Whenever I leave my hometown of Manhattan these days, I am always reminded of what a safe, insular and gentrified bubble New York City has become. Gone are the days of the meat-market tranny hookers, Times Square street hustlers, Hell's Kitchen muggers and Alphabet City's pot-selling bodegas with their cashiers enclosed behind bulletproof plexi for protection. I no longer see cops parked late night in Tribeca alleys smoking reefer. The super-tenacious, now aging, Washington Square Park drug dealers are still hanging on, although they seem like fish out of water as they try to "transition" their business with the city's ongoing upgrades and park renovations. Not knowing quite where to lurk anymore with the park closed and the fountain under construction, they shuffle back and forth amidst the joggers and dog walkers hoping to squeeze what cash they can out of the NYU kids.
The grit that has been sandpapered out of New York City during the past 15 years has taken with it much of the underground creative community. Gone are the crazy 20-year-old art kids jamming on acid at clubs in the middle of the night, performing and making art, music and trouble. No more graffiti-ed and wheat-pasted walls below Houston Street, little local one-off shops, art exhibition spaces and storefront studios, all of which have been replaced by banks, condos and chain stores. The art busine$$ may still be booming in New York City, but the creation of groundbreaking culture and art in our city is a thing of the past. Young artists these days have been forced to take their mischief and wild experimental energy elsewhere as they can't afford to live on the island of Manhattan any more. This huge loss for our great city cannot be underestimated, and I think its effect on New York's character will become more and more evident as time passes.
Hopping across the bridge, curious to sniff around Bushwick the other day, I couldn't help feeling nostalgic. I was meeting a friend for lunch on Wyckoff Avenue at the lone, yummy and cool restaurant in the nabe, Northeast Kingdom. It had no sign out front but was marked by a painting of a deer above the door and was packed inside with hipsters. Around the corner I noticed a tortilla factory blasting music and a storefront selling live chickens and rabbits. (Believe it or not, I remember when you could buy a live chicken on Broome Street and West Broadway). Further down the block, industrial buildings were colorfully tagged, stenciled and painted by artists with names like Judith Supine, Bast, Ripo, Pufferella, Dan Witz, UFO, Dark Cloud, MANMAN, Rubin, ILOVEMYBOO, Gore B, Ollie Dior, Chris Stain, Bloke, C215, Best, and populated with creative young kids who have flocked here to live and make art for the same reason we were all drawn to downtown New York in the old days -- really cheap rent.
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