Union Square and the Paradox of Public Space

At 6 o’clock on a weekday evening in early July, Union Square is most alive. The small, oval park at its center, three acres of green nestled between four broad streets, throbs with music and conversation, with voices rising and swelling to join the steady drone of traffic on all sides. You see children swinging under their parents’ eye in small playgrounds on the park’s northern edge; at the southern end you pick your way carefully through a swarm of a couple hundred young men and women who are milling around the wide, shallow stone steps leading up to the park’s main entrance. Tourists browse the T-shirt and art vendors’ tables while other shoppers stop at the Greenmarket on their way home, and every fifth person in the crowd is making a call or reading a text message on their cell phone. The crowd skews young, mostly under thirty-five, their faces are mainly white but also black and brown and several shades of tan, and you hear a girl ask, “Where are you? Are you in front?” in Japanese on her phone. Next to the subway entrance a lone political demonstrator uses a portable loudspeaker to make a speech against the U.S. president; nearby, under a statue of George Washington on horseback, two New York City police officers, also on horseback, interrupt their early evening patrol to chat with a park cleaner in a bright red uniform and a private security guard in navy pants and a matching cap. So many people are sitting on green wooden benches under the trees that you can hardly find two seats together. Most of the occupants are watching the parade of passersby; some are listening through earbuds to portable music players, others read a book, and one or two doze. In the fenced-in dog run, pets frisk about while their owners laugh and talk. A trio of young musicians sits on benches in the middle of the park, setting up a cello and two violins for an informal outdoor rehearsal.

How Brooklyn Became Cool

It’s one o’clock in the morning on a warm October night, and the streets of northern Brooklyn are eerily deserted. The hulks of warehouses and the chimney of the old Domino sugar refinery stand guard along the waterfront, while grim industrial buildings hunker down in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Steel gates hide the windows of small plastics and metalworking shops. Nearby tenements are silent and dark. You’re wide awake, though, driving through the darkness on Kent Avenue, bumping over warped asphalt and steering around potholes. You’re circling Williamsburg, looking for the neighborhood that made Brooklyn cool. First you pass the Northside, the original center of Brooklyn’s hipster culture, a cluster of art galleries, cafés, bars, and boutiques around the subway station at North Seventh Street and Bedford Avenue. Then you pass the Southside, where French bistros and Japanese hair salons have recently joined yeshivas and bodegas, and artists and graduate students are a noticeable presence on the streets. Ahead of you stretch neighborhoods that have been predominantly black since after World War II but are now rapidly gentrifying and becoming socially and ethnically more diverse—that is, richer and whiter: Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill. The old Brooklyn Navy Yard sits vast and uninhabited just one block to the west. A few blocks beyond that, brownstone townhouses sell for a million dollars and up. Navigating solo through this dark landscape, you don’t see any sign of life. But when you turn onto the wider roadway of Flushing Avenue, you meet up with men and women walking in couples and groups of four. They are Hasidic Jews, women with heads covered in wigs and scarves, skirts below their knees, and black-hatted men wearing long black overcoats. Sabbath began at sundown. Because driving is prohibited then, any believers who are out on the street at this hour must find their way home on foot. After you pass the Hasidim, you find a few more people walking on the street; these men are wearing tight jeans and the women are in short skirts.

A Tale of Two Globals: Pupusas and IKEA in Red Hook

It’s a Saturday afternoon in mid-July and the city is swooning in 96-degree heat and fearsome humidity. You think it will be cooler out on the water than in the subway, so you line up at the Wall Street pier in Lower Manhattan to take the free water taxi across the East River to Red Hook, on the Brooklyn waterfront. The ride is sponsored by IKEA, the Swedish big-box chain that opened its first New York City outpost in Red Hook a few weeks earlier. Because the neighborhood is notoriously difficult to reach on public transportation and IKEA is hoping to lure shoppers whose apartments are starved for Scandinavian modern couches but who don’t own cars, the store has decided to sponsor water taxis from Manhattan. They have a system to discourage free riders from Brooklyn. You get your hand stamped before you walk onto the ferry so the taxi company’s employees, on IKEA’s instructions, can refuse to carry any passenger on the return trip who didn’t come to Brooklyn to make a purchase. Sitting on the top deck of the ferry, you’re caught up in an air of joyful anticipation. The small boat is full, with more than thirty passengers, some of them young children and their parents, all smiling and laughing from the unusual pleasure of being out on the water on a sunny afternoon, and from the pleasure of a shopping trip as well. The kids snap photos with cell phone cameras, everyone admires the Statue of Liberty on the other side of the harbor, and a few passengers point out the artificial waterfalls designed by the Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson that have been installed on the river for the summer as a public art project. Though the ride takes less than ten minutes, it’s the kind of entertainment New Yorkers love: a chance to act like tourists on the town.

Introduction The City That Lost Its Soul

In the early years of the twenty-first century, New York City lost its soul. Some people doubt that the city ever had a soul, because New York has always grown by shedding its past, tearing down old neighborhoods and erecting new ones in their place, usually in a bare-faced struggle for financial gain. Others just shrug because, today, all big cities are erasing their gritty, bricks-and-mortar history to build a shiny vision of the future. Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities are clearing out the narrow, rundown alleys in their center, removing longtime residents to the distant edges of town, and replacing small, old houses with expensive apartments and new skyscrapers of spectacular design. Liverpool and Bilbao have torn down their abandoned waterfronts and turned aging docks and warehouses into modern art museums. In London, Paris, and New York artists and gentrifiers move into old immigrant areas, praising the working-class bars and take-out joints but overwhelming them with new cafés and boutiques, which are soon followed by brand-name chain stores. A universal rhetoric of upscale growth, based on both the economic power of capital and the state and the cultural power of the media and consumer tastes, is driving these changes and exposing a conflict between city dwellers’ desire for authentic origins—a traditional, mythical desire for roots—and their new beginnings: the continuous reinvention of communities. To speak of a city being authentic at all may seem absurd. Especially in a global capital like New York, neither people nor buildings have a chance to accumulate the patina of age. Most residents are not born there, neither do they live in the same house for generations, and the physical fabric of the city is constantly changing around them. In fact, all over the world, “Manhattanization” signifies everything in a city that is not thought to be authentic: high-rise buildings that grow taller every year, dense crowds where no one knows your name, high prices for inferior living conditions, and intense competition to be in style.

Living Local in the East Village

You’re waiting to meet the Japanese college students at 10 A.M. on the corner of Broadway and Astor Place. It’s a cool and drizzly day in June, passersby are buttoned up against the chill, and at this early hour downtown doesn’t have its usual buzz. When the students show up, you’re surprised to see they’re all young women, led by a middle-aged male professor who has some contacts in the city. They’re excited to be in New York, especially in Greenwich Village, and they whip out their digital cameras when you show them the colored tiles that Jim Power, the otherwise unemployed “Mosaic Man,” has spent the past twenty years gluing onto lampposts in a single-handed effort to beautify the neighborhood. They giggle in soft, high voices when you point out the Japanese pastry shop around the corner. “Beard Papa’s,” you hear them say to each other. They know the name of this chain from home. But they don’t know about local institutions such as Astor Place Hair Stylists, which occupies a basement in the building behind you, with its multiethnic team of eighty barbers who use their old-school expertise with the clippers to style the most eye-catching, gravity-defying Mohawks of the Lower Manhattan punk scene. In the 1980s young men used to make the pilgrimage to Astor’s barbers in the East Village from the suburbs and overseas, walking in with a shaggy mane and walking out with a towering crest, sprayed and lacquered and often dyed an unnatural black or red or green that went much better with their black leather jacket and metal studs. Opened in 1945 by an Italian American barber, the salon is still family owned and run. Now it shares the block with a branch of Cold Stone Creamery, the ice cream chain, Arche, the French shoe store chain, and a big Barnes & Noble bookstore. Neither do the Japanese students know that the Walgreen’s drugstore on the corner was until recently Astor Wines.

The Billboard and the Garden: A Struggle for Roots

The weather is unusually warm for a Saturday morning in mid-October, and the clear horizon of the sky stretches blue and wide above this distant patch of Brooklyn. To the southeast, high above the elevated subway tracks, a jet plane climbs on the first part of its journey, away from Kennedy Airport in Queens, its real point of departure, but also far away from the two-story, redbrick houses and vacant lots of East New York, long known as one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. When you get out of the subway train at Van Siclen Avenue and walk down the stairs from the elevated tracks, you feel a bit lost in the shadows and the absence of shops, except for a small corner bodega, on the quiet street. But a short, smiling woman in her sixties, who gets off the train with you, sees that you don’t look black or Hispanic and senses that you don’t live in the neighborhood; she invites you to walk with her. Improbably, on the next block, almost directly under the tracks, three lush, green gardens, carefully tended and fenced, come into view. Inside, planted in neat rows, green beans and mint wait to be picked. Small onions peek through the earth, ready to be dug before the first frost. A few peppers fl ash slivers of bright red through the leaves of tomato and squash plants that have already seen the last harvest of the year. These oases represent the time and effort of a small number of community gardeners who live in the neighborhood. Since the 1990s they have been created and maintained by the gardeners’ hard work and earnest planning, both subsidized and jeopardized by the city and state governments; like the Red Hook food vendors, they are a tangible symbol of the constant struggle to put down roots in the city, especially if you don’t have much money. The helpful woman whom you have just met invites you to visit one of the gardens, a small lot of about one-third of an acre.

Why Harlem Is Not a Ghetto

It’s noon on a warm Saturday in the middle of June, and a bright sun is shining on Settepani Bakery’s sidewalk café at 120th Street and Lenox Avenue. You didn’t think to bring sunscreen to eat brunch in Harlem, so you choose a table under the red awning, put on your dark glasses, and settle down to read the menu. The small, square, white tables and lightweight aluminum chairs remind you of cafés in Italy or Greenwich Village, and the dishes on the menu also inspire dreams of other places. Smoked turkey panini with brie on pumpernickel bread. Mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil on rosemary focaccia. Bucatini pasta with an almond, basil, and tomato pesto. Cappuccino and latte, of course, but also decaf Masala chai. You understand why Settepani is popular among Harlem’s new movers and shakers. You’ve heard that Maya Angelou, the distinguished poet, playwright, and actor, who lives in a restored brownstone townhouse nearby, often has lunch here. The famous basketball champion and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been seen walking by. The restaurant’s website lists former president Bill Clinton, whose office is on 125th Street, as a corporate customer. And when your graduate students stop in for coffee while doing a research project for your class, they meet Daniel Tisdale, the founder and publisher of Harlem World magazine, who is having a business meeting a few tables away, and Eric Woods, the chief financial officer of Uptown magazine and cofounder of Harlem Vintage, the neighborhood’s first wine store. Harlem has other well-known restaurants: the venerable Sylvia’s, the soul food restaurant that is on every tourist itinerary and sells its own bottled sauces; M&G Diner, known for its smothered pork chops, collard greens, and candied yams; and Amy Ruth’s, offering dishes named for local celebrities, like the waffles and bacon that honor retired police chief Joseph Leake and the chicken and waffles that pay tribute to the Rev. Al Sharpton, a friend of the former owner.

Conclusion Destination Culture and the Crisis of Authenticity

When Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1960, death was all too evident around her. New York City’s port was shutting down, factories and neighborhoods hadn’t altered their look since the beginning of the century, and middle-class families were fleeing from declining public services and expanding dark ghettos to the suburbs. The city, it was clear, lay in the grip of two malevolent forces, government and developers, though Jacobs directed her ire at architects and bureaucrats, whose plans, she said, destroyed lively neighborhoods and extinguished all sparks of social life. In Jacobs’s view the monolithic office towers, large public housing projects, intrusive highways, and monumental cultural centers that marked postwar cities brought on a “great blight of dullness” and reduced residents to passive pawns. Followed to a logical extreme, these were not plans for growth; they were a design for catastrophe. The city’s life, on the other hand, required preserving the old streets, buildings, and blocks that seemed so old-fashioned, for these sustained the delicate fabric of social uses and cultural meanings that wove people together. On this authenticity the city’s future would depend. “Authenticity” was not a word in Jacobs’s vocabulary. She talked instead about density and diversity, about “character and liveliness,” and how to “avoid the ravages of apathetic and helpless neighborhoods.” For the most part, she advocated resisting overscale development and permitting good design of urban spaces to encourage community involvement. It is not clear that following her suggestions would have allowed cities to avoid the lack of investment in public institutions and the miscarriage of racial and social equality that depressed so many neighborhoods in the next generation. By now, though, we have enough critical distance from those neighborhoods to see them as “authentic,” and we can use our Jacobs-influenced vision to transform their authenticity into equity for all. We already use the streets and buildings to create a physical fiction of our common origins; now we need to tap deeper into the aesthetic of new beginnings that inspires our emotions.