CHARACTER AND CHANGE
I noticed from response to the Central Square thread that if a place has small virtues, these are touted as reasons to bar larger improvements. The theory is that adding bigger virtues invariably causes the small ones' demise. This theory has the power to nudge otherwise sensible urbanity buffs into ad hoc nimbyhood.
The theory would strike most Londoner as odd. They're accustomed to applaud the recent and rapid transformation of places like Hoxton, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, Camden Lock, Spitalfields and Southwark without irredeemable loss of all the gritty character that made these places desirable targets for development to begin with. As they see it, the good is mostly saved while the dormant potential of a place is roused.
Rent rises soon escort such transformations as hip businesses and residents ooze in; and this we decry like dutiful bolsheviks. The objects of our fond concern can perhaps be forgiven when they find whiffs of hypocrisy in our protestations; after all we mavens judge the city mostly as entertainment. That's why we're members of archBoston.
There is currently a modest wringing of hands over the de-Italianization of the North End, which urbotourists prized for its gaggles of elderly male Sicilians. These used to stand or sit around on sidewalks and comment in two languages on the passing scene. Their fadeout is commonly regretted by epicures of the urban, but perhaps for selfish reasons; how many grousing middle-class habitues of the new North End Starbuck?s have considered that a picturesque Sicilian flaneur might actually be grateful to retire to Son-the-Doctor?s suburban McMansion for its limitless television reruns and air-conditioned comfort?
Generally, as ethnic groups find themselves less marginalized in their country of choice, they drop the tendency to congregate in ghettoes. Thus the North End's residential makeup will continue its shift from Italians to yuppies until all that's left is a nostalgic core of heritage businesses --like the spaghetti joints that surround Ferrara's in New York's Little Italy (really part of Chinatown). Weekends, Italians nostalgic for cannoli cruise in from the suburbs, while the rest of the week it's left to tourists and the newer residents.
Just so, Coolidge Corner now sports few Hebrew inscriptions; they vanished about the time Jack and Marion's closed its doors. And the Irish no longer predominate as they did in South Boston or Charlestown. Plus, where are East Boston's Italians vanishing to? At least we're getting Hispanics to replace them, not just yuppies.
Instead of ghettoes, we now have ethnic diversity --though when we call for greater diversity we city mavens really mean we'd like the ghettoes back. (Less boring.)
The shock-troops of ethnic displacement are artists and hipsters. We find hipsters amusing (especially in the early stages of colonialization, when they're still well-mixed with an underlayment of ethnics), because they're creative and unconventional, and they see the potential of a place. Hipdom's flying wedge of artists lead the charge of change, gays in hot pursuit.
In New York, the Creative Class uncovered pocket after pocket of industrial and economic decay for hip colonization. SoHo, DUMBO, LES, EV, TriBeCa, NoHo --an alphabet soup of emerging glitz joined by Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, the High Line, maybe Red Hook --and now even (zounds!) Harlem.
As an urbotourist, I regret having missed seeing the Chinese in Mao costumes, Turks in fezzes (I missed this one by eons), cowpokes in six-guns, and tennis players in white slacks, and I will probably miss Peruvian women in bowler hats; but I did manage to catch the Combat Zone and the line-up of floozies on the rue St. Honore before they moved to the Internet. And like many visitors to Times Square, I miss the three-card monte.
Picturesque humanity as part of the ambiance: generally I find people like myself boring?at least in gaggles on the sidewalk, though not so much in one-on-one conversation, for which I prefer the like-minded.
On the sidewalk I favor groupings of rap singers, turbaned Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, even juvenile delinquents (at a distance) or (best of all) pretty girls-- but someone obviously likes all those Starbucks; how else do you explain their proliferation and success?
It is, however, fairly hypocritical of us to bleed our hearts over the preservation of lifestyles not our own and a ?sense of community? we find hard to pin down. This is not, after all, the survival of species, and what do we really know about the merits of other ways of life?
Can we be so dead sure that ?yokel? who sold his leaky three-decker to the stockbroker for a cool million did the wrong thing for himself and his family? Maybe he and his wife can be found today by the pool in Acapulco, margarita in hand. Or at least, ensconced in the comfy bourgeois security of Belmont.
We rue the passing of this or that community, but isn?t there also a Starbucks community (unexotic) fading in to replace it? As we get prosperously post-Industrial, sooner or later everyone turns into a yuppie.
Ultimately, I think we just find ourselves boring. Maybe we should start wearing fezzes.
.
I noticed from response to the Central Square thread that if a place has small virtues, these are touted as reasons to bar larger improvements. The theory is that adding bigger virtues invariably causes the small ones' demise. This theory has the power to nudge otherwise sensible urbanity buffs into ad hoc nimbyhood.
The theory would strike most Londoner as odd. They're accustomed to applaud the recent and rapid transformation of places like Hoxton, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, Camden Lock, Spitalfields and Southwark without irredeemable loss of all the gritty character that made these places desirable targets for development to begin with. As they see it, the good is mostly saved while the dormant potential of a place is roused.
Rent rises soon escort such transformations as hip businesses and residents ooze in; and this we decry like dutiful bolsheviks. The objects of our fond concern can perhaps be forgiven when they find whiffs of hypocrisy in our protestations; after all we mavens judge the city mostly as entertainment. That's why we're members of archBoston.
There is currently a modest wringing of hands over the de-Italianization of the North End, which urbotourists prized for its gaggles of elderly male Sicilians. These used to stand or sit around on sidewalks and comment in two languages on the passing scene. Their fadeout is commonly regretted by epicures of the urban, but perhaps for selfish reasons; how many grousing middle-class habitues of the new North End Starbuck?s have considered that a picturesque Sicilian flaneur might actually be grateful to retire to Son-the-Doctor?s suburban McMansion for its limitless television reruns and air-conditioned comfort?
Generally, as ethnic groups find themselves less marginalized in their country of choice, they drop the tendency to congregate in ghettoes. Thus the North End's residential makeup will continue its shift from Italians to yuppies until all that's left is a nostalgic core of heritage businesses --like the spaghetti joints that surround Ferrara's in New York's Little Italy (really part of Chinatown). Weekends, Italians nostalgic for cannoli cruise in from the suburbs, while the rest of the week it's left to tourists and the newer residents.
Just so, Coolidge Corner now sports few Hebrew inscriptions; they vanished about the time Jack and Marion's closed its doors. And the Irish no longer predominate as they did in South Boston or Charlestown. Plus, where are East Boston's Italians vanishing to? At least we're getting Hispanics to replace them, not just yuppies.
Instead of ghettoes, we now have ethnic diversity --though when we call for greater diversity we city mavens really mean we'd like the ghettoes back. (Less boring.)
The shock-troops of ethnic displacement are artists and hipsters. We find hipsters amusing (especially in the early stages of colonialization, when they're still well-mixed with an underlayment of ethnics), because they're creative and unconventional, and they see the potential of a place. Hipdom's flying wedge of artists lead the charge of change, gays in hot pursuit.
In New York, the Creative Class uncovered pocket after pocket of industrial and economic decay for hip colonization. SoHo, DUMBO, LES, EV, TriBeCa, NoHo --an alphabet soup of emerging glitz joined by Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, the High Line, maybe Red Hook --and now even (zounds!) Harlem.
As an urbotourist, I regret having missed seeing the Chinese in Mao costumes, Turks in fezzes (I missed this one by eons), cowpokes in six-guns, and tennis players in white slacks, and I will probably miss Peruvian women in bowler hats; but I did manage to catch the Combat Zone and the line-up of floozies on the rue St. Honore before they moved to the Internet. And like many visitors to Times Square, I miss the three-card monte.
Picturesque humanity as part of the ambiance: generally I find people like myself boring?at least in gaggles on the sidewalk, though not so much in one-on-one conversation, for which I prefer the like-minded.
On the sidewalk I favor groupings of rap singers, turbaned Sikhs, Orthodox Jews, even juvenile delinquents (at a distance) or (best of all) pretty girls-- but someone obviously likes all those Starbucks; how else do you explain their proliferation and success?
It is, however, fairly hypocritical of us to bleed our hearts over the preservation of lifestyles not our own and a ?sense of community? we find hard to pin down. This is not, after all, the survival of species, and what do we really know about the merits of other ways of life?
Can we be so dead sure that ?yokel? who sold his leaky three-decker to the stockbroker for a cool million did the wrong thing for himself and his family? Maybe he and his wife can be found today by the pool in Acapulco, margarita in hand. Or at least, ensconced in the comfy bourgeois security of Belmont.
We rue the passing of this or that community, but isn?t there also a Starbucks community (unexotic) fading in to replace it? As we get prosperously post-Industrial, sooner or later everyone turns into a yuppie.
Ultimately, I think we just find ourselves boring. Maybe we should start wearing fezzes.
.
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