puerto Ricans moved in. Today the neighborhood is a vibrant tourist destination bearing no resemblance to the surrounding areas—that is, the Bathgate Industrial Park and the Crotona Park area. The presence of students from nearby Fordham University, who rent apartments in Little Italy, also helps. And there are gentrifiers too, looking for inexpensive homes. When an area has a combination of business interests, populations who don’t move so quickly, and students, it can maintain itself.
The area is so successful that, in the words of Ivine Galarza, district manager of Bronx Community Board #6, “On any Saturday or holiday, any given weekend, you cannot walk because it’s so congested. People come from all over—Jersey, Connecticut—to get their meats, breads, and cheeses.” I can attest to the accuracy of these statements from personal experience. There are many delicatessens, Italian and Albanian restaurants, including the Zagatapproved, top-rated Roberto’s, along with an assortment of bakeries and cafés. The Feast of Saint Anthony at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church is held in Little Italy every June, featuring games, rides, amusements, and singing groups like the Wanderers.26
The area also has peculiar historical continuities. The community was built up by the cigarette-manufacturing Lorillard family in the mid-nineteenth century. Today Dominican workers make a wide array of fine cigars right in front of you in an indoor minimall while you wait. A cigar-chomping friend of mine claims they’re among the best he’s ever had.
One somewhat bizarre example of preserving history is an old flophouse at 220 Bowery that was formerly known as the Prince Hotel. The two entrepreneurs who spruced up the place retained the building’s narrow cubicles topped with chicken wire on one floor and now rent them to down-and-out people for less than ten dollars a night. Renaming the hotel the Bowery House, the owners’ purpose was to create “living history,” with the above-mentioned residents described as “an asset to the property.” What is striking here is that the owners do not seem to consider the embarrassment they may be causing the impoverished people to whom they rent. Sure, those people are happy to have a place to stay, but one wonders if they don’t resent being showcased as if they were on display in a zoo.
On the two floors above these inexpensive rooms, the hotel’s cubicles (or, as the owners call them, cabins) are more upscale, featuring custom-made mattresses and shared bathrooms with heated floors and marbled sinks. The idea is to give a clientele made up mostly of European and American visitors to the area a taste of the flophouse days of yore, when the Bowery was “drunk heaven,” but in a more attractive way. The cost? Anywhere from $62.00 to $129.00 a night, including a free guided tour of the entire building.27
Ethnic and racial diversity is definitely a positive when gentrifiers mull over their residential options. This notion was a common one, but it was often stated as an advantage of where they were already living rather than as a reason for choosing to move there in the first place. Sometimes I had the feeling that the pluses of encountering new groups were a surprise to them, that these were groups of people they might have been hesitant to meet, but once they did so, in their building or local PTA, they found them to be interesting, pleasant, and even exciting. The following comments by a woman living in diverse Ditmas Park, were fairly typical: “There’s a real sense of community here, lots of young people, especially artists. A three-bedroom in a modest prewar building is $1,390, and it’s only three blocks from the train. And the diversity is incredible. There are, like, forty languages in the public schools here. I prefer more progressive, and here it’s more ‘old-style.’ I can’t believe how expensive Dumbo is. I mean, how can you work with the hum of the trains? It’s a little chichi [in this sense, affectedly trendy].” Further evidence of Ditmas Park’s diversity, albeit in another way, may be discerned from the eclectic range of books in the windows of the Internet cafés that dot the streets—Virginia Wolfe, Dickens, Doris Lessing, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but also the not-so-highbrow Steve Martin, James Michener, and Sue Grafton.
Prospect Heights is another fount of diversity. Along Washington Avenue, which borders Bedford-Stuyvesant, you’ll find the usual coffeehouses, wine bars, and trendy Thai restaurants but also West Indian and Southern-style eateries. I pass by the Underhill Playground. It’s a model of racial integration, with a roughly equal number of black and white parents supervising their children as they play in the sandbox, climb various types of equipment, or just race around. I wonder if the integration also extends to play dates at each others’ homes.
Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo, close to Brooklyn Heights, offers further evidence of diversity of all sorts. Yuppies and teenagers vie for space on benches and in the grass as bicyclists and roller-bladers speed past babies in strollers. An occasional Hasidic or traditional Muslim family enjoys a family outing as a Czech documentary film crew points its cameras at the space across the water where the World Trade Center once stood. Carnival music accompanies a brightly lit carousel whose riders include Asian couples seemingly in love and small Hispanic children accompanied by adults. There’s even a wedding party having itself filmed against the Lower Manhattan skyline. On a nearby street, posters are mounted on a faded, multicolored brick wall in preparation for the upcoming Dumbo Arts Festival.
In West Harlem, the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que at Twelfth Avenue and 125th Street offers up some interesting food. Zagat gives it a 22 rating, describing the fare as “mouthwatering, swoon-worthy sides, chased with buckets of beer are yours at this rockin’ West Harlem barbecue joint set up like a biker bar, complete with picnic tables and sticky floors. Middle America pricing.” And the customers are a mix of white and black families—some sharing tables—locals, working-class types, college students from the nearby universities, no doubt, and tourists. Barbecue is soul food too, though this is no Sylvia’s (the iconic soul food Harlem restaurant). Dinosaur Bar-B-Que’s offerings are more Southwestern style—Texas Brisket Plate, Big-Ass Pork Plate, ribs, beans, mac ’n’ cheese. It also serves Mexican-type Churrasco chicken. The brick interior has exposed pipes along the ceiling. The mirrored bar is lined with high-backed chairs and is done up like a saloon. Everybody is here and everybody is welcome.
Dinosaur Bar-B-Que is but one example of such mixing. What’s happening in New York is a fusion of culture at all levels of social life, both in the workplace and in the city’s restaurants. At the intersection of Ryerson Street and Myrtle Avenue on the north side of the avenue is the Sapolo Spanish and Chinese Restaurant. And directly across the street you have La Stalla, featuring Italian and Mexican cuisine, and right next to that you have the Sushi Okdol Korean and Japanese Restaurant. So in one small area are three totally separate eateries, seemingly unconnected, representing six different cultures. That’s New York!
One community that has a mix of many cultures is Roosevelt Island, formerly called Welfare Island (the insane, criminals, and the poor actually lived there at various times). It was built up in the early 1970s and is a bit less than two miles long, running from roughly Eighty-fifth to Forty-sixth Streets. In 1989 a subway stop was created for Roosevelt Island. Fears that this planned, moderate- to middle-income community would lose its safe, smalltown flavor did not materialize. The island has about ten thousand residents and is known as a quiet place with few cars and easy access from Manhattan (tram and subway) and Queens (bridge and subway). Its population is about 45 percent white, 27 percent black, 14 percent Hispanic, and 11 percent Asian, with 3 percent defined as “other.” As I walk through it, I get the sense that it’s part of the city—indeed the island is surrounded by the city—but that it’s in another place, a category by itself.
Not to be omitted from this discussion is that the gentrifiers’ very presence adds to the diversity of New York, because they themselves come from a variety of cultures. I frequently looked through the names inside apartment buildings in these areas and was amazed at the number of ethnic groups that appeared to be represented. The Upper West Side, for instance, was once very Jewish, then very Hispanic, then both. Today these groups are augmented by the gentrifiers. A look at the names of some of the residents in an apartment building on West Seventy-eighth Street tells the story: Jabido, Hagstrom, Balphy, Evans, Burney, Abrams, Flanders, Taylor, Park, Matarazzo, Gillespie, Blackshire, Ahearn, Lee, Martin, Leman, Gorman, Chan, Maartens, Ruocco. The building is a veritable UN, and it’s a five-story walk-up. Almost no Jewish or Hispanic names, but plenty of Irish, Italians, and probablyWASPS.
They stand there, the tenements, brick, usually reddish-colored structures, both separate from and within the neighborhoods of New York. Sometimes they run for ten or more blocks, two avenues wide, and in other locations they comprise just a few short streets. People tend to avoid them and exercise caution if they need to pass by the buildings. Even the residents of the area, who know more about where and when it’s safe to walk, keep a watchful eye out, especially after night falls. The tenements have been part of the city’s urban landscape for decades, but today there’s a difference.
The good housing is pushing out or rendering irrelevant the bad housing, and that includes both the tenements and the projects in these areas too. Perhaps because space is at such a premium, perhaps even because Section 8 people live in well-appointed buildings, or simply perhaps because crime is lower, people don’t care that much if they live near a project or run-down tenements. Or maybe they’ve just made a decision that this is the price of living cheaply near their place of work.
Warren Street in Boerum Hill has townhouses in a one-block section that dead-ends into low-income projects at both ends of the block. One is the 1,134-unit Gowanus Houses; the other, the 528-unit Wyckoff Gardens. Yet prices remain high for available condos in the area. One four-bedroom unit went to contract for $1.15 million. A real estate agent noted the connection between professionals moving in and a stronger police presence that encouraged buyers, adding, “Also, when the market is down, the projects are a factor. When it is up, the projects aren’t a factor.” People do complain about the failure of the police to crack down on crack users and dealers who hang out by the projects and the violence their presence encourages.28 The strong market may in fact be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because when demand is high, people are less choosy. Plus, high demand leads to a belief that the area is going to get even better.
Studies by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy have concluded that people moving into an area are not deterred by the projects or low-income residents in general.29 And it is an irony that the new arrivals reportedly look at the incumbent poor as though they are the outsiders. As one longtime resident complained, “They look at you like you don’t belong here.”30 Still, brutal crimes occasionally occur in gentrifying neighborhoods, serving as a rude awakening to residents that this is still New York City, not Scarsdale or Old Brookville. Those who had reservations to begin with may leave as a result, but the majority are apt to rationalize their decision by characterizing such events as aberrations.31
People with whom I spoke were voluble in expressing their satisfaction with the shift. One of these people, who for decades has lived near the poor, run-down, and massive Red Hook housing project in a small clapboard house on Luquer Street, two blocks from the Battery Tunnel entrance, told me, “In the eighties we had shootings, crack-heads, you know. My brother called the cops all the time. He exaggerated so they should come, and they did. But after Giuliani took over, things changed. They began paying attention and things got better. Now it’s amazingly gentrified. Nobody cares what’s around the house, just that it’s ten minutes from Manhattan.” In 2001 this person’s family bought another house right next to the projects for $150,000. Today it’s worth eight times that.
Savvy gentrifiers do take into account the fact that a nearby public housing project could be a crime problem, but that fact is weighed against the positive aspects of the neighborhood. Everywhere in the city there are gentrifying areas that have public housing projects in the neighborhood or just beyond its borders, a block or two away. Sometimes the project is part of the border. But good housing near places of work is in short supply. As more and more gentrifiers move in, their numbers create safety and the police step up their efforts to patrol and protect.
I ask residents of Dumbo/Vinegar Hill about the low-income Farragut Houses situated at the edge of the neighborhood. “I’ve lived here seven years, and it’s not a problem,” a man who works out of his home told me as he walked his dog. “There are some muggings, but that’s New York. The police have said this is a better project as these projects go. More likely you’ll have a domestic dispute, but that’s about it. I walk alone sometimes at night, and nothing’s ever happened to me.” (To be fair, he does have a fairly large dog, though it’s a Labrador, not a Rottweiler.) Some projects are, in fact, a lot better than others. Contrast Farragut with, say, the Ingersoll/Whitman projects on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene, where drug dealers, gangs, and squatters have taken over more than a few of these dwellings.
That said, no one should be fooled into believing that nothing ever happens to those who live near the projects or other areas where the poor reside. Crime may be down, but if you’re a victim statistics mean nothing. I ask a cop in downtown Brooklyn about why people don’t mind living in fancy buildings along Flatbush Avenue near the projects. There’s annoyance in her eyes, and she actually grimaces as she answers the question.
The area’s all right. But they don’t understand when they get mugged. They say somebody snatched their pocketbook. Well, what do you expect if you gonna live across the street from a project? And they be lookin’ at their laptops in their cars, handling their portable GPS. They gonna have problems because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They shouldn’t be moving here. They complain, but we can’t be everywhere at once. You’re a New Yorker. You wouldn’t do that. What are you supposed to do when somebody sticks a million dollars in your face? I grew up in Brooklyn. I understand the neighborhoods.
The police do feel the political pressure from the newcomers, people who complain vociferously when these things happen, and they’re not used to it in this precinct. In a way the police justify the actions of the locals when they say, “Well, what do you expect if you gonna live here?” They also reveal their own resentment about the new arrivals when they say “somebody sticks a million dollars in your face.” In other words, it’s being stuck in their faces too, since they see it as well. The degree to which the police are less than enthusiastic about protecting the gentrifiers can also affect and even slow down the process of change in an area.
Have the gentrifiers really displaced the poor, or have they, for the most part, simply entered their communities? This is a major and greatly debated issue in the field of urban studies. It cannot be resolved in this book, but it must be addressed.
Logically, visually, and anecdotally it would seem that the poor have been displaced. When you compare communities like Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Boerum Hill, Harlem, Washington Heights, Astoria, and elsewhere, you’ll find that there are tens of thousands more middle-class people residing in these places than was the case twenty or thirty years ago. In other words, gentrification has occurred on a massive scale in many areas that were once predominantly home to the poor. Blocks that formerly housed the poor now contain many well-off people. Community advocates insist that rapacious, profit-hungry landlords are doing everything in their power to oust the remaining poor so that they can reap the profits occasioned by their departure. For instance, there’s the case of a property in Harlem that housed poor women and children and was run by the nonprofit Queen Mother Dr. Delois Blakely organization. With the mortgage in arrears, the property’s owners are fighting off foreclosure. Plans are under way to turn it into a Starbucks. The residents will be displaced, and there are other situations like this in the area.32 In his book Selling the Lower East Side, sociologist Christopher Mele describes a similar process that occurred in the East Village over a number of years.33
On the other side of the debate you have people like Lance Freeman, who studied Fort Greene and Harlem and concluded that, contrary to popular opinion, gentrification did not force out most of the poor. Most of them stayed where they were.34 This is supported by a national statistical study of the American Housing Survey by researchers at the Furman Center led by Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of public policy and planning. It found that across the nation there was virtually no displacement of the poor as a result of gentrification. In fact, gentrifying or gaining neighborhoods showed slightly lower exit rates than non-gaining areas, and a number of the original residents actually gained in income. Rents rose too, and even though their incomes didn’t rise enough to offset the higher rents, poor people remained. This may be because they were willing to pay more for better services in an improved neighborhood.35 On the other hand, an investigation of both quantitative and qualitative data by political scientist Kathe Newman and geographer Kelvin Wyly challenged the view that displacement of the poor is minimal.36
Thus we see that the evidence on this question is contradictory and therefore inconclusive. One problem is that the quantitative data may not be close enough to the ground to tell us what’s really going on. Sheer numbers don’t always tell the story that well. People often base decisions on a variety of factors, and only in-depth interviews can uncover the process that led to those decisions—namely, the weight given to each factor. For example, the landlord may never have provided enough heat. He may never have dealt adequately with roaches and rats in the building. People complained bitterly but remained where they were. Then, when there was a shooting down the block, that was the last straw. Is this displacement? Yes and no. A couple is planning to retire to North Carolina in a year. The building’s maintenance has never been good, but they’ve lived with it. Suddenly the wife’s sister, who lives in North Carolina, has a stroke and needs her sister to come down from New York and help her. The couple moves, and when asked why, they say it was because of the sister and the fact that the building was in bad shape.
Changes in a gentrifying neighborhood can have a strong impact on longtime poor residents. For instance, an area is becoming gentrified and a man living there can no longer get coffee for seventy-five cents, because the grocery store has been replaced by a far more expensive Starbucks. When he hangs out in front of the building, the police threaten to arrest him for loitering. The new white and black population is wealthier than he’ll ever be, and they make him uncomfortable. He cites all of the above as reasons for leaving, but which of them are most important?
Ultimately, what constitutes displacement? Technically, it’s when people are forced to leave against their will. But how is that to be determined? When a neighborhood changes economically, the remaining poor no longer feel welcome. They are not being literally forced out, but they feel they are and their new living conditions make it difficult for them to feel comfortable and survive. In the larger sense, they have been displaced by gentrification.
I’ve spoken with many landlords, tenants, and community organization leaders in my travels through New York City, and each group’s arguments have some merit, though their perspectives may be biased by self-interest. The tenants always want better services and will not easily admit to having damaged their apartments, if, indeed, they have. Community organizations receive funding from various sources in amounts that are dependent on how much their services are needed, though one must add that such organizations do a great deal to help tenants who are ignorant of their rights and of how the system can work against them. The landlords want to maximize their profits and argue that because rent control and rent stabilization mean that people cannot simply be thrown out, they must foot the bill for tenants who do not maintain their apartments. Yet landlords are prone, for reasons of self-interest to exaggerate tenants’ failure to keep their dwellings in good order.
An off-the-record discussion I had with one landlord was particularly revealing regarding how tenants are convinced or pressured to move out. I asked him, “How do you persuade a person to leave?”
“It all depends on what they want,” he responded. “I had a building with one tenant left that I wanted to convert. So I said to him, ‘What would you like? Is it a girlfriend? I can get you one.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want an apartment.’ I said, ‘Fine. Would you like to move to Florida or stay here?’ ‘I want to be in the city.’ ‘Okay. I’ll give you a nice place in one of my other buildings at fifty percent of the rent here.’ ‘Great,’ he said. And that was it. We made a deal and both parties were happy. The new place was even bigger than where he was and in a neighborhood nearby.”
This conversation sheds light on what goes on behind the scenes. There’s a give and take. It’s not like some people imagine—namely, that harassing letters go out and heat is turned off. Today these tactics are not as easy to use as in the past. If a landlord fails to provide heat in a timely fashion and the tenant complains, an oil truck is sent by the city to the location to fill the tank and the building owner is charged for it.
Statistically, this and other cases look like displacement on paper, but are they really? That’s why one must ask, did those who were replaced remain in the neighborhood? If the building exists and was improved, were the tenants offered any deals? Does a person who leaves a tenement and moves into Section 8 housing qualify as displaced in the same way as a tenement resident who moves into another substandard dwelling? Until there is more extensive research on the subject analyzing what happened and where, we can’t possibly know the full story.
National studies are often unable to distinguish between people who have left their building because it was torn down or because of a fire. More important, if new housing is built on vacant land five years after the residents have departed, how are we to know what happened? Did they leave because the landlords stopped providing services, or was it a voluntary decision, perhaps because their own fortunes improved? The first case is much closer to displacement than the second.37
There’s one major piece of the puzzle that’s missing here: we know almost nothing about where the poor who left went. I know of no study that has examined this very important issue. They were not interviewed at the time they departed, and no one has tried to track them down. Did they go to Long Island’s Suffolk County? To other states? Or did they just move to other neighborhoods? How many are there in each category? How can we talk about what happened to the displaced if we don’t know where they went? Without that information, we can’t find out why they left and are left in the dark as to perhaps the most crucial part of the process.
This discussion intersects with a heated policy debate that rages alongside it. Much in that debate turns on whether New York City allowed whole segments of its poor to be displaced against their will. Critics of gentrification concede that attracting people of means to the city is obviously very important if it is to thrive. Cities all over America, like St. Louis and Detroit, went downhill because they became the province, mostly, of the poor, which greatly eroded their tax bases. But New York has been a different story. It has become a place that attracts those with money and the upwardly mobile. The change began when the Koch administration, through a variety of economic incentives, encouraged real estate interests and the private sector in general to invest in a broad range of economic projects that provided goods and services. The Dinkins administration was also friendly to such interests, especially that of the United States Tennis Association and the Disney/Times Square initiative, which began in earnest under Carl Weisbrod, then executive director of the 42nd Street Development Project. So was the Giuliani administration, which supported business interests and played a major role in making the city feel safe and prosperous. Once that happened, the process accelerated during the Bloomberg administration, and many more people with money came and started raising their kids here.
Michael Bloomberg, in particular, has endeared himself to many gentrifiers, because he represents what they feel a mayor of the twenty-first century should be. Politically liberal, he champions business and real estate development; is unabashedly in love with Manhattan; cares about making the city user-friendly to cyclists, joggers, and park enthusiasts; and makes healthy living a priority, banning smoking or unhealthy soft drinks wherever he can. One of his pet endeavors, reflecting his enthusiasm for out-of-the-box ideas, is financing a project at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to genetically engineer mosquitoes in a way that would prevent the spread of malaria.
In a March 2013 interview I asked Mayor Bloomberg what achievements had given him the greatest satisfaction. Among many factors, he cited areas revolving around health issues, supporting cultural institutions, climate-change measures, and the like. But he also took credit for broader accomplishments such as “driving down crime to record lows; extending life expectancy by three years; outpacing the nation in job growth; transforming a broken public school system and turning it into one that the Obama administration has hailed as a national model; creating the nation’s largest affordable housing programs. None of it would have happened without the incredibly talented people who we were able to attract to our administration.” Doubtless, others who came before him and people today, outside his own circle, also deserve credit for both initiating and carrying out these programs. Regardless, these comments demonstrate that the mayor is very cognizant of the big picture.
Nevertheless, when I asked Bloomberg what he felt are the greatest challenges facing the city, his answer and his focus on the economy made clear what his priorities are—namely, those that most concern the middle and upper class, because, as he sees it, they are the ones who will contribute the most to the city’s success as a world center.
The challenge for any city is not just to keep up with the changing times, but to help lead the change. That’s what we’re trying to do in every area of the city’s life. Think about the economy. We’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, and resources to make our city more attractive to industries that are growing—from bioscience and technology, to film and fashion, to tourism and arts and culture. Part of that work is making our city a more attractive place for people to live and work in—safe streets, good schools, beautiful parks, exciting cultural opportunities. If a city is a magnet for people, then investors will follow. I’ve always believed that talent attracts capital far more effectively than capital attracts talent. That’s why I think that New York City is better positioned to lead the tech revolution than Silicon Valley. We’re already catching up, and we’re working to accelerate that by producing more homegrown tech talent through computer science in middle and high school. And we’re also collaborating with world-class universities to increase investment in applied sciences here in the city—to attract the best and brightest scientists and engineers. The new Cornell/Technion Applied Science School is a decades-long project, and it’s a great example of how we’re working to ensure tomorrow’s innovators are using New York City as their campus.
This is not a man who agonizes over his decisions. Sure, he cares about his legacy, as anyone in his position would. But it’s not a preoccupation by any means, at least not now. He’s definitely visionary, self-confident, even brash, as the following exchange, vintage Bloomberg, makes clear.
“As you look back, are there any decisions you made that you regret?” I ask.
The mayor replies: “We’re focused on making the most of every day we have left. As the countdown clock at city hall says, ‘Make Every Day Count.’ We’re not going to spend our last months in office gazing at our navels. We’re going to stay focused on our goals and doing the job the people of New York City expect us to do.”
Beautiful as formerly poorer parts of New York City like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant might look today, there is a concern that a world-class progressive city worthy of the name cannot consider itself a success if it fails to attend to the needs of its less fortunate residents. There are still plenty of poor people in this city, clustered in various areas like South Jamaica, Melrose, Brownsville, Manhattan’s Alphabet City section of the Lower East Side, and portions of Staten Island’s northern area. They need to be helped, according to this line of thinking, and both government and the private sector must do more to provide a safety net for the poor by creating more affordable housing, jobs programs, and better municipal services. Precisely how those things are to be accomplished is beyond the scope of this book, but the first step is to make such plans part of the municipal agenda.38
Most gentrifying, or even gentrified, neighborhoods cannot be considered completely gentrified, because it’s a generally uneven process, depending on what the neighborhood was like originally. Huge housing projects can slow down the process of gentrification; so can groups of people who simply refuse to move, no matter how much pressure they get or how enticed they are. Commercial zones where store owners refuse to vacate despite receiving good offers are another factor. This means that some of the areas people move into are a mixture of gentrified and non-gentrified within the same neighborhood.
Take, for instance, East Harlem. Large areas between 110th and 125th Streets along Third Avenue and Lexington and on the side streets have been gentrified. But 125th Street itself, eastward from Lexington Avenue all the way to Second Avenue, where it is funneled into the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge—or, as it is still popularly referred to, the Triborough Bridge—has not. The intersection at Lexington and 125th is beautifully described in a photo essay that appeared on Slate by the world-famous street photographer Camilo José Vergara. If you stand at that interesection, you will see the ghetto and much of its ugliness and liveliness all rolled into one. Along with plain old shoppers, there are “down-and-out canners bringing their cans and bottles to the recycling center on East 124th Street. Some are recently released hospital patients, plastic I.D. bracelets still on their wrists …. a few carry on intense conversations with themselves. This corner of New York is particularly attractive to street evangelists, who readily find people in need of salvation.” There’s a flourishing drug trade; “loosies,” or single cigarettes, are available; men wearing sandwich boards advertise for nearby stores; and prostitutes advertise for themselves.
It also makes for great free theater of a sort. Vergara explains: “Corner regulars tell me about the hustles they’ve witnessed, such as the wheelchair-bound man who suddenly stood up and started running from the police, wheelchair under his arm. Once I saw a street preacher instantly change his sermon when a recycling truck pulled up next to him. He began telling those around him that their souls were garbage and needed recycling—otherwise they were going to hell. The driver of the truck heard this and laughed loudly.”39
I also find myself questioning how many other wheelchair frauds are plying their trade around the city or whether such suspicions are uncharitable to the genuinely disabled. It’s a tough call. I recall a story my friend from Brooklyn told me. She had always given money to a crippled woman on crutches who regularly rang her bell. She’d even invited her in for tea and cookies sometimes. The woman was not always appreciative. “You used to give me rainbow cookies,” she complained once, not liking that day’s offering. Perhaps my friend should have known never to trust an ingrate. And then one day my friend was shocked when she saw the same lady walking in another neighborhood—but without crutches!
Gentrification doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a process with many twists and turns.40 Park Slope today looks beautiful, with block after block of brownstones in excellent condition. But it wasn’t always like that. Here’s one person’s recollection of her experiences when she and her husband moved there in 1979.
Eleventh Street was bad then. It was still a slum. Our neighbor across the street referred to his rundown brownstone as “Jaws.” The center of Park Slope was very good, from the name streets to Eighth Street. Flatbush to Seventh Avenue was good. But from 1979 to about 1983, Fifth Avenue was a hell-hole. It was working-class, though, not a really dangerous place. We were robbed several times during the years we lived there. We moved there because we wanted a house with a convenient commute. But it took too long to get to work, and the trains were not reliable then. And I had to stand forty minutes every day on the subway. And we believed Park Slope was going up. We were definitely part of the early gentrification process. But the brownstone we got was in bad shape. Every time it rained water would cascade down our walls. We had to put in a floor.
It was actually homesteading, not exactly gentrification. Everyone had the same crappy brownstones. We were very proud of the gas lamp outside our house and of our little garden. And the fact was you could get a three-story house and a basement rental for a grand total of $90,000. We sold it a few years later for $180,000, so we made money on it. Carroll Gardens was also a mess then, and so was Boerum Hill, and if you walked into Prospect Park at night, you had a very good chance of getting mugged.
Today prices for brownstones in Park Slope begin at $1.5 million and go much higher. The comment that Park Slope was “not really a dangerous place” followed by “We were robbed several times” over four years reminds us that the 1980s were a time of far lower expectations. A few robberies didn’t qualify as “dangerous.”
My Hudson Heights informant tells me about the beef longtime locals and new age arrivals have with the Hispanic teenagers who ride their bikes down the steep hill from where Overlook Terrace begins, reaching terrifying speeds estimated at eighty miles per hour. “They’re a terror known as the ‘bike boys.’ This is their sport, and there is a lack of playgrounds. But sometimes they injure street crossers. Werner Gruenebaum was hit and laid up for months. There’ve been community meetings, with the police coming, but nothing is ever done.” Hudson Heights, however, has a large population of low-income Hispanics, and it appears they don’t plan to leave the neighborhood anytime soon. In such cases the old-timers and the gentrifiers simply have to get used to the status quo—in this case the “bike boys.”
Greenpoint is yet another example of the segmented way change occurs. Most of the stores on Manhattan Avenue and Nassau Street are Polish-owned and operated. But on nearby Franklin Street it’s a different story. Franklin has almost no Polish presence, dominated instead by bars, cafés, an English-language bookstore called Word, and newly constructed apartment buildings. As one researcher describes it, “Walking down Manhattan Avenue and up Franklin Street is akin to walking in two separate neighborhoods.”41
Today’s gentrifiers were in many cases preceded by an earlier generation. In a study of the Lower East Side, sociologist Richard Ocejo describes how these pioneers, who often moved there because the rents were cheap, can become upset by later, well-heeled arrivals who introduce elements like bars and clubs that are not in any way representative of what the neighborhood once was. Although the earlier gentrfiers may deny it, they are in many ways similar to the more recent gentrifiers. Yet they are also more likely to know about and be sensitive to what the neighborhood once was.
In this way the earlier gentrifiers are a bridge between the old and the new. Why do they care about the area’s “true” character? Because nostalgia and its preservation give people a sense of identity, belonging, and community, all of which help to justify and validate their decision to move there. This quest is frequently shared by the newest residents too, even if they don’t care as much about preservation of the local institutions, customs, and “look” of the neighborhood. Moreover, the new gentrifiers are not nearly as likely to relate to the poorer incumbent residents. This is in contrast to, say, the 1970s. In his classic work Streetwise, Elijah Anderson cites a resident’s description of the newcomers during that era: “People were unpretentious. They would dress in a laidback way and act down to earth. Such a person could be spotted on the streets as a countercultural person…. They would dialogue about anything.”42
Today’s Lower East Side has sleek new apartment buildings, chic restaurants and nightclubs, a Whole Foods store, and much more. One interesting attraction is the Bowery Hotel, a beautifully appointed place with uniformed doormen where rooms go for more than three hundred dollars a night, right around the corner from a shelter for the homeless called Renewal on the Bowery. In the mid-1960s, flophouses on the Bowery charged ten cents a night for a bed in a cubicle. I know because my first sociology project was interviewing derelicts on the Bowery for a study called “The Homelessness Project.” Directed by Columbia sociologist Theodore Caplow, its goal was to better understand the causes and nature of homelessness. My primary assignment was to interview those who previously had refused to talk to interviewers, a daunting but fascinating challenge. History is never completely erased from changing neighborhoods; if you look hard enough you’ll find it. One reminder here is the Grand Hotel, a flophouse that’s not grand at all and charges only twelve bucks a night for a room.
There are all sorts of signs that foretell and even hasten change in a neighborhood. At the Williamsburg border of Bushwick, one can see notices posted outside a café for French lessons, yoga classes, and new age eateries. At this point 90 percent of the community is Hispanic, and the most frequently displayed sign, actually a billboard, seems to be, “Divorce—99 Dollars,” and it’s in Spanish.
In Washington/Hudson Heights gentrification is traveling south of 181st Street and west of Broadway, all the way to streets numbered in the lower 160s. How do you know? When you see a young Chinese American woman with two kids walking her dogs, accompanied by a Hispanic-looking man who might be her husband or boyfriend. Then another white guy comes by with his dog and is joined by a black woman and her dog, and they all have a fifteen-minute conversation on 163rd Street and Riverside Drive.43
I turn around and walk up a grassy knoll toward the streets, passing a small area with park benches set up against a concrete slab table with black and white squares. Suddenly I recall a day from my teenage years. I am playing chess at precisely this location with a white-haired elderly man and winning. And he is cursing me out for doing so. It is one of the aspects of this voyage that repeats itself over and over. So many of the places I have visited in the last few years bring back childhood memories decades later: Times Square, where I was pick-pocketed when I went there at age fourteen, on New Year’s Eve. Fortunately my wallet had nothing in it. Borough Park, Brooklyn, an area I once walked to from Washington Heights, just to see if I could do it. The trip took five hours. And then Coney Island, where my older brother, Mark, rode the Cyclone roller coaster. He had bought two tickets, for two consecutive rides, but the first one so sickened him—I remember his greenish complexion after he stumbled off the car—that he declined a repeat performance. It’s a reality; I have a nostalgic bias toward this city that makes this effort deeply personal.
I had a discussion with an Asian medical student who, with his girlfriend, rents a three-bedroom apartment on 162nd Street near Fort Washington Avenue for about twenty-seven hundred dollars a month. This compares with about forty-five hundred dollars a month on Ninetieth Street and Columbus Avenue. He explained that the apartment is lovely because whenever someone moves out, the landlord guts and rehabs the apartment. Everything’s brand-new. “It’s safe, though I keep my eyes open. There’s loud Spanish music at night, but it’s not so bad.” He says others like him are moving in.
“But the names by the buzzers are mostly Spanish,” I say.
“They’re old,” he responds. “They haven’t removed them yet.” Thus the area is even more gentrified than appears to be the case.
Quantitative information can also be helpful in determining the degree of change. An analysis of U.S. Census data shows that between 2000 and 2010 the population of non-Hispanic whites increased by about 17 percent along the Grand Concourse in the South Bronx, especially between 153rd and 167th Streets, which is now a historic district. People can buy spacious apartments there for less than three hundred thousand dollars. Crime has dropped sharply in recent years, and the commute to Manhattan is a little more than a half hour. Most of the buyers are savvy New Yorkers looking for a good deal, but some are Europeans unaware of the Bronx’s unsavory past—namely, the 1970s and 1980s.44 Other features are nearby Yankee Stadium, the courthouses, and the Grand Concourse itself. Many people feel safer living on a very wide street with lots of traffic.
Houses of worship also tell a tale. Walk into services and see who’s there, or ask reliable informants. Hudson Heights is almost completely gentrified, and that is corroborated by a visit to a formerly dying synagogue, Mount Sinai Congregation, which attracts about four hundred people to its weekly services, most of them young Modern Orthodox singles. They took over the synagogue from the remaining old-timers and are now the major force there. But there’s a catch: these people are often transients. They’re not necessarily going to put down roots in the Heights. Most are fresh out of college. They’re working at their first job. For the moment, though, they’re content to be in an Orthodox community where the rents are lower than they are in the mecca for Orthodox singles, the Upper West Side.45 Plus, those who leave Hudson Heights might return at a later point.
On Shakespeare Avenue in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx, there’s a beautiful new residential building dubbed the Shakespeare. It offers a gym, a learning center, and a washing machine and dryer on every floor. The problem is that there’s no infrastructure in this community except for convenient transportation. There are no upscale restaurants, boutiques, or cafés, all of them essential to discerning gentrifiers. If you want to understand what gentrification looks like in its embryonic state, go to the Shakespeare’s listing at Urban Edge (http://www.urbanedgeny.com/property/shakespeare-apartments-0). There are photos of treadmills, Nautilus weights, and stationary bikes, plus a roof deck with a great skyline view, albeit the Bronx skyline rather than that of Manhattan. Another Shakespeare website proclaims, “A great lifestyle is more attainable than you think.” Vision, imagination, and guts will one day pay off, no doubt, but not until there’s an infrastructure in the rest of the neighborhood to support it.
The description of the apartments is technically correct. For example, the “effortless commute” means there’s great transportation to Manhattan, but you must walk for five to ten minutes through a still-rough-around-the-edges neighborhood to get to the subway on Jerome Avenue. You can also walk across a nearby bridge and be in Washington Heights in twenty minutes. The drive would be a mere three minutes from your building to the FDR Drive. And you can walk to Yankee Stadium in fifteen minutes. All of this was made possible through a cooperative effort by the Atlantic Development Group, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and the New York City Housing Development Corporation.
Most people are totally unaware of nice, inexpensive housing possibilities like the Shakespeare. I took one of my departmental colleagues from the CUNY Graduate Center there for a little tour. She grew up on Shakespeare Avenue right across the street from the Shakespeare, and she could not believe what she saw. “This has changed everything for me. I came here expecting to be totally depressed about what had become of my old neighborhood. Instead, I’m thrilled beyond belief. This is amazing—all these new buildings. And my old elementary school is still there, looking beautiful, just as it was. I can’t get over it.”
There are also anomalies in non-gentrifying neighborhoods of this sort. Several miles east of the Shakespeare you’ll discover Crotona Park, which has a lake, swimming pool, tennis courts, and playing fields. All of these amenities speak to the park’s potential. There are poor neighborhoods around Crotona Park, a ten-minute drive away, and the park used to be a notoriously dangerous place. On the other hand, unknown to most people, high-level tennis matches featuring players from all over the world are sometimes played at the park in August, and the seating opportunities are great, owing to the remote location. A fair number of these players compete in the U.S. Open, and you can watch them play at Crotona Park for a fraction of the price—that is, for free. During the week in the late afternoon, high school students from some of the exclusive private schools of the Upper East Side play their tennis matches in the park. You go where there’s room to play. Nearby are the Bronx Botanical Gardens and the world-famous Bronx Zoo. And five minutes from Crotona Park is the Arthur Avenue Italian shopping and dining area, totally safe and gentrified. In sum, the area has real potential, though again, it’s a ways off.
Now let’s turn our attention to Hunters Point in Queens. The neighborhood runs along the East River, next to Long Island City, and it’s not one-tenth as dangerous as the Bronx. There are gleaming new high-rise condos and co-ops, either for rent or sale, depending on what the market will bear, from about Forty-seventh to Fiftieth Avenues. Aside from the 1996 CityLights Building, these high-rises were built in the mid-2000s, and more are going up to join the five already there. They sport magnificent views of the eastern Manhattan Midtown skyline. In the spring of 2009 you could have rented a two-bedroom apartment with a nice river view for three thousand dollars a month or even less, compared to four thousand dollars for the same on the Upper East Side, a difference of about 25 percent. Another difference is that you can’t get the same panoramic view of Manhattan living in Manhattan as you can in Hunters Point. And it’s one stop away from Times Square on the 7 line. Amenities in these buildings typically include an indoor, sky-lit, glass-enclosed, heated pool; a gym; a spacious fitness center with saunas, steam rooms, dressing rooms, and showers; activities ranging from card games to bocci, to yoga classes; and a tennis bubble nearby.
Sitting on a bench one cloudless, sun-drenched afternoon, gazing at the UN Building across the water and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, I find myself wondering why more people don’t live in Hunters Point. Do they simply not know about it? Are they Queens-phobic? Or is this just the dawn of the soon-to-come eastward migration? Certainly the amenities are already here. Restaurants, coffeehouses, and boutiques have sprouted along Vernon Avenue like the blossoms on the trees that line the nearby shore. A gleaming, spotless Whole Foods supermarket, serving gourmet foods as well as oven-fresh pizza, heightens the appeal. A large Duane Reade pharmacy is next door too. Indeed, demographically, the area seems to be attracting mostly families and young couples just starting out, and the stores’ customers reflect that. Perhaps 75 percent of the high-rise population falls into this category.
There are also numerous new and smaller six- or seven-story buildings that lack the amenities of their more glamorous, taller counterparts, but their lower asking prices attract those looking for a cheaper and roomier alternative to a Manhattan studio apartment on a noisy street in the East Village or in Hell’s Kitchen on the Far West Side. These share the street with salt-box-shaped three-story clapboard houses, with their peeling paint suggesting that less-than-affluent residents live within them. There are also numerous tiny, two-story, yellow-brick, semi-attached houses that appear to be more than one hundred years old.46 Can Hunters Point become a Cobble Hill, Dumbo, or Chelsea? It may not have enough to offer. But it can certainly be a community that’s a big notch below them yet still quite attractive.
To discover dramatic change one need go no farther than Harlem’s Bradhurst Avenue, now called W.E.B. DuBois Avenue, which extends from 145th Street to the Polo Grounds projects by 155th Street. Until the mid-1990s Bradhurst Avenue was one of Harlem’s most notorious locations for drug dealing and crime in general. Jackie Robinson Park, which runs along the avenue, was considered unsafe at any time of day or night. Today it’s a new world. On the corner of 145th and Bradhurst you have the luxury condominium called the Langston, after Langston Hughes. This is followed by the Sutton, named for the Harlem political leader and former Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton. (See figure 26.) Next to it sits the Ellington, in memory of jazz icon Duke Ellington. You can now walk the length of Bradhurst Avenue in complete safety, even at night, though somewhat less so because of the projects at the north end, whose residents must look upon the street with envy—so close, yet so far away in terms of what they can afford.
Here are the words of Don, a maintenance worker at one of these buildings. Balding and dressed in a red-and-gray-checked flannel shirt, with owlish gold-rimmed glasses, he greeted me with a firm handshake. I had found him in the boiler room after someone in the building told me that he was the “neighborhood expert.” When I told him I was trying to understand the Bradhurst area now as compared to the past, he stared at me intently, like a man with something on his mind. He’s a bouncy sort of guy, and he frequently punctuated his responses by jumping off the bench where he was sitting and describing, with windmill-like motions, how things had changed over time. I soon learned graphically what Bradhurst used to be like in the “bad old days.”
Let me tell you somethin’. These apartments are worth $100,000. But if I gotta pay $100,000 to live somewhere, I wanna be where there’s grass around me. These are just glorified tenements. You still gotta fix the leaks in the bathroom and the stove when it breaks. Any apartment where I can hear somebody burpin’ next door is not an apartment that I want. Actually, these apartments go from $300,000 to more than $400,000. They got condos and co-ops. They got all sorts of stuff here. One time, dammit, in June of 2010, they told me there’s maggots here; you know, they feed on human flesh. I went to look at them and there must have been a half million maggots comin’ up out of the ground, through cracks in the sidewalk. I don’t know where the fuck they came from. When they came here to build and knocked down them old buildings—I swear to you I am not exaggeratin’—they knocked some of these walls down in the tenements here, and they discovered bodies in the walls. People had been buried here for years.
And some of them was there because of Preacher [Clarence Heatly], the drug dealer, who ran this place. He’d say, ‘I like this car,’ and you’d have to give it to him. If not, you could end up dead. That was when crack was big. Then he went upstate. He died there, killed by a prisoner. Can you imagine? What a way to go. He controlled this state. All the drug dealers were afraid of him. He’d say, ‘Give me money.’ They’d have to give him money.”
“So how did crack die here?” I ask.
“People just got tired of the crack. The crack epidemic started in Los Angeles in South Central and it came back east. That started all the wars. So many people got strung out. And then they just got tired of being drugged out and not havin’ any money.”
“Is Harlem becoming more white?”
White? I call this area above 145th Street West Village! You got white people, yuppies moving in here. All the prejudiced people, they died out. These yuppies don’t give a shit. They just wanna get to their jobs. People get tired of having to have two-fare zones and everythin’ else. Nobody wants that shit. So that’s how the neighborhood completely changed. This is now a very interestin’ neighborhood. And it’s a lot safer now than it was before. Actually, in the early seventies Bradhurst was a very nice area. Then came the crack epidemic and it all changed. Now it’s back to where it was before.
Gentrification is even more apparent when it is not news, and never more so than when it is in the news, but not news itself. This is what I took away from a December 21, 2010, New York Times article about New York City doormen and the range of tips they received from Manhattanites. Vignettes were presented about six buildings, the amounts they received, mostly in the one-hundred- to two-hundred-dollar range, and some weird gifts like a collection of expensive cufflinks, a 1991 burgundy Honda Accord, and a velvet smoking jacket. And there, among all these posh addresses, was the Langston! It was described simply as “a 186-unit condo in Harlem with four doormen.” What’s more, the only photo accompanying the article was that of doorman James Greene, standing in front of the very same Langston, his gloved hand resting on the very same Honda Accord.47 The casual yet prominent description of the building speaks volumes about how far gentrification has come in Harlem. It’s just like all the other doorman-staffed buildings in New York City. And you can’t call the newspaper article an indirect sales pitch, because the street location for the Langston isn’t even given.
Emblematic of the changes that have taken place over time is the Starbucks at 145th Street and Bradhurst. Even the older buildings on Bradhurst are gentrifying. What’s interesting is that one block away from the still unsafe Polo Grounds projects, white people are walking their dogs. They’re not afraid. Rucker Park, a worldfamous basketball venue, is across the street from the projects. They have exhibitions here, and many NBA players have played in the park.
“Is this a safe area?” I ask a graduate student at CUNY who lives in a five-story walk-up on Bradhurst one block away. She’s from Slovenia, has a trace of an accent, but has lived in the United States for many years. Her apartment was renovated when she moved into this older five-story building. She walks around the area at night and is not fearful.
“Who cares?” she says with bravado. “I can’t worry about that. Nothing has happened to me yet, and it’s what I can afford. So I take my chances.”
The areas that have experienced the least gentrification in New York City are East New York, Brownsville, and various parts of the West and South Bronx. In a New York Times article about Brownsville titled “Where Optimism Seems Out of Reach,” Ginia Bellafante writes how the murder rate there has not fallen at all since 1998. And the infant mortality rate is the highest in the city, about the same as that of Malaysia.48 Decades of neglect, lack of private investment, distance from the city center, and large numbers of low-income people have all contributed to this unfortunate state of affairs. There are, and always will be, adventurous souls willing to take a chance on an area and build there, but if it happens in Brownsville, it is likely to be a long and difficult road.
I walk toward Roberto Clemente State Park in the Morris Heights section. The park sits on the Harlem River, just to the right of River Park Towers. It’s deserted and doesn’t look like much, but there is a police car parked nearby. I ask a white officer about safety in the neighborhood, and he comes back with, “Why do you wanna know?”
“Because my kids may be moving back from Los Angeles and I’m trying to find a cheap apartment for them. I realize the Bronx isn’t Long Island, but still….” I leave the question hanging.
“Well, there’s a lot of crime,” he says. “Listen, this is a really high crime area. And the warmer it gets outside, the more crime activity you have. I’m sure there’s other places you could find. Last night there was a car outside. They just took it. A guy got stabbed up the street too. You see this cherry picker? My partner’s up there right now. They only put these things in bad areas, and it’s broad daylight right now. I’d go Hoboken, over in Jersey, or Long Island.”
He clearly thinks it’s ludicrous for someone to want to move here when there are nice, peaceful suburbs beckoning. He has not considered issues like commuting and the very idea of living in the city, not to mention the fact that to gentrifiers New York’s suburbs are often viewed as dull places.
I decide to test his dour assessment and talk to a black superintendent about renting an apartment a block away in a building on Sedgwick Avenue. The building has twenty-four-hour security and market-rate apartments available for about twelve hundred dollars a month for a one-bedroom. It looks good—a decent, tall, redbrick structure about fifteen stories high facing the Harlem River. It’s a two-minute drive from Upper Manhattan, with public transportation nearby.
Giving me a quick once-over, the super says, “It’s all right, but for a guy of your ethnicity, I don’t know.”
I inquire about a building across the road. “What about this big building across the street from you, River Park Towers?”
He smiles. “I call that Vietnam. It looks fancy, but it’s Vietnam. It used to be good, but over the years they let everything, every thing in there. And now you could get killed in there.” True enough, but his own building is only relatively safe, considering its location.
Can gentrification ever happen here in an area where more than one-third of residents lived below the poverty line in 2000? New housing construction for those whose income restrictions make them eligible, improved public schools, and a $20 million renovation of Roberto Clemente State Park offer some hope. The pattern is one that is being repeated elsewhere. Real estate agents in East and Northern Harlem, places like Beacon Mews on 139th Street, east of Malcolm X Boulevard, direct their appeals to potential buyers priced out of Harlem’s better areas. Realtors in Fort Greene look to people unable to afford Prospect Heights, while those in Bed-Stuy seek to attract buyers unable to get what they want in Fort Greene. And real estate agents in the Bronx hope that people looking for homes in Washington Heights will consider other communities, perhaps even the long-established middle-income Executive Towers over on the Grand Concourse.
Will a community that is minutes away from Manhattan by car but separated by the Harlem River and in another borough be seen as geographically off-limits in a way that cannot be overcome? Or will people say, “The hell with it. Let’s take the plunge,” once they see the price and what they’ll get for it? Are the few urban pioneers who’ve already taken that plunge in places like the brandnew Shakespeare and other new buildings just the first wave? And when will the rest of the gentrifiers come, creating the shopping, restaurants, and coffeehouses that will really transform the area? The people will decide.
Throughout the poorer parts of the city—South Bronx, East New York, Corona, Queens—are buildings ranging from two to as many as fifteen or so stories funded by government money. They are generally rented and sometimes purchased by working- or lower middle-class people whose limited incomes qualify them for generous mortgages at low interest rates.49 In some cases they are existing renovated structures. These are not gentrifiers, but indigenous residents who are simply improving their situation. However, they can stimulate gentrification by outsiders because their homes are new and attractive-looking and because their inhabitants take pride in their homes and maintain them. As a result, the look of the entire neighborhood changes.50
Section 8 programs distribute vouchers that help low-income families across the country pay rent and utilities. The governmental agencies pay a “fair market rent” (FMR), which may not relate to the true market rents in an area; the tenant pays 30 percent of his or her income, and the Section 8 program pays the difference between the tenant contribution and the rent, capped at the FMR. Since 2008 in apartments where landlords participate in the program, those who pay less can live in the same building as full payers. They have the same amenities, nice views, and appliances. Depending on their financial situation, they could end up paying only 25 percent of what market-rate people pay. Does this make the full payers reluctant to move into such buildings? Are they jealous, and do they show it? And just how do these two groups interact with each other on a daily and long-term basis? Some interesting research could be done on these questions, to say the least. Anecdotally, the difference in rents doesn’t seem to be a major problem, according to the thirty or so people I asked. And are there crime issues? With regard to that question, remember that low earners must meet strict credit requirements, supply references, and agree to home visits. Plus, they don’t want to lose these good apartments.51
One good example of how these government programs are intertwined with gentrification is the Atlantic Yards development project in downtown Brooklyn, designed by famed architect Frank Gehry, and under construction by developer Bruce Ratner. Bloomberg approved the project, and it has accelerated gentrification in the surrounding areas. The yards are owned by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but the developer can also take nearby properties by the laws of eminent domain. There’s a brand-new sports arena for the Brooklyn Nets, and plans are under way to develop 4.5 million square feet of office space. To overcome community opposition, Ratner consented to what’s known as a Community Benefit Agreement in which he agreed to give the community various housing benefits.
Future plans for the Atlantic Yards project call for fourteen residential towers with 6,430 apartments plus two commercial buildings. Some will be completed in the next few years, but the whole project may take twenty years to finish. Not surprisingly, there has been a flood of boutiques, upscale eateries, and the like, opening at the rate of one a week on Flatbush Avenue. As usual, we know who’s moving in but very little about who’s leaving.52
Since its creation in 1965, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has landmarked thousands of buildings. Owners of buildings who seek such a designation must provide documentation to legitimate the claim that the building deserves such status. You need a special permit to make exterior renovations, and demolition is restricted as well. The effect of being designated a city landmark is often to drive out the poor, because they can’t afford to restore it but are also not allowed to destroy and replace it with a new building. Most applications are approved. A lesser but still important designation is for a building or area of a building to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The LPC also approves the designation of historic districts within the city, whether it’s the Upper East Side or the Longwood District in the Bronx.53 The commission has approved at least two hundred historic districts in the last decade, and probably many more will be approved by the time this book is published. The movement to restore and preserve in recent years has perhaps been as strong as the trend toward development and construction. These designations can affect gentrifiers in either direction depending on their opinions about these matters. Some want to live in historic districts for the cachet and because they believe in historical preservation. Others don’t care and are hungry for available space even if it means knocking down the old.
An important question is how to decide when a building is worth preserving. How do we determine what’s beautiful—a lowrise building that’s part of St. Vincent’s Hospital, which is seen as an example of 1950s Modernism? Usually it’s experts who make these decisions. No matter how one feels, the buildings, parks, and streets of New York City embody its history, culture, and values as expressed by all of those who came before us and created them. You can’t discard these places without at least evaluating their importance. That’s what was behind the creation of the LPC. History in New York City is as important as it is in London or Paris, or at least it should be.
Universities can be, and sometimes are, change agents in the gentrification process. Students attending universities welcome the chance to live in reasonably priced dwellings near their campuses and are therefore willing to take chances regarding safety. While most of these students successfully avoid being victims of crime, some are mugged and occasionally seriously injured or even killed, though the latter is rare. The risk is particularly problematic when it’s a private university that has a more affluent student population unfamiliar with an urban and unsafe environment.
Nevertheless, schools like Columbia, NYU, Pratt, and Fordham push on despite frequent community opposition, taking over and renovating buildings for both campus housing and apartments. One benefit is that by increasing the number of students in the area, it becomes safer for everyone. Some schools employ shuttle buses and post security guards on streets considered dangerous.54 Columbia is near some unsafe low-income projects in West Harlem, NYU’s area is basically safe, and Pratt and Fordham’s Bronx campus are fairly safe. Regardless, the presence of these universities in the community does enhance the gentrification process. The same is true, of course, of hospitals in the city when their employees elect to live near work despite the risks involved.
The newest addition to this pattern is the City University of New York, which has built an apartment building in already gentrifying East Harlem for graduate students and faculty at 165 East 118th Street near Third Avenue, which opened in the fall of 2011. Though some criminal incidents have been reported in the area, the residence is highly popular, and why not? Rents range from two thousand dollars a month for a one-bedroom to twenty-seven hundred dollars for a two-bedroom with a terrace. Amenities include a doorman, fitness center, and a rooftop garden. The apartments were fully occupied soon after the place opened.
For the most part, crime around the CUNY residence hasn’t been a problem, but there are some issues. For example, there had been drug dealing across the street before it was built, and it took a concerted effort by Victor, the building’s streetwise and feisty Hispanic superintendent, to drive the dealers away. With his frequent calls to the local police precinct, he’s a latter-day example of Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street.” But Victor also spoke hopefully of the cameras with a zoom function that are being installed in his building. “You would be able to see Park Avenue [two blocks away] from here!” he boasts. The widespread use and acceptance of cameras, of course, is something that Jacobs did not anticipate.
The imagery embodied in the moniker for Myrtle Avenue during the 1980s, “Murder Avenue,” lives on for those in the know. Yet an article in the New York Times on February 15, 2011, by Fred Bernstein, told about an eleven-year effort to revitalize the area. It began with the formation of the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project, headed by Thomas F. Schutte, president of Pratt Institute. He had a real stake in the project, because Myrtle Avenue was the closest shopping area to the campus. Its initial efforts included sweeping streets, removing graffiti, and finding retailers to take over empty space. And in January 2011 Pratt opened the doors to Myrtle Hall, a $54 million, six-story building containing offices, classrooms, and galleries.
Arrangements of this sort often require the involvement of other parties, and this project was no exception. The owner of the property, real estate developer Michael Orbach, had no desire to sell it to Pratt, but he and Schutte became acquainted and an unusual deal was struck. Orbach would control the first floor and basement as retail space, and Pratt would control the building’s upper floors. This highlights the reality that gentrification works best when different parties partner, which requires that everyone’s interests be served.
Black opposition to whites moving into areas like Bed-Stuy and Fort Greene is unusual, though this attitude may partly be due to the fact that despite gentrification these two neighborhoods have so far remained mostly black. When such resistance is expressed, it frequently has to do with differences in lifestyle, cultural and class issues, or an increase in harassment because of a greater police presence, like not being able to drink alcohol in public. Architecture professor Lance Freeman argues that creating mixed-income communities in inner-city gentrifying neighborhoods might be easier than in the suburbs, because those who move into gentrifying areas are generally more liberal and hence more receptive to subsidized housing for the poor than are suburban residents. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been willing to move in the first place.55 But if it becomes too “mixed,” then gentrifiers might not find where they live so attractive. Notwithstanding their presumed greater tolerance for the poor than suburbanites, research, as yet not done, might reveal that the real dream of many of these gentrifiers is that the poor will leave.
In her witty and, at times, scathing novel of the mores of life in Park Slope, Amy Sohn describes some of the criteria and prejudices of those living there. They reveal that tolerance has its limits.
Karen had read in New York magazine that houses in the [P.S.] 321 zone cost an average of $100,000 more than similarly sized apartments in 107 but felt that was a small price to pay if it meant your kid went to a school that was 62 percent white instead of only 43…. The apartment was not only on a name street, which meant the northernmost, priciest area of Park Slope, but a park block. Better, it was in short walking distance of the Prospect Park Food Coop…. The North Slope was also closer to the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and the Montauk Club, where Karen already schlepped twice a week for her Weight Watchers meetings.56
As a Brooklyn resident and a New York magazine columnist, Sohn knows what she’s talking about. Because the book uses real placenames and streets, it is a valuable document for the researcher. Her comments can be taken in several ways. Is Karen expressing racism in her comments about the school, or simply a desire to be in a better academic environment? Perhaps a little of each? Is she interested only in status, or is it real estate resale value that she’s concerned with when she explains why she wants to live on a name street? It’s obvious that for many people a good library plays a role in their purchase decision, but it’s not so clear that being near a weight-loss location matters enough to mention, unless, of course, you’re very concerned about your weight. Regardless, Sohn’s book is quite accurate in many respects. No one would disagree with her up-to-date anthropological description of the streets, as in the following: “Down on Fourth Avenue, a gritty strip of tire repair shops, gas stations, and glass cutters, new modernist buildings, featuring million-dollar lofts, were going up each day.”57
On occasion, opposition to gentrifiers can make for strange bedfellows. Crown Heights has seen a 15 percent increase in the white population over the past fifteen years. The Hasidic Jews don’t like the lifestyles of some of the incoming whites, especially what they see as immodest dress, and the black community is worried about being priced out of the neighborhood. When some real estate agents tried to rebrand the neighborhood by renaming it ProCro (combining Prospect Heights and Crown Heights), Assemblyman Hakim Jeffries was vocal in his opposition to what he saw as catering to the gentrifiers, saying, “I was offended. The collective efforts of the black and Jewish neighbors are what made Crown Heights the destination and the attractive neighborhood it is today.”58
I asked former mayor Dinkins about the Crown Heights riots that occurred during his tenure and rocked both the Jewish and black communities. His response revealed how much the events still bother him, a man who frequently describes New York City as a “gorgeous mosaic.”
It was very unfortunate, a tragedy. But I feel the police were not fully prepared for that. I used to say the New York City Police Department is the best in the world at controlling riot situations, but they should have done a better job. What really annoyed me was that I had been a friend of the Jewish community and Israel for many years. When Ronald Reagan went to Bitburg to honor the German war dead, I went with the American Jewish Congress to Munich and was one of a very few privileged to speak at the grave site of the White Rose organization—young Germans who were executed simply for handing out leaflets against the Nazis. But those who chose to do so chose to forget all that. They also neglected to consider that, following the Rodney King verdict in 1992, there were riots all over the country but not in New York. You’ll find maybe three or four people who will remember that. We had something called Increase the Peace Corps. They were volunteers who took to the streets and it worked.
An unintentional consequence of gentrification is that the new urban pioneers make those who are there already—that is, blacks—in communities like Crown Heights or Harlem, more aware of what they might lose in this process and prouder of what they do have: brownstones, parks, stores, and the by now indigenous culture. This can also lead people to strengthen their own group identity and attachment to a community they have long taken for granted.
This phenomenon is an ironic downside to gentrification. People in poor neighborhoods fight to bring down the crime rate. Then, as a result of the lower crime rate, gentrifiers move in, rents go up, and the poor may then be displaced by those with greater wealth. The organizers of these efforts can end up feeling guilty about having caused their own local allies and friends to be replaced.59
How well do the gentrifiers get along with those whom they meet in their new communities? Can the cultural and class differences be bridged? The answers to these questions appear to be mixed. Gentrifying neighborhoods provide venues, or spaces, if you will, where people can meet. One example is the Red Room Lounge at 181st Street and Bennett Avenue in Hudson Heights, which offers open mike nights. You’ll have a singer-songwriter from Tennessee, Nick Swan, playing on the same program as a local rapper, Chunk Rodríguez. And there’ll be poetry and hip-hop on the same night.60 The neighborhood—once heavily German Jewish, mostly Orthodox; Greek; Cuban; and Irish—became heavily Dominican and now attracts increasing numbers of yuppies, penurious assistant professors and teachers, as well as hopeful actors and screenwriters. Some people think the higher rents and a corresponding lack of development have created friction between the poorer, mostly Hispanic locals and whites, who are driving prices upward. Bringing people together through music, drinks, and food is one way of relieving the tensions.
The pattern appears elsewhere too, in places like Paradise Alley in Flushing, where Koreans occasionally stop by for a drink, and at the Blarney Bar in Jamaica, Queens. Speaking of his changed clientele, a mélange of blacks and Ecuadorians, the owner of the Blarney Bar, Peter O’Hanlon, says, “If an Irishman comes in now, we treat them with kid gloves because we don’t see them very often.” But, regardless, he notes, “As long as a man comes in and sits down and acts like a gentleman, I don’t care where he comes from.”61
Speaking with an African American in his forties who lives on Macon Street in Bed-Stuy, I heard this positive assessment of the gentrifiers:
Gentrification is the issue. I was born in this house and have lived here my whole life. I’m an art collector. We went through the bad sixties, the riots, and then we realized by the eighties that we can’t let this neighborhood get run down, and we have to get involved. So we did. If you look at me you can see that even though one of my parents was white, I look black and that’s how I identify. But I don’t care about color. Beneath we’re all human beings and we have to live together. I’m happy that whites are moving in. I have German tenants across the street and they’re fine.
Thus we see that self-interest is a factor in people’s attitudes about gentrifiers. The Bed-Stuy resident pragmatically believes that not being friendly is counterproductive and that “we have to live together.” Similarly, a sports area in Hunters Point for handball and basketball has Hispanic, black, and Asian kids and yuppies playing together. They too spoke of a need to “get along.” The youths attend Information Technology High School. In New York City disparate groups often have to share space.
Some people, however, are not so charitable in their evaluations of gentrification, displaying negative views that seem based on both perceived and real class differences. A longtime Hispanic resident of Park Slope who works as a teacher’s aide in nearby Sunset Park expresses her feelings about the yuppies in her neighborhood: “They even complain that the birds make too much noise. They don’t want Whole Foods to come in, because they buy everything from farmers. And they want to ban cars in all of Park Slope. They should go back to the Midwest, or wherever they came from. You know how I know this? I go on the Park Slope blog.” Is she stereotyping? Quite possibly, since she acknowledges having no friends from this group. Clearly, outreach by community leaders could be helpful in such cases.
There appears to be a feeling, even by people who are middle and working class, that the gentrifier types look down on them. In explaining why she moved to Parkchester, a middle-class community in the Bronx, Evelyn Liston, a consultant to musical composers and organizations, put it as follows: “It [Parkchester] was a green oasis and the people were so nice. They’re not yuppies or whatever. They’re just really good people with solid income who want to invest and have a nice place to live.”62
On the south side of Williamsburg I discover a development, Schaefer Landing, in which both Hasidim and gentrifiers reside. I wonder to myself how the two groups get along. A young, Germanborn resident explains it to me: “They allocated a percentage for the poor—namely, Hasids—in order to get the tax breaks. But the Hasids only use the street entrance on Kent Avenue, whereas the yuppies get the back with the river views, and so they’re really segregated.” He likes the arrangement because, as he put it, “I don’t like or dislike these people. I just don’t have anything in common with them.” I ask an Orthodox Jewish resident about this set-up and he confirms this, telling me that the Hasidim live on all the floors on the Kent Avenue side.
“How do they deal with the Sabbath restriction against using an elevator if they live above, say, the ninth floor?” I ask.
“They walk,” he responds. “The men take the stairs. They could use the exercise. And the women don’t go to shul [synagogue] on Shabbos, so they stay upstairs, eat, take care of the kids, and visit each other. And during the week there’s an area where they can walk to the water and the children can play in the grass.”
This is an example of side-by-side gentrification. The Hasidim and the gentrifiers live adjacent to each other but have almost no contact. Members of both groups told me they prefer it that way. In the nearby Roberto Clemente projects, Hasidim and Hispanics have been living in the same buildings for many years with little or no friction, although they interact very little beyond saying hello. And in most Section 8 buildings in the city, the norm is for the poor and the well-off to live together in the same building.
Sometimes getting along doesn’t have to do with the group to which you belong, but with your own persona. The following conversation with a college student who lives in Washington Heights in the low 150s below Broadway was quite revealing in many respects. He has longish, dark brown hair and is wearing blue-tinted sunglasses even though it’s a cloudy day.
“About twenty percent of the people on my block are white. You can tell which block is like that because the supers spend more time on the streets hosing down the area in front of the building. I live in a basement apartment. When I was scouting out this area for livability, I saw this nice wine store and wondered how they can make any money in this part of town. But when you see it and who’s coming in to buy, you realize the neighborhood is changing. I moved here from Ninety-third and Amsterdam because it’s cheaper. The rent here is fifteen hundred dollars a month for three bedrooms. On Ninety-third it would be about forty-five hundred.”
“Do you have contact with the Dominicans here? Can you develop relationships with the people here?”
“I’d say yeah, in my case anyway, because I smoke pot and so do the young locals here. Sometimes I even buy it from them. You kid around with them and they hang around with you. In general you don’t associate with people like these in the area. But I’m different from my friends. I’ll go out and look for it. They don’t have the guts to do it.”
“Is it safe when you come home at night?”
“For me, yes.”
“And for whom would it not be safe?”
“Those who aren’t cool. I had a friend who walked around here safely because he did the ‘I’m a cop’ routine. But you have to be careful with that, because you’re on their block. It’s always their block.”
“Is the place gentrifying?”
“Slowly, and a lot of the white people are poor. Or they’re students.”
What I learned from this exchange is, first, that blocks that have more gentrifiers get better attention, as in the super hosing down the sidewalk. Second, that the wine store was a sign for this student indicating that there were others here like him. Third, that the rent differential for him is huge—one-third the price of the Upper West Side—and it helps if you live in a basement apartment. Fourth, that pot is an ice-breaker, especially if you’re a customer. Fifth, that there’s variation within the same category—students—namely, that some are shy, even afraid to do this. Finally, that walking around is safer if you have a relationship with the locals. In sum, you can’t generalize; there are lots of factors that determine the social relationships that develop in these communities.
For comparative purposes, look at the following account of living in the same area by a married man named Jim with a young son who resides a bit farther down from the college student, on 136th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, and who hails from upstate New York. I catch him as he’s entering his threeyear-old apartment building around 7:00 PM. With his charcoal gray suit, matching tie, and leather briefcase, he looks like a typical executive, which, in fact, he is. He’s “white-bread,” but his wife is Puerto Rican.
“Everyone’s friendly. They’re not my buddies, but they all know me.” Jim feels comfortable in the neighborhood, but only up to a point.
“Would you send your kid to the local public school?” I ask.
“Hell, no!” he exclaims. “When we get to that point we’ll look around for a private school. You have to remember that Columbia has bought a lot of stuff around here on the basis of its rights to eminent domain. So the whole area’s going to improve, and I can’t imagine we won’t have options.”
And maybe, given that the IRT subway is only two blocks away and that new age restaurants are springing up in the vicinity, it’s likely that Jim will have options. I also notice in my walks that quite a few whites, mostly students, already live in the old tenements. And on the blocks between Broadway and Riverside Drive, like 138th Street, there are many decent brownstones with whites living there too.
“But how did you feel,” I persist, “about living here where you’re in the only new apartment building on the block, as, say, compared to Brooklyn Heights?”
“Things are very different now. Today people live all over. And don’t forget, I couldn’t get this type of place for this price in the other areas.”
Like it or not, Jim’s comments suggest he would live elsewhere if he could, but he can’t get what he wants there. Today, as opposed to fifteen years ago, these rough areas are a real option, made possible by reduced crime rates and an acceptance of the presence of professionals by the locals. And yet that’s still not true everywhere. In many parts of the Central and South Bronx, for instance, you can still walk miles without seeing a white face.
Jim is a perfect example of a practical gentrifier. He wouldn’t consider living here if he had more money. Unlike the student I spoke with, he’s not interested in becoming friends with the locals. They’re not his type and he knows it.63 Obviously the kids on the block are not going to be the after-school playmates of choice, if at all. Jim just wants to be superficially friendly so that he can get along with his neighbors. Maybe his Spanish-speaking wife helps with the language barrier too. Let’s keep in mind that because of his status as a responsible family man, he can’t play the potsmoking student who’s cool. He justifies his decision by making himself part of a larger body of like-minded souls. “Today people live all over,” Jim opines. Because of nearby Columbia University, the subway, and the eateries, he thinks he might be coming in on the bottom floor of a new community of gentrifiers that will grow. Parenthetically, one of the things that gentrifiers must get used to is that at night the teenagers, and the men, hang out. The Dominicans here have a loud street culture. They may even make remarks, but it’s not taken seriously by those in the know. They’re just acting out and you have to get used to it.
Here’s a third situation involving a different sort of person. He’s actually not a gentrifier, but he’s part of the scene because he’s one of those who were left behind, and they’re all over the city living with gentrifiers, immigrants, and just regular folks. The community is South Ozone Park, and it’s predominantly Guyanese these days, but it was once white and Catholic. Near 133rd Avenue, standing outside his immaculate split-level home, with a large American flag proudly flying in the yard, I meet John, a brown-eyed, stocky white man with close-cropped hair, sporting a dark gray North Face sweatshirt and holding a straw broom in his hand. He is wearing a cap that says, “Duck-Hunting,” though I learn later that although he owns a rifle, he does not hunt.
“Your place looks beautiful and everything’s swept clean,” I say.
“Always, always.”
“What kind of style is that gleaming silver railing?”
“That’s stainless steel. The main ones who do it are the Chinese. They have the market for it. Just type in ‘stainless steel.’ ”64
“Is this is a safe neighborhood?”
“Safe? It’s safer than it ever was. I’m here fifty-three years. I was born here. It went through its times. It was once Irish, Italian. There was robberies later on. Now it’s mostly Indians from Guyana. They’re building mansions all over. I mean, there are still some whites here—my friends, Lenny and Larry. But nobody bothers nobody here.”
“But can you be friends with the Guyanese? I mean, do you have enough in common with them?”
“Yeah, they’re all workin’ people here.”
“You have ’em over to your house for a beer?”
“Naw, I don’t get too friendly with anybody like that. More ‘Hi.’ ”
“How do you feel about all the people moving away?”
“What am I gonna do? I mean the houses’ value went up.”
“How come you didn’t sell?”
“Because I’m still working for Con Ed. I got thirty-five years. I got two more years and then I go up to Greene County, upstate. I got twenty-five acres. Nice house.
“You got a nice flag.”
“That’s the only flag I fly. [This may be an indirect reference to the Hindu prayer flags found in many yards here.] Here’s where you’re good, not near Rockaway Boulevard,” he adds.
“What about Ozone Park?”
“Ozone Park. Yeah. At one time it was all mob. From here on to Aqueduct Racetrack it’s all white. Check out the house around the corner. It’s got stained-glass windows, brand-new, huge camera, sculptured bushes, digital signs. They’re Indians. Beautiful.”
John’s a holdover with one foot out the door. He claims that it’s possible to be friends with the Guyanese, but his definition of friendship is a bit narrow. He will not have them over for a beer, stating plainly, “I don’t get friendly with anybody like that.” He’s clearly not into diversity, and the comfort level of sameness just isn’t there. But he does appreciate the way his Guyanese neighbors have done their houses up. I also ponder, briefly, how he perceives me. In an earlier time in the area’s history, when it was mostly white, he might not have spoken so freely. I would be an outsider, despite my white skin. Today, however, with so few whites left, I’m in his group, even though he’s just met me.
But such limited interactions with others are not always the case. There are those who sometimes seize the opportunities for social interaction that this metropolis provides. Take the surprising case of David, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Holliswood, Queens, and whose wife follows the tradition of covering her hair. His upstairs neighbors are a lesbian couple, hardly an approved-of lifestyle among the Orthodox. Yet David and his wife are good friends with the couple and trust them enough to use them as regular babysitters for their children. In fact, the lesbians even take the kids to their own summer home for mini-vacations and on one occasion told the mother, “We love your kids as much as you do, if not more.” The degree of trust David and his wife have in their neighbors is quite amazing, considering the different values of the two communities.
One final case demonstrates that within groups class can trump race. A middle-class, stylishly dressed black woman in Bed-Stuy who owns a home and business in the community related her tale of woe to me. “I’ve been here many years and we made strenuous efforts to keep it in the community, so to speak. I bought up the block on Lewis Avenue around the corner, and we rented out space to restaurants, bookstores, and other upscale places. One condition was that they [the business owners] had to live within walking distance of their place of business. That way it would be run by people from the community.” This is the kind of thing black gentrifiers are sensitive to.
“Now we’re involved with efforts to get permission for a wine bar on Nostrand Avenue,” she continued. “And we’re facing opposition from the old-timers, who say, ‘We don’t want it. We worked so hard to get these winos out of the area and you want to bring them back in.’ ”
“But isn’t a wine bar different from a liquor store?” I ask. “Can’t they see what you’ve done here?”
“They can and we told them the young people need a place to hang out in, but they’re the old-timers and we’re the new people. They see us as more successful, more educated, and different. When I first applied for permission to build a place here, they said to me, ‘Who are your parents?’ meaning, ‘you’re not one of us.’ You see, it’s a class thing, not a race thing.”
“What if you patronized some of the old corner stores?”
Her voice rises an octave as she glares at the very thought of it. “I’m not going into some place with a bullet-proof window and some little holes to talk through or a joint that serves food but isn’t clean!”
I suggest ways of making the old-timers feel included, of talking to the ministers of the churches they attend and making donations. She agrees but isn’t too hopeful. This struggle develops along class lines and is going on elsewhere in the city too, wherever areas are gentrifying. The point is that it has almost nothing to do with race and points to why even cultural similarities and a common history do not always mean a lot.65
After four years of walking the neighborhoods of New York and conversing with many people, as well as from personal observation, I’ve concluded that most gentrifiers do not really mix with the natives, often preferring people who, like them, are new to an area instead. And why not? After all, they have more in common with other gentrifiers. The truth is that authenticity, eating in local ethnic restaurants, and having conversations with people whose origins, values, and lifestyles are quite different from their own can be fun. But these places are often more something they want to dabble in or experience, not a community they wish to permanently join. In the end they’re too comfortable in their own skin. That’s why they are who they are. What this means is that they are in the neighborhood but not of the neighborhood, even after having lived there awhile. Perhaps this phenomenon will change somewhat over time as they get used to the idea of living with others who are different from them. Besides, some of the gentrifiers may themselves have grown up in less privileged environments than those to which they currently belong. More likely, however, the neighborhood they have moved to will become more homogeneous as the overall cost of living makes it possible for only the well-off to remain there.
When all is said and done, gentrification is a complex issue. It has swept through many parts of the city and has been helped along by many interests. It is changing the face of New York and will shape its future for decades. By observing it on the ground, it becomes possible to see these complexities from different angles, many of them positive, some not necessarily so. We now turn our attention to an equally complicated question: the future of ethnic identity in this city. Interestingly the issue has some striking parallels with the gentrification process with respect to class and residential patterns.