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Factually, you're correct, and I agree with this. The city was a dump in the '70's, and headed for what we'd now call Detroitification. But amid the wreckage, a number of people were having a lot of fun, because pretty much anything went, and it was cheap to live there. The cops used to look the other way about a lot of things that they don't any more. This was also when a lot of the artist contingent moved in, and took over the abandoned industrial spaces that could be had cheaply. So for these people, it's look at as something of a golden age.
Now that the wheel has turned, and Manhattan is desirable and expensive (and this is even extending to a lot of the boroughs), these people and their successors are being priced out. There is no more fallow post-industrial space to set up cheap art studios, etc.. So they're pining for the old days.
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Originally Posted by Cinema Cat
I think most people view the 1970s as New York City's nadir, as least in the 20th century. The decade of the 1977 blackout and its mass lootings. The decade in which the city almost when bankrupt. The decade when the subways and Time Square were regarded as cesspools of crime. A decade in which the city was characterized as a concrete jungle in films like DEATH WISH and SERPICO.
I don't know about the city's 1970s pop culture. Studio 54? Big deal.
I think some of you have lost my point. Yes, historically NYC neighborhoods have changed a lot of the years with different ethnicities or subcultures making them a home every decade or so. BUT there was always a new culture that took over the place. Now its just yuppies everywhere.
So for example, in the 70's Chelsea was a Hispanic neighborhood, then became a LGBT neighborhood in the 80's and 90's. Now it is yuppie like so many other neighborhoods in Manhattan.
And yes, there are exceptions. Harlem, Chinatown and the LES are still untouched by this but it won't be long before every part of Manhattan becomes yuppie-ville.
I think some of you have lost my point. Yes, historically NYC neighborhoods have changed a lot of the years with different ethnicities or subcultures making them a home every decade or so. BUT there was always a new culture that took over the place. Now its just yuppies everywhere.
So for example, in the 70's Chelsea was a Hispanic neighborhood, then became a LGBT neighborhood in the 80's and 90's. Now it is yuppie like so many other neighborhoods in Manhattan.
And yes, there are exceptions. Harlem, Chinatown and the LES are still untouched by this but it won't be long before every part of Manhattan becomes yuppie-ville.
Basic law of the universe: nothing stays the same.
It will be interesting to see how the city will evolve in the next five, ten, and twenty years. Will it get even more impossibly expensive and generic or will there be a bit of a reversal?
Will immigrants stop coming or slow down? Will they head to more affordable cities? Will the city's population take a hit?
I grew up in a basement apartment on the upper east side where my dad was the super of a prewar doorman building that was between Third and Lexington. West of Third Avenue was a magic land of wealth and privilege. East of Third was Yorkville, which still had a remnant of its old ethnic German and Hungarian neighborhood past. I haven't lived there in a few years, but I had to go to a doctor's visit on the upper east side a week ago and it was a little like being home. I'd like to say I felt like a little boy again, but it wouldn't be true. But I did remember how it felt to be a little boy there. The boy in the basement around all that old money west of Third Avenue and in our building itself, living by those museums and architecture and all that beauty and pretending that i was a part of it all. And the boy who'd go to Hungarian church east of Third, and the Hungarian butcher and other specialty shops with my mother, or Carl Schurz Park, and who'd hear Hungarian (and German) spoken by strangers in the streets east of Third a few times every week, the same Hungarian my family spoke in our home.
Well, all the Hungarian shops are gone, and I think there's only one German holdover, if it's even still there (Schaller and Weber on 86th). The boundary between the rich part of the neighborhood and what was the still slightly ethnic part is still there, but those ethnic streets are more home to young people recently out of college, from other places besides New York who came to live in their first apartment in Manhattan. The modest walkups are still there, but they're a fortune to rent in, now, too, for their close proximity to college bars. The Hungarian church, St. Stephen of Hungary, retains the name but probably doesn't have even one weekly service in Hungarian, anymore.
The money part of the upper east side, west of Third Avenue, remains much closer to what I remembered. The money's lasted, and hasn't been displaced. But I could no longer pretend to somehow be part of it, like I could as a boy. As I walked to and from the doctor's, seeing it all there only reminded me of just how far I am from that, and I guess just how far I always was, even as that dreamy boy in the basement. And the part of the neighborhood that I really was, the Hungarian and German remnant enclave, is gone forever.
Anyway, no other part of Manhattan could make me feel all that. Homogenized? I don't know. Depends where you're coming from, I guess.
My wife and I used to live right across the street from St Stephens in 1993-95. Champaign Video, cool bakeries.
Anyone else feel this way? I feel that most of Manhattan (everything south of 96th Street) has lost neighborhood identities. Its almost as if Manhattan is one large homogenous neighborhood. In the past, hoods were quite differentiated.
For example, Chelsea was home for the LBGT crowd. Now many stores/establishments catering to the LBGT crowd in Chelsea have moved out due to high rentals. Chelsea looks like any other part of Manhattan.
I can't deny that Chelsea has changed and become more expensive. However, its not the dead corpse that it may appear to be to you. There are still a few popular places that 20 something LGBT people go and those establishments aren't leaving.
I miss the working class people I used to meet in Chelsea--they seem to be extinct or hiding. Now, everyone seems to work corporate/professional jobs. Don't get me wrong, they are often nice people and I'm glad they are in the city, but it used to be nice to have a different perspective.
It will be interesting to see how the city will evolve in the next five, ten, and twenty years. Will it get even more impossibly expensive and generic or will there be a bit of a reversal?
Will immigrants stop coming or slow down? Will they head to more affordable cities? Will the city's population take a hit?
I never understood why immigrants pour into New York City. McDonalds pays the same wage in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse (or a hundred other cities), where you can buy a decent house for under $75,000, and where you can rent a 1-bedroom apartment for less than $500.
A couple each making $9.00/hour @40 hours is $36,000. And if you hustle, like lots of immigrants do, you work a second job. So if you each work 50 hours, now you are earning $45,000. In no time you can be a homeowner and on your way to fulfilling the American Dream.
In NYC you have less than nothing.
Just makes me think how when you get away from NYC and a few other big cities, it's very easy not to live in poverty if you don't do the single mother thing with no man to help support you.
No, Manhattan has NOT lost its identity. And homogenous could be further from the truth, I don't know what you're talking about. Has it changed in many ways? Absolutely. However, Manhattan has as much character as it did before if not more. Everyone cries that Manhattan has become a playground for the rich and in many ways that is true (I feel) or can be debatable.
If you start from North Manhattan (Inwood) and work your way to Lower Manhattan, you'll see and feel vastly different vibes. You'll start off in Dominican land, past by African, Black soul brothas/sistas, past all the gays, past the stinky hustling and bustling streets of Chinatown into the White Collar crime that gets done under our noses everyday in Wall Street. You can walk, bike, run, jog, drive, take the train up and down Manhattan and feel some COMPLETELY different vibes and see how the demographics alter from each area to the next. Sure, many areas have been or slightly going through gentrification but it doesn't mean the culture of these areas (Washington Heights, Harlem, Chinatown, L.E.S) have been completely raped of their culture.
Go to Harlem and ask the real heads about the "Harlem Shake" and see what kind of answers you'll get. Sure Times Square has been cleaned big time by Mickey Mouse but hangout at the Port Authority long enough and you'll see more than enough homeless, volatile, vagabonds trying to hustle people out of a dollar. Go to the projects in the L.E.S. during the summer and tell me if you feel it has been "cleaned up". Hangout at Chelsea Piers during the summer and if you don't see gay guys secretly blowing each other once the sun has settled, then you're probably really naive or just aren't looking hard enough. I could keep going.
The dynamics in NYC have changed a lot, plenty of things have changed a lot. I've seen the change in NYC or generally speaking Manhattan come along way. For all the slack Manhattan gets for "losing its culture" I think its worth taking a walk through Manhattan. It's still bustling with culture, diversity, vibrancy. Homogenous and Manhattan shouldn't even be in the same sentence. If you want to see REAL homogeneity, go Staten Island.
Anyone else feel this way? I feel that most of Manhattan (everything south of 96th Street) has lost neighborhood identities. Its almost as if Manhattan is one large homogenous neighborhood. In the past, hoods were quite differentiated.
For example, Chelsea was home for the LBGT crowd. Now many stores/establishments catering to the LBGT crowd in Chelsea have moved out due to high rentals. Chelsea looks like any other part of Manhattan.
Transplants came to NYC and killed the cultures of the city. There is nothing unique about NYC anymore. Hate to say this but NYC is so boring now.
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