Anyone who lives in a city for more than a few years has to be ready to face change.
Many of the buildings and businesses that seem an integral part of your life disappear just like the people in them.
The downtown Philadelphia of my childhood contained wonderful movie palaces (seating up to 2,000 people!) like the Fox Theater; a good half-dozen legitimate theaters that booked pre-Broadway try-outs of new plays and musicals; and Market Street East was lined with fantastic department stores like Lit Brothers. Gimbels and John Wanamaker.
Now they are all — with only a few exceptions — gone.
The swinging singles who sing Center City Philly’s praises these days have no idea of what they missed out on 40 or 50 years ago. They would be shocked (and maybe a little horrified) by the crowds of middle class people that once filled the streets there, shopping and entertaining themselves.
(What I wouldn’t give to make one more visit to the marvelously funky — and long gone — Germantown arthouse, the Bandbox, where I fell in love with foreign and classic movies as a teen!)
But that was then and this is now, and the current young generation can’t be expected to pine for my own lost Philadelphia.
These thoughts of urban nostalgia washed over me last weekend at Manhattan’s Film Forum as I watched Su Friedrich’s cranky — and willfully naive — documentary, “Gut Renovation,” about the changes in her Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood since the turn of the century.
Friedrich moved into one of the abandoned factory buildings in 1989 where she and other artists scored much cheaper rents than they could find in Lower Manhattan, and yet were only one stop away from their old neighborhood on the L train.
What happened in Soho in the 1980s and the Lower East Side in the 1990s — an influx of brave bohemians followed by hipsters with more money and then real estate developers — happened in Williamsburg in the ‘00s.
Instead of seeing the writing on the wall — and being grateful for 20 years of cheap rent and lots of space — Friedrich got out her video camera and began aggressively shooting the newcomers to her neighborhood. Although the rundown industrial/warehouse district near the Williamsburg riverfront was hardly nirvana, the threat of its loss made the resident/filmmaker increasingly angry and stubborn.
Rather than start looking for another affordable place — and perhaps considering buying rather than renting if she was determined to spend decades in the same spot — Friedrich went into lockdown mode and simply stewed in her own juices.
I hate the word “entitlement” but it does seem apt for the urban artists with blinders who think the down-and-out neighborhoods they move into will never change (they don’t seem to think too much about the working class and middle class people who had to leave cities behind when all of those funky factory buildings shut down).
Watching “Gut Renovation” is like spending an hour and a half with your least rational New York City friend — someone who spends more time kvetching than taking any concrete action.
Thanks so much for your comments, Su.
While I disagreed with much of your film, it made me think a lot – more than I can say of 90 percent of the movies in the marketplace. It made me ponder my own life spent in cities and the role real estate played in where I lived and for how long.
I hope that urban artists will see your movie as a call to action before things go south in their neighborhoods. The New York artistic community I’m most familiar with – theater companies – has changed radically over the past 30 years because of real estate issues. The only ones from back then that have survived bought rather than rented. One of my favorite companies – the WPA on 23rd Street – was a renter swept away in the gentrification of Chelsea despite playing a vital role for many years.
I’m afraid that cities took a perhaps killing blow – in terms of being affordable for middle class and working class people – when so many manufacturing jobs left the country forever. The lives my parents led in Philadelphia from the 1940s through the 1970s would no longer possible.
Oh, I’m sorry, but I can’t resist also replying to this gem:
“Rather than start looking for another affordable place — and perhaps considering buying rather than renting if she was determined to spend decades in the same spot”
Have you read any of the many articles that have been published in the last few years about the lack of affordable space in NY? Since you think I was too stupid to consider buying in the same spot, then you do the math for me: We paid $4,000/mo. for 3,500 sq. ft. (plus $5,000 yr in real estate taxes, something which the new condo owners don’t have to pay because the city, in their infinite wisdom, gave them 25 yr tax abatements.) New rents were circa $4,000/mo. for 400 sq. ft. And if I’d been smart enough to think about buying? I could have paid, for example, $650,000 for 700 sq. ft. What a great deal! Why didn’t I think of that?
The city (as I say in the film, un-naively) ignored the recommendations of its own City Planning Office in 1992–which said that the industries in WB should be supported–because even then they knew they wanted to do the rezoning. In fact, back in the 1970′s, they were already leaving the neighborhood to fall into decline by not putting money into it as they were into other “better” neighborhoods. To some extent, the change in WB was due to gentrification, but it’s more a story of developers and development (as they choose to call it.) It was a planned action, from the top down, to force out the old (and btw, that means many more Hispanic, Polish and Italian multi-generational residents that artists) and bring in the new: people who pay 7 to 8 times (when renting) what the older tenants paid. Many of the artists who moved into industrial bldgs could do that because the city’s policies had already driven out the industries and emptied the bldgs. I am not naive; I grew up on the south side of Chicago, where I experienced white flight first hand–we didn’t move, but many around us did. I don’t think cities are static, but I do know the difference between neighborhoods evolving and changing in more organic ways and ones changing because the rich and powerful force a change, and that’s what happened in Chicago in the 1960′s, and in WB in the 1990′s. And the developers and politicians love it when people shrug and say, “Oh well, things change….” because they don’t want working class people (in which I include many artists, who work relatively low paying jobs to survive)to call them on what they’re doing. If you think what happened to NY in the hands of Robert Moses was a result of gentrification, then you’ll think that’s what made WB change, and you’ll think it’s okay. I happen to think that Moses and Bloomberg have shaped the city in their own manner with gross disregard for the needs and feelings of the people of the city.