Vanity Fair on the West Village's sad future
In last month's Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens considers the importance of urban "Bohemias" and why the ultimate demolishment/development of New York's Greenwich Village is a very, very sad thing. From the essay:
It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.Last Call, Bohemia (Vanity Fair, thanks Jess Hemerly!)
In aspect and design, New York’s West Village is the opposite of Soho in London in that it began its existence before the famous evolution of Manhattan as a grid had taken shape. As Malcolm Cowley phrased it, evoking the Village just after the First World War, “Most of us drifted to Manhattan to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly.… We came to the Village … because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already … because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published.” Trying to sum up the ethos, Cowley wrote that for his generation the Village was something more than “a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine.”
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See also William Gibson's much earlier treatment of this issue, through the proxy of character Cody Harwood, in All Tomorrow's Parties
republicans hate bohemians!
Which is better? Preserving the designated 'other' space for the unclassifiable polyglot, or preserving the 'other' itself? San Francisco's North Beach enjoys the continuity with Ginsberg and the rest - but is just one nostalgic (and still-relevant) stop in an evolving neighborhood. The new Bohemians, such as they are, meet there as often as they meet in the new 'other' spaces elsewhere in my fair city.
Beware nostalgia - it doesn't preserve creativity.
Too bad working class families don't have a magazine to bemoan how the bohemians priced THEM out of Manhattan. :D
bohemians always pre-date gentrification.
I agree it's sad to watch a bohemian paradise slowly 'degrade' into luxury condos of glass. But that Bohemia is the past and I think you can look to neighborhoods in Brooklyn like Bushwick to fill in the gap left by the now bourgeois Village. Things change, for better or worse.
Cities change. Disinvestment, abandonment, colonization, gentrification, corporatization, and back to the start. Deal with it. Find the next Greenwich Village.
> republicans hate bohemians!
Speaking as an anarcho-capitalist who agrees with Republicans on some cultural matters, even if I don't think the State should exist:
I don't hate bohemians. Heck, my favorite painting is "The Bohemian" by Bouguereau!
I think it's great when a new bohemian district comes into existence. I think it's great when a new condo development comes into existence.
Why?
Because in each case, people are getting what they want.
Those who want to freeze a particular commercial district in amber, so that it never "degenerates" into a bohemian district are just as misguided as those who want to freeze a bohemian district in amber so that it never gentrifies.
Change is life.
It's fine for Hitch to feel bad that his favorite district is going away, but it would be wrong to try to stop the dynamism.
The only thing that will save NYC in general, let alone the Vill., would be a brutal global recession. An economic downturn that would drive the rich people away and back to the burbs, and that would make foreigners stay home. Crime rates rising, budgetary deficits forcing reduction of police, and infrastructure breakdowns would help. In other words, the 1970's all over again. Not likely to happen. Bloomberg has a budgetary surplus, and has devoted his mayoralty towards turning Manhattan into a "luxury product" for financial service executives, lawyers, media moguls, international restaurateurs and fashion designers, and foreigners from the wealthy EU and Arab nations. His strategy is impervious to recession. While the rest of the country might be experiencing contraction, NYC, specifically Manhattan, has stayed stable. He doesn't give a shit about Bohemian culture, nor do the wealthy people flocking here. What they want is an Epcott Center simulacra of NYC grit and edginess because it is so Sex and the City, but they certainly don't want the real thing.
does that mean you are a republican?
Hmm. Malcolm Cowley says you could rent a furnished room for two or three dollars a week in the Village right after WW1. Inflation has cut the value of the dollar by a factor of ten since then -- $3 in 1920 money is about $30 now.
Checking Craig's List, I can see furnished rooms in the Bronx and Inwood going for $125. (A month, I assume, though it isn't specified.) That comes out around $29/week, so there's Hitch's new bohemia, at least as housing prices go.
There is something malicious and very damaging in the co-op of culture by the production of products. This is one of the ways in which a social movement or a protest movement is de-fanged.
So yeah, it should scare or trouble people a bit when an area is gentrified (homogenized.)
@4 Actual bohemians, as they existed in the 1920's through 1970's, did not displace people. They lived and worked among them often renting in the same neglected urban buildings. Their creativity thrived on seedy, dangerous, postwar (whichever war it was at the time) urban life.
Don't confuse that with today's faux-hemian who, along with the hipster are "vanguards of the mainstream" according to an opinion piece in the very excellent The Next American City. Over the course of a few years, centers of cultural production (artists' enclaves, hole-in-the-walls) give way to centers of cultural consumption (Urban Outfitters, condos).
I read Hitchin's piece when it came out and agree with the sad conclusion that with the rise of the suburban-urban and the destruction of places for real artists to live and work in, creative counterculture will be no more.
I think that in a lot of neighborhoods like this, small business owners get punished for their success. They stick it out for years in a non-central neighborhood with a high crime rate and after all their hard work, the residual benefit of their business (increased community interaction, more pedestrian taffic, etc.) causes rents to rise outside their grasp, or for wholesale redevelopment to occur.
Recently I visited a traditionally downtrodden suburb of Seattle and my first thought was "wow, so many authentic, diverse, independent businesses, this place doesn't stand a chance!"
Forget the Village, there isn't a single neighborhood in New York that resembles what it was in it's "heyday". Most of the people complaining have already missed the party. NYC for the most part is a dead playground for yuppies and trustfunders. Look in your backyard before you head to NYC looking for bohemia. The real thing is probably closer than you think.
Hey Avram, have you also correlated with the number of scam listings on Craiglists? You are aware those rents are fake, right? Try $500-1000 a room, depending on what side of Broadway you're on.
Actually, Inwood has quite the bohemian culture. Lots of artists, musicians and so on. And compared to the rest of Manhattan, it's cheap.
@9&15: Aye.
@16: Inwood has *bedrooms* for artists and musicians and writers. Plus a massive up-all-night drag racing culture.
Not the same thing as a bohemia.
I think a Bohemian would be the first to say that "Bohemia" is a state of mind, not a bit of of real estate. When Bohemians get together they can create a new Bohemia, as short-lived as it might be. As soon as you try to preserve it and keep it as it was, you have nothing but the past, and an artifical past at that. Detroit is ripe for a grand new Bohemian experiment.
@18: Cheap real estate is only part of it -- but there have to be (pause to smile) community organizers -- we call them community animators in poetryland -- and hospitable places to lounge, not in isolation, but among other bohemians.. to do the silly intense version of next-to-nothing bohemians do. Performing and partying come next, then distributing artifacts (texts, music, art etc).
The rest is marketing, and it's been 'the rest' in Hitchens's editor's neighborhood for fifty years.
All the bohemians should rise up and take over Detroit. The place is dirt cheap, inspiring, and just a few steps away from Canada.
@ Avram - Those room rental prices are more likely by the week.
I'm amused by the notion of what our Czech readers would think of all this bandying about of the word "Bohemian."
@#17: An all-night drag-racing culture sounds awesome.
>I'm amused by the notion of what our Czech readers >would think of all this bandying about of the word >"Bohemian."
Probably just roll their eyes and shrug the way they did when people talked about "La Boheme" in Paris, on the Left Bank of the Seine...
He pretty much lost me with the start of his second sentence:
"Now, I know there’s nothing as tedious as an aging literary hack reminiscing about his lost days and nights in Bohemia..."
Too right.
No, the Village is not what it was. It's full of rich people... and the secret truth is, many of the rich people of today were the starving artists of 40 or 50 years ago.
But young creative spirits will always find cheap rents, plentiful booze, and late-night fellowship somewhere. After the Village, they went to SoHo; then the East Village; then the Lower East Side; then Williamsburg; then Greenpoint.
Now they're flocking to Bushwick, as mentioned above... and as that neighborhood too starts to ossify, the kids are moving further east, into Ridgewood, Queens. In another 10 or 20 years, maybe we'll be hearing about underground rock shows and storefront galleries in East New York.
Hitchens feels sorrow for a place I never knew except as an enclave of boutiquey preciousness and cultic nostalgia. In a quarter century, the younger generation won't understand my memories of Williamsburg and Greenpoint at the turn of the millenium. So it goes.
In Salt Lake City there's a district named sugarhouse that was rather Boho, and now they're tearing down most of the unique store fronts and most everyone left. :\
Well, I was going to slag Hitch, but too many beat me to it. As usual, he misses the point.
What would he want, the "Bohemia" of his youth preserved? Then it's an historic district. The whole point of centers of thought/art outside the mainstream is that they tend to pop up, mature, die off, and begin again somewhere else. And I don't think he'd recognize the current denizens of such a place or even appreciate them anyway.
seems to me he's about what, 20-30 years late in his observation? good lord, the Village, Manhattan in general (below Inwood) has been priced out of most "bohemians" reach for a loooong time now.
Orcateers @14, or the influx of wealthier residents gives the small business a chance to reinvent itself. That's what's happening to a lot of stores in my gentrifying neighborhood -- they've been renovating and stocking higher-quality goods for the new customers.
@23: Dyckman Street from Payson to the Marina is practically Bonneville Flats East. I'm pretty sure there are already two teams making documentaries about it. No fun to try to sleep near it, but for the Honda-modders and their fans it must be a blast. Someday somebody's going to come down the offramp from the Henry Hudson right into a race, though...
MaximusNYC: You are correct, sir. When I read some of the plans for development in the area, I was all "oh noes! The Village must be saved!" Then I remembered that, back when I actually lived in NYC (about fifteen years ago), I hardly ever went there after that first touristy visit.
The sad thing about New York is that it has ceased creating new international artforms every few years, and it hasn't done that for a long time. So you could say that Bohemia is long over in the Villiage and in New York in general.
On the other hand, the Villiage always had (and still does, though fading) an odd, almost mysterious feeling to it, and whenever I go down there I get dose of what our lives were like back in the 70s and 80s. I hope that can be preserved, at least.
On the third hand (!), there's very few of you bemoaning the loss of Bohemia that would have wanted to live with the concomittant crime, grunge and mixture of rich and poor, but it is precisely that mixture of rich and poor that allowed New York to produce:
Punk
New Wave
Minimalism
Rap
Pop art
Modern Dance
Abstract expressionsim
The Beats
and so on.
(Of course, Londoners love to claim Punk was invented in London, but by that they mean the Sex Pistols and a clothing style...try The Velvets, Patty Smith and Iggy back in the late 60s and early 70s.)
Me, I miss the Crime and I remember when Black folks were allowed South of 125th street.
the west village's redevelopment comes more than 2 decades after it even resembled the farce of a bohemia. who are these people kidding?