A city of workers and eccentrics...

Shortly after I wrote my last post, I found the cover article of July's Harpers Magazine, called "Death of a Great American City." Kevin Baker wrote this article, and while I think he very nicely articulates the concerns I have about the city losing its character by economically unsustainable for artists and creatives, I think he also gives way to the nostalgia and impracticality that tarnishes the arguments I would like to make.

Baker tries to strike a balance, but often ends up damning development on the whole, and draws on no data and loads of undocumented nostalgia.

In one quote, he does perfectly articulate my concerns and desire for the city.

But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a place of school-teachers and garbage men and janitors, or people who wear buttons reading IS IT FASCISM YET? -- as one woman in my neighborhood has for decades, even as she grows steadily grayer and more stooped. A city of people who sell books on the street-- and in their own shops. A city of street photographers, and immigrant vendors, and bus drivers with attitudes, and even driven businessmen and hedge fund operators. All helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they do to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable.

And earlier in his story he articulated it slightly differently, focusing on the experience in the street.

It is through all these interactions, multiplied a million times, that a truly great city is made. The street life--the warrens of little shops and businesses that once sustained our neighborhood in the sort of 'exhuberant diversity' that Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite for a successful city--is being eradicated as well: the botanica on 96th Stree that Susan, my sister-in-law, always visisted to buy her healing herbs when she was in town; the Indians spice shop next to it, with the protective elephant-headed idol of Ganesh mounted outside. ...

... These stores, like so many others in my neighborhood, ahve not been replaced. They are simply... gone.

He also provided an interesting history of the city in the 60's and 70's that I was previously unfamiliar with. Basically, the decline in the port system (as container shipping began), and a decline in manufacturing in the Northeast US, meant a decline in industrial jobs just as a large number of African Americans and Hispanics arrived in the city.

The great threat to the New York of the Sixties and Seventies--and many other cities in the Northeast and Miwest--was considered to be the flood of largely unskilled, uneducated African Americans from the South and Hispanics from the islands. (He goes on to address the racism in this.)... 

But the 'peasants' pour in just as the hopeful and the desperate had always come, though they encountered, for the first time in New York's history, a city that no longer had many entry-level industrial jobs to offer them. The result was perverse, a New York that was home to more than a million welfare recipients and featured almost full employment for everyone else; a city where 7 milion to 14 million square feet of office space--the size of the entire downtown of a metropolis such as Kansas City or Pittsburgh--was built in New York every year from 1967 to 1970, as Ric Burns and James Sandeers notes in their history of the city.