#6: File under "interesting failures"
Living in a big city means getting comfortable with the gradual disappearance of things you love: bars, restaurants, stores, buildings, scenes, neighborhood identities. New York, with a pressurized real estate market that usually overpowers tradition or nostalgia, presents an especially intense version of this phenomenon (when I go back to Chicago it's pleasant to find that most of what I remember is still there). It's obvious why this kind of change has to happen, and we'd be fools to wish that it didn't, but it's harder to see a record store or dive bar vanish when a bank or a Just Salad or something similarly boring replaces it (no offense to Just Salad).
It's easier to accept a flood of dull corporate chain businesses, though, when you understand them as the ruins of the future (or the "ruins of the unsustainable," as Bruce Sterling characterizes the 21st century). One of Jane Jacobs' most interesting points in The Death and Life of Great American Cities was that "cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them." Reflecting on the history of vital cultural spaces in expensive global cities, it was necessary for gluts of building use types to fail and become cheap so that subcultures could then use them unprofitably. Paradise Garage, a birthplace of NYC house music during the '70s and '80s, was actually a parking garage before it became a club, and now it's a Verizon warehouse again. The cosmic ballet goes on.
Today's Bank of America could be tomorrow's art gallery or club, and probably will be. We just have to build them with enough flexibility to fail interestingly.
Reads (Weird-Future-of-NYC edition):
A cryptic but seemingly serious proposal to turn Flushing, Queens into a high-tech megacity
How cities are increasingly like malls, which are both increasingly like airports (the Dubai duty free is everywhere). "Tens of thousands of people often work, live and play in a single megastructure, without ever having to leave."
I can't wait to read Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, New York 2140, which extrapolates rising sea levels and the financialization of everything 100 years into Manhattan's future (also, "cli-fi" is a literary genre, cool)
Until next time,
Drew