The Early Gentrifier: Weaving a Nostalgia Narrative on the Lower East Side

Home , Colors (restaurant), Lower East Side, Residential area

Richard E. Ocejo∗ Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY)

Focusing on the consequences of social and cultural displacement from commercial gentrification, this article examines the perspective of “early gentrifiers” decades after they moved into the neighborhood. Based on ethnographic data collected on the Lower East Side—a gentrified neighborhood with new bars—this article ana- lyzes how new nightlife triggered early gentrifiers to weave a “nostalgia narrative” from their experiences. They use this narrative to construct a new local identity as the neighborhood’s symbolic “owners,” which helps them in their collective action against bars. Their narrative, however, contains internal contradictions that reveal several issues with their new identity. I argue that a cultural analysis of early gentrifiers reveals significant social configurations in gentrified neighborhoods and informs us of the relationship between ideology and action.

I am aware that it is childish, but sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter... - Joseph Mitchell1

COMMERCIAL GENTRIFICATION AND THE EARLY GENTRIFIER

An understudied facet of gentrification is the cultural impacts of its commercial devel- opments. Commercial gentrification refers to new establishments with particular goods and services—such as clothing boutiques, art galleries, cafes, restaurants, and bars—that open to satisfy the needs of middle-class gentrifiers (Deener 2007; Levy and Cybriwsky 1980; Lloyd 2006; Patch 2008; Zukin et al. 2009). It has a mutually reinforcing relationship with residential gentrification in that these businesses also attract new residents (Chernoff 1980). As with residential gentrification, new businesses raise property values and rents and threaten to displace existing establishments (see Atkinson 2000; Marcuse 1986; Smith 1996; Smith and Williams 1986). But commercial gentrification also causes social and cultural displacement for existing residents as new businesses attract new uses and users to the neighborhood. Social displacement refers to “the replacement of one group by another...in terms of prestige and power...the ability to affect decisions and

∗ Correspondence should be addressed to Richard E. Ocejo, Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY), 899 Tenth Avenue, Room 520.12, New York, NY 10019; [email protected] City & Community 10:3 September 2011 doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6040.2011.01372.x C 2011 American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

285 CITY AND COMMUNITY policies...to set goals and priorities, and to be recognized by outsiders as the legitimate spokesman for the area” (Chernoff 1980: 204; see also Martin 2007). Cultural displacement refers to the replacement of a group’s everyday way of life in the neighborhood with that of another (Jackson 2003; Levy and Cybriwsky 1980; Pattillo 2007). Both forms of displacement threaten the local identities of existing residents. Many gentrification studies focus on existing, working-class, low-income residents and their perspectives toward new residents and businesses (Jackson 2003; Levy and Cybriwsky 1980; Pattillo 2007; Perez 2004; Smith 1996). Others have looked at a broad array of gentrifiers (i.e., artists, social preservationists, gays and lesbians, Whites and Blacks, and owners of boutiques and cafes) and focused on their reasons for moving into and opening up businesses in the neighborhood as well as their perspectives toward and relationships with existing residents (Brown-Saracino 2009; Butler 1997; Caulfield 1994; Deener 2007; Lloyd 2006; Patch 2008; Pattillo 2007; Rose 1984; Sibalis 2004). Rather than a single event, gentrification is a gradual process, often with identifiable “stages” or “waves” (Clay 1979; Lees 2000; see also Hackworth and Smith 2001). The neighborhood’s conditions at the time of their arrival, as well as their own social position within the neighborhood, help to shape gentrifiers’ perspectives toward its gentrification (Brown-Saracino 2010: 170–1). In her discussion of the “marginal gentrifier” concept— an early account of the variety of gentrifier types—Rose (1984) states that scholars must continue to characterize people in gentrifying neighborhoods by their motives and interests (also see Caulfield 1994). Despite the increasing amount of literature on gentrifiers, underexplored is their perspective toward the gentrified neighborhood, their atti- tudes toward its people, their understanding of their own role in its gentrification, and the bases of their local identities, decades after they moved there. How do early gentrifiers construct new local identities? What sorts of ideological tools do they use while under the threat of social and cultural displacement, and in what ways do they use these tools? Based on ethnographic data collected on the gentrified Lower East Side of Manhattan, this article reveals how “early gentrifiers” use a “nostalgia narrative” to construct a new local identity as the neighborhood’s symbolic “owners” (Deener 2007). They then use this narrative and identity in their organized protests against bars and nightlife. A nostalgia narrative is an example of “collective memory” (Halbwachs 1992; also see Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) or a social construction of the past that is specifically triggered by a sense of loss. The Lower East Side’s early gentrifiers see new bars and nightlife as threats to the sociocultural environments that they remember, the people and places that they were strongly attached to, the public spaces they inhabited, and their future, or “interactional potential” (Milligan 1998), in the neighborhood. Their nostalgia narrative consists of their personal experiences with the neighborhood’s gritty past, ethnic and cultural diversity, and creativity and creative production, all of which they identify as “authentic.” This community ideology contrasts with their understanding of new residents and visiting nightlife revelers, whom they identify as homogenous (and homogenizing), transient and uncreative consumers, and “inauthentic.” On the basis of this narrative, early gentrifiers construct their new local identity and protest bars, despite both having internal contradictions. I argue that a cultural analysis of early gentrifiers reveals not only how local identities are shaped, but also how social power is configured in gentrified neighborhoods.

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NOSTALGIA AND GENTRIFIERS

An important aspect of people’s reactions to displacement, or more generally to discon- tinuities in their attachment to place (Milligan 1998), is their use of nostalgia. Nostalgia represents a very powerful feeling toward change, and specifically toward loss (Turner 1987). But while people often quickly dismiss nostalgia as overly romantic and a passing emotion, it is in fact strongly connected with one’s identity and sense of community (Davis 1979). A nostalgia narrative is an imagined story of the past that deliberately selects certain elements from personal history while excluding others to construct a version that is more favorable than the reality. People weave a nostalgia narrative when they sense that their attachments to a place and their future in a place are under threat. Despite its internal contradictions, people use a nostalgia narrative to create new identities that establish them as significant actors in the place’s past and present (Milligan 2003). Neighborhoods are important places in cities, where people weave a tale based on nostalgia. In their research on Red Hook, Kasinitz and Hillyard (1995) show how “old- timers,” or longtime working-class residents, tell a “tale” of their waterfront neighborhood’s past that highlights a sense of solidarity and economic self-sufficiency, as it is going through a present period of decline. Red Hook’s diminished economic vitality led to an influx of poor Puerto Rican and African-American residents into the neighborhood’s substantial stock of public housing. This transformation forced coexistence between new minorities and the largely racially intolerant White working-class old-timers, who understood the former’s influx as a threat to their stake in the neighborhood’s sociocultural environment and their ability to control its image. But while Red Hook’s old- timers express dissatisfaction with the neighborhood’s present, they ignore and down- play key aspects of its past. For instance, old-timers often condemn the illegal activity that takes place in the housing projects, but omit the violence, drugs, and organized crime that plagued the neighborhood of their youth. They use this constructed tale of nostalgia to counter the present and assert the value of what outsiders saw as a slum. Gentrification scholars also identify the use of nostalgia among social actors. In her study of the gentrifying Black Chicago neighborhood of North Kenwood-Oakland, Pattillo’s (2007) participants fondly recall a time of community, shopping, and entertainment before gentrification. Even though they were surrounded by gangs, poverty, and violence in the 1970s and 1980s, they saw their own community as an “island” amid chaos (72–3). As new middle-class residents arrived and threatened to residentially, socially, and culturally displace them, existing residents relied on their longstanding positive community to stake their claim for its future. Even recent gentrifiers use nostalgia and their relatively short existence in the neighborhood to distinguish themselves from each other. Lloyd (2006) shows how Wicker Park’s artist gentrifers protest when MTV chooses the trendy neighborhood to film its reality show The Real World (143–9). In doing so, he argues, they fail to recognize the similarities that exist between them and the show’s cast members, both of whom have come to the neighborhood with hopes of achieving a degree of fame. They also criticize the neighborhood’s newer non-artist “yuppie” residents’ and visitors’ unhip, consumer-driven lifestyles that threaten their sense of neighborhood cool. Although they recognize their lengthier tenancy, gentrifiers primarily base their criticism of newer residents on the different lifestyles of their peers who occupy different status groups.

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Brown-Saracino’s (2004; 2007) “social preservationists” are a distinct group of gentrifiers who work to prevent the displacement of select groups of “authentic” longtime residents and their “traditional” cultures. In fact, social preservationists are so transfixed by the communities they have selected that they ignore or deny the existence of their own communities and networks. They are aware of their status as gentrifiers, but do not acknowl- edge the inherent contradiction in their ideology—that is, combining a desire to move to a gentrifying neighborhood with a desire to prevent its gentrification (11–12). They do not recognize that they are the threats to their own notions of authenticity. In a sense, they are “nostalgic” for an idealized time period, but it is one that they never actually experienced. Early gentrifiers use nostalgia differently, which stems from their distinct position between lifelong and longtime low-income, working-class residents and the late gentrifiers and new residents who confront a significantly different neighborhood. On the one hand, early gentrifiers have lived in the neighborhood for long enough to have experienced its period as a working-class area and a disinvested slum. In that time, they have established a strong sense of community in the neighborhood. Early gentrifiers possess a high amount of place attachment that is based on personal experiences, relationships, and social networks. They see themselves as “old-timers,” even though they voluntarily moved to the neighborhood as young adults. On the other hand, early gentrifiers generally possess greater amounts of educational and economic, not to mention cultural and social, capital, and hold higher status po- sitions in comparison to existing low-income residents. As a result, early gentrifiers are in a more favorable position than lifelong low-income residents to deal with the harms of gentrification, such as an escalated standard of living. This social position gives these early gentrifiers a unique perspective on both the past and contemporary neighborhood that rests on their own experiences. The Lower East Side’s early gentrifiers understand the neighborhood’s new bars and nightlife as threats to the “authentic” neighborhood that they recall. As opposed to social preservationists, early gentrifiers only use “authentic” to describe their own experiences and interpretations of community in their nostalgia narrative. Early gentrifiers understand existing, working-class residents from their early days in the neighborhood as authentic insofar as they were part of their experiences and their own communities. They also describe certain artifacts of the physical environment that reflect their experiences or perceptions of the Lower East Side’s historical legacy as authentic (i.e., “diverse” tenements for immigrants). In this sense, they are similar to Brown-Saracino’s (2009) “social homesteaders,” or gentrifiers who are “less hesitant than social preservationists about making a space for themselves alongside longtimers” (10) but are still wary of advancing gentrification. But the existing history and embedded experience in the neighborhood of early gentrifiers, which represent the elements they use to weave together a narrative, distinguishes them from social homesteaders. Displacement and discontinuity, however, has not necessarily meant residential eviction for early gentrifiers who have remained in the neighborhood. Rather, it has primarily meant the threat of displacing them as social authorities in the neighborhood and displacing their attachment to its places. Early gentrifiers on the Lower East Side use their nostalgia narrative to create a new local identity (Milligan 2003), which they express through their collective action against bars. Based on their narrative, the Lower East Side is “theirs” because of their commitment to the neighborhood during the period of little investment and government neglect

288 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE in the 1970s and 1980s (Mele 2000; Smith 1996). In the Los Angeles area of Venice that he examines, Deener (2007) shows how new gentrifiers fight to brand a popular commercial street as a symbol of the independent, anticorporate, and bohemian community. He considers their efforts to be a form of “symbolic ownership,” or the work that local groups do to “maintain control over the relationship between aesthetic presentation, public perception, and social and economic utility of a neighborhood location to the effect of closing off additional definitions and uses” (311). The Lower East Side’s early gentrifiers also symbolically own the neighborhood, but this claim is based on past experience. Their identity reflects a sense of loss rather than an initiative to exclude potential threats. They use their narrative of hard work, tenure, and claims of authenticity to assert that they “still own” the neighborhood, counter the new images and behaviors of bars and revelers, and protest bars. In other words, their ideology serves as a basis for collective action. In gentrified neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, early gentrifiers and newcomers represent a social configuration of cohort replacement (see Elias and Scotson 1965). Tension between established groups and newcomers, of course, is hardly unique to people in gentrified neighborhoods or even urban environments. Nor are early gentrifiers unique as a group in conceiving of a neighborhood as “theirs” (as we saw above, existing and new residents make the same claim). However, not all social groups use such an ideology for action. The nostalgia narrative is not just a tale that early gentrifiers tell, nor is it only the basis of a new local identity. It also fuels a set of actions, including anti-nightlife protest.

THE THREAT OF NIGHTLIFE: SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, AND METHODS

Several scholars have documented the Lower East Side’s gentrification, which began in the 1970s and 1980s (Abu-Lughod 1994; Mele 2000; Sites 2003). Smith (1996) uses the Lower East Side as his chief case in his well-known characterization of gentrification as an invasion of middle-class “pioneers” into the “frontier” of the disinvested urban downtown. Few scholars, however, have examined the commercial dimension of its gentrification (see Zukin and Kosta 2004 for an exception). Like its “frontier” spaces, the Lower East Side’s “frontier” time of the night has also been settled by business interests and new users (Melbin 1987). The number of bars in the neighborhood more than doubled from 35 in 1985 to 76 in 1995.2 They doubled again to 144 in 2000 and then increased to 177 in 2005. In general, they followed gentrification’s “frontier line” (Smith 1996) that gradually moved eastward. As of 2008, there were 692 establishments with an on-premise liquor license—that is, any place where an alcoholic beverage may be purchased and consumed—within the 1.8-square-mile area of the Lower East Side, which includes bars, restaurants, clubs, lounges, cafes, and hotels.3 Many of these establishments are clustered in dense concentrations throughout the neighborhood. Like residential gentrification, commercial gentrification occurs in identifiable stages or waves (Zukin and Kosta 2004). Early gentrifiers initially opened new bars and other businesses (e.g., boutiques, galleries, cafes) on the Lower East Side for newcomers like them. They opened places in empty and abandoned storefronts that characterized the commercial landscape and next to the neighborhood’s existing bars and businesses for

289 CITY AND COMMUNITY low-income and ethnic residents, which early gentrifiers also went to and shopped at. These establishments were mainly what Oldenburg (1989) calls “third places,” or local community-oriented gathering places. Early gentrifiers opened bars as the Lower East Side gained widespread media attention as a gentrifying neighborhood and an arts scene (Deutsche and Ryan 1984). Following this “first wave” of commercial “pioneers,” a “second wave” of entrepreneurs opened funky establishments that supported its emerging reputation as an edgy, alternative place for middle-class lifestyles (Mele 2000). In the 2000s, a “third wave” of entrepreneurs capitalized on this successful “representation of place” and opened nightlife establishments that catered to a broad range of young revelers and sold upscale and exclusive products. As a result of this proliferation, the Lower East Side has become a destination for nightlife for young residents in the neighborhood, visitors from around the city and metropolitan area (or “as if” tourists; Lloyd and Clark 2001), and tourists. It is often the case that these latter two groups only experience the neighborhood at night and in its nightlife establishments. This article draws on data collected from more than two years of ethnographic research and interviewing. I conducted participant observation in a wide array of settings on the Lower East Side from September 2006 to December 2008 in order to document the impact of nightlife on communities and cultures in the neighborhood. This article focuses on data acquired in those public settings where residents come together to protest bars and discuss strategies for their curtailment. These include monthly community board, community group, and police precinct community council meetings. Resi- dents cite quality-of-life issues caused by nightlife activity—persistent noise, crowds, litter, and damaged property—as their biggest problem with bars. These problems serve as re- current physical manifestations of gentrification. Residents literally see and hear what they perceive as threats to their attachments and identity in the neighborhood. But a closer look at how they discuss nightlife reveals a more complex understanding of gentrification and self-identity. The vast majority of residents who complain about nightlife activity and organize to prevent the further proliferation of bars are early gentrifiers who moved into the neighborhood during the start of its gentrification and who remain there today. Schwarz (2010) refers to this period as a “transitional moment,” or a time of balance between the “emerging and the residual.” Early gentrifiers are heterogeneous in the sense that they moved to the neighborhood for different reasons, work in a wide array of occupations, and have their own social networks within the neighborhood, with varying degrees of over- lap (Brown-Saracino 2009). They share in common a perspective toward the neighborhood that relies heavily on their past experience, particularly what they consider “authentic” about the Lower East Side, and that they use in their protests against nightlife proliferation. Many of the people who moved to the Lower East Side when it first gentrified have since moved away for various reasons, while some have died (drug abuse and HIV rates were very high in the neighborhood during the 1980s). Their perspective on the contemporary Lower East Side will differ considerably from those of early gentrifiers who stayed in the neighborhood and have continued to invest themselves in it. Obviously, people who moved away are no longer active in neighborhood issues and are difficult to contact (Atkinson (2000) refers to taking these individuals into account as “measuring the invisi- ble”; also see Newman and Wyly 2005). Bars and nightlife are not always the sole purposes for the meetings that residents hold and the community groups that they form. Indeed,

290 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE the Lower East Side has a long history of community activism, particularly in housing and land use, and many early gentrifiers are highly active in these issues. However, over the past decade, a number of community groups and block and tenant associations have either formed because of bar proliferation or added nightlife to their agendas. Liquor licensing issues take up a considerable amount of time for the area’s community board, and the police deal with quality-of-life complaints as a result of nightlife more than any other issue in the neighborhood. Even early gentrifiers who are active in longstanding issues, such as affordable housing and community gardens, consider bars and visiting revelers to be symbolic of the gentrification of their neighborhood and symptomatic of their tensions with newcomers. Overall, many early gentrifiers understand commercial nightlife to be the most severe daily reminder that their social authority over and cultural world within the neighborhood is under threat. I followed up this field work with 26 in-depth, semistructured interviews with early gentrifiers and lifelong residents, some of whom are community leaders (members of the community board or other local groups), neighborhood activists, and small business owners, including longtime bar owners, whose perspective toward the neighborhood and its changes is different from new bar owners. Questions focused on oral histories document- ing experiences in the neighborhood as well as feelings toward contemporary conditions. Each of the residents that I interviewed is at least 38 years old and has lived in the neighborhood for at least 15 years (four were born on the Lower East Side, and two of these moved away during the course of my research due to rising real estate prices). All but two are White (both non-Whites are Hispanic and lifelong residents), 15 are men, and 11 are women.

“OWNING” A NEIGHBORHOOD

RECALLING LIVED EXPERIENCES

An important aspect of early gentrifiers’ nostalgia narrative and basis for their identity as symbolic owners is their experience of the neighborhood at the time of their arrival. They particularly constructed place attachments amid the Lower East Side’s negative conditions, such as abandonment, neglect, and arson. Sophie is a photographer in her early 60s. Originally from Germany, she came to the United States in 1966. After 10 years living and working near the more upscale area of Midtown, she moved to the Lower East Side. She turned away from her work in chic fashion photography and was drawn to the gritty neighborhood and the murals that were painted on the sides of buildings. “The whole neighborhood reminded me of Berlin after the war,” she says. “It looked like it had been bombed. It was a war zone, it was a bloody war zone.” This was the period when the city neglected the neighborhood, landlords purposefully destroyed buildings, and there were not many businesses. For residents during this time, damage and destruction characterized the setting for their everyday lives. Early gentrifiers identify with having been in an extreme situation together. Virgil, a 53-year-old community activist who moved to the Lower East Side in the mid-1970s, explains this sentiment,

It used to be that this was an abandoned part of the city. The landlords, they were absent landlords, developers did not look at this neighborhood, the city did not

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care about the neighborhood, it was left to the people that lived here. The people that lived here appropriated it to themselves. They treated it as if it belonged to them.

Structural abandonment meant that newcomers experienced the neighborhood as “theirs,” despite legal rights to the contrary and the presence of existing residents. In facing these negative conditions, many people became politically active and took to community organizing. Along with the neighborhood’s art and music scene, these efforts were a way in which they established local roots. Physical conditions often necessitated such activity. Madeline, a community activist in her late 50s, explains the work they had to do:

Every other building was empty, or the ones that were occupied were abandoned by the owner of the building. And the tenants that were there stayed behind, lived with this mess, and it was a moment in which a lot of community organizing occurred in order for people to survive, basically.

Residents formed tenant, block, and community associations in order to address the problems caused by neglect. Without landlords or reliable maintenance workers, residents were left to handle their own basic services such as heat, water, and electricity. The city acquired hundreds of Lower East Side properties in the 1970s after tax ar- rears and foreclosures (Smith 1996), but at the time the buildings had little resale value and the neighborhood had little hope for redevelopment. On top of this, the city’s fiscal crisis prevented it from funding rehabilitation or upkeep. Instead, it formed legal arrangements with tenants to maintain the properties. Known as “homesteading,” the city allowed residents to remain in buildings rent-free, provided they worked for its maintenance. While most homesteaders were low-income Puerto Ricans, many were newcomers to the neighborhood who invested “sweat equity” instead of money (Von Hassell 1999). There were also various squatter groups who moved into abandoned buildings without any formal agreements with the city and risked eviction at any time. But squatters occupied and rehabilitated buildings that would have likely remained in states of disrepair. Finally, residents also developed community gardens in the rubble-strewn lots where buildings formerly stood (Schmelzkopf 1995; Zukin 2010). Early gentrifiers’ work in a neglected neighborhood helped foster their place attachment. And efforts such as community gardens helped foster a sense of creativity and creative production for these newcomers. Today, early gentrifiers feel that their community activism efforts prevented the neighborhood’s total decline. They weave their commitment to the slum into their narrative and to their new local identity. Sophie, who was a homesteader, states,

Because of this kind of pioneering work we did, any of this can exist. Because if the city had had their way, this was slated to be basically connected via the East River Park to Wall Street and it would be a residential area for Wall Street brokers. None of us would be here.4

By “any of this,” Sophie is referring to the built environment itself and the fact that the neighborhood exists at all, not its gentrification. And by “us,” she of course refers

292 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE to pioneers like her, not newcomers. Many scholars consider residents such as Sophie to be “pioneers” in the gentrification process, or a group that does not mind harsh conditions or impoverished neighborhoods (and sometimes seek them out) and who indicate to real estate and business interests that a neighborhood is suitable for redevelopment (Lloyd 2006; Smith 1996). But as Sophie demonstrates, residents understand their role and use the concept of “pioneering” in a different manner. They hardly see themselves as useful speculators for capitalist interests. To them, they are pioneers in the sense that they cultivated and cared for spaces that most people did not (Cornwell 2002, 2007). Nonhomesteaders and nonsquatters also express the ownerships identity. It was their experience of living among unwanted spaces—apartments, buildings, and sidewalks— and in a dangerous public environment that fostered feelings of proprietorship, despite a lack of actual ownership. Daniel is a 38-year-old activist, neighborhood historian, and walking tour guide, who was born on the Lower East Side. He lived in the neighborhood until spring 2008, when he could no longer afford the rent, and moved to Brooklyn, but he still works on the Lower East Side and is active in local issues. He recalls that “It was always like we owned the area, that the neighborhood actually policed itself, took care of itself, and [the police] never paid any attention if something was happening. And now all of a sudden the city starts taking it back.” Here, Daniel also demonstrates that residents lack culpability when it comes to gentrification, with the city “all of a sudden...taking it back” from them. As he and Sophie both imply, early gentrifiers feel the neighborhood was theirs because of the work they did amid abandonment. Based on this experience, residents identify as “pioneers” in the sense that they established their own long-lasting social roots in the neighborhood that they feel should be recognized today. This nostalgia narrative that underscores symbolic ownership omits several key historical facts. First, it does not include the city’s fiscal crisis and ongoing capital shifts away from urban downtowns during the 1970s. It is more likely that these two conditions, rather than the reparative actions of local residents, tremendously prevented development from taking place. Indeed, the Lower East Side has a long history of being targeted and threatened by developers. But such economic conditions as those produced by the Depression and World War II and such economic shifts as suburbanization played more significant roles in thwarting their efforts than residents’ protests, as important as these were (Mele 2000; Wasserman 1994). Second, it ignores the role that the work of early gentrifiers plays in gentrification, such as by making the neighborhood attractive with im- proved conditions and new amenities. As with other types of gentrifiers, the Lower East Side’s early gentrifiers do not mention the unintended consequences of their efforts. But through their work, gentrifiers often imperil the conditions they wish to see preserved (Brown-Saracino 2009). Finally, their narrative does not include the existing presence of low-income residents who had already been dealing with the stark realities of life in an underserved and under-resourced neighborhood. However, they weave these individuals into the narrative in other ways.

THE AUTHENTIC NEIGHBORHOOD: DIVERSITY AND CREATIVITY

Along with physical conditions, early gentrifiers also incorporate the neighborhood’s social and cultural conditions in their nostalgia narrative. They weave their personal experiences with existing residents, local characters, and local places with their experiences and

293 CITY AND COMMUNITY contributions to its creativity to claim that the neighborhood of this time and their communities were “authentic.” This claim forms a significant part of their new local identity as symbolic owners. Early gentrifiers frequently describe the Lower East Side’s population during their early years as diverse. But it is rarely the reason why they initially chose to live there. The most common explanation for why early gentrifiers came to the Lower East Side was its affordability. Denis, an early gentrifier and bar owner, is in his early 40s and moved to the neighborhood in the mid-1980s, to attend college. For him, the Lower East Side was both convenient and cheap,

Moved over here because I could afford it, in school. I came [here] on a lark, passed up a scholarship elsewhere, got here and realized I was not in Nebraska anymore and things were much more expensive. In Nebraska you could rent an apartment for like $80 a month back then. Here, I ended up getting a share for $250. Even then that was a bargain.

And for early gentrifiers who fight bars, the Lower East Side is still affordable because they have apartments that are rent regulated (through either rent control or rent stabi- lization). But these facts are not part of early gentrifiers’ nostalgia narrative, nor do they see themselves as part of a demographic trend of more Whites moving in that has led to a decline in racial and ethnic diversity. Looking back on early days in the neighborhood, diversity was not just more important than affordability, but also an important part of what made the neighborhood unique. Virgil lauds diversity as one of the neighborhood’s significant attributes,

People love this neighborhood for being a mixed neighborhood. Even when it was a ghetto it was unlike other ghettos. It was unlike the South Bronx, it was unlike parts of Brooklyn, Bushwick, wherever, and it was unlike Harlem, because it had, my block, was about one-third Black, one-third White, one-third Latino. At the time there weren’t any East Asians on the block, but in other parts of the neighborhood there were. And people of all colors appreciated that fact about the neighborhood, even though in large areas of life, of the life world, they were segregated.

Virgil bases his description of the neighborhood on what he remembers about his block. Many early gentrifiers share his imagination of the neighborhood as diverse. When we compare their statements to Census data from the time, the neighborhood as well as their own Census tracts were indeed very diverse, and became less so over time. Even though affordability was its key draw for them, diversity is what they encountered and what made the Lower East Side unique, irreplaceable, and unlike other neighborhoods. Although they often lament the lack of diversity among new residents and visiting revelers, they do not recognize their own role in attracting more White residents and visitors to the neighborhood. Along with its highly varied ethnic composition, early gentrifiers also point to the number of “characters” that were on the Lower East Side. They cite their experiences with these people as an important part of what made the neighborhood authentic. Many of these figures were homeless (by circumstance or personal choice), mentally ill, artists, eccentrics, or members of various marginal groups. In this sense, as public characters

294 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE they were more like Duneier’s (1999) homeless, African-American book vendors than Jacobs’s (1961) friendly, White ethnic grocers. They were “broken windows” (Wilson and Kelling 1982) in a neighborhood filled with them who, in the nostalgia narrative, gave the neighborhood charm and made it unique. Given its social isolation and formal neglect during this period, the Lower East Side was a place where such individuals were accepted and where public spaces were accessible to a wide array of groups for their own uses. Despite the negative conditions that surrounded their lives, early gentrifiers often speak fondly of these characters. Jamie moved to the Lower East Side while in her early 20s in the mid-1980s. For nearly 10 years she bartended at a local bar that mostly catered to homeless men who lived on the Bowery, the neighborhood’s Skid Row area. “We got a kick out of the old guys,” she says, “but we also felt very sorry for them in a very human way. We wanted to take care of them and give them a place where they could feel welcome.” Early gentrifiers often cite the neighborhood’s large population of public characters during this period for the charm and unpredictability they lent to daily life. For the most part, early gentrifiers describe characters such as the homeless in terms that demonstrate social distance. Denis remembers the neighborhood by using highly adventurous terms:

When I came to this neighborhood, it was like you were going to look around and find Colonel Kurtz somewhere. I mean, you were up the river. This was the most singular place in the United States of America. It felt like you were at the edge of the earth. As a bit of an action junkie, I can’t tell you how exciting it was. I’m in this place where anything in the world can happen to me tomorrow.

They saw the Lower East Side in general as a setting for such characters. Early gentrifiers also use the neighborhood’s public characters to characterize their experiences in the neighborhood as authentic. Virgil discusses the importance of local people in this characterization:

We’re losing the cultural character of the neighborhood. Instead of having these local places, the neighborhood has completely changed. Instead of having folks who hang out on the sidewalks, you have these non-local folks coming in and hanging out in front of the bars. You just don’t have the same character of the Lower East Side anymore. When you talk about the authentic experience, who’s to say what the authentic experience is? It’s gone! You can’t find those real folks anymore.

Here, Virgil particularly uses the word “real” to describe locality and its importance in characterizing authenticity. These statements provide greater nuance to the notion that “pioneers” work to rid the neighborhood of existing negative conditions such as home- lessness (Smith 1996; Vitale 2005). While many early gentrifiers took part in this effort, for others the neighborhood’s characters are intertwined with their personal experiences. But this is based on the harsh realities of life in a disinvested slum, such as alcoholism and substance abuse as well as mental illness, all taking place in public space. The Lower East Side’s public characters may have had substance abuse problems and personal issues, and early gentrifiers may not have socialized with them, but their presence in the neighborhood became a source of place attachment and an identifiable feature of everyday life. Although they originated from destructive processes of deindustrialization and a

295 CITY AND COMMUNITY reduction of public services, these characters were familiar and normal to residents, who have turned their interactions with them into meaningful social identities. As in many gentrifying neighborhoods, commercial establishments on the Lower East Side were important for early gentrifiers to establish a sense of community (Lloyd 2006; Patch 2008; Zukin et al. 2009). These included existing establishments for the neighborhood’s low-income and ethnic populations as well as new establishments that they opened for newcomers like them. Early gentrifiers drank in the existing bars that accepted them. Dave, who is now in his late 30s, remembers first visiting a Skid Row bar for homeless men with two of his friends when he was in college at New York University (NYU) in the late 1980s. “There were all these old guys in there,” he says, “but they didn’t bother us when they saw we were just there to drink. We liked it. It was a diverse place.” They understood these bars to be unique, authentic aspects of the neighborhood, and they relish their experiences in them. Denis recalls a similar existing bar:

They had this old, grumpy bartender, Tommy. He was a great guy. And this goes to singularity—we walk in there, this is probably about ‘85 or ’86, so we go in there, and being college kids, we asked, ‘What kind of beer do you have?’ And he says, ‘I got Schlitz.’ So we looked at him, and being college kids, we said, ‘Is it any good?’ And he looks at us and says, ‘It made Pennsylvania famous, didn’t it?’ So we had a Schlitz, and back then they had frosted mugs, and we sat down and all the old guys started telling stories, and it was romantic.

In short, early gentrifiers use an understanding of authentic community to protest new bars that is in part based on their past experiences within bars. But as we will see, they make clear distinctions between the old bars and the new ones. By moving into commercial storefronts new bars sometimes physically replace these establishments, or move in next door to them. Virgil describes,

The rising commercial rents pushing out all of the mom and pops, all of the old stores that were here, all the local services. They aren’t all gone, yet, and the process is itself a complex process because the rising commercial rents and the upscale residents are actually bringing in some local services, but I think we’re on a track which is going to lead to a net loss in local services.

“Mom and pop” shops, or independently-run stores with owners who everyone knows, evoke warm feelings of community and trust in a neighborhood, and early gentrifiers often contrast them with new bars. Patti, a musician in her early 40s who moved to the Lower East Side in 1984, focuses on the cultural institutions that she says were “Kicked out, replaced. I mean, we also lost like six avant-garde, little theatres and clubs from be- low Houston, which most of them became bars. One, the whole building was wrecked, so we don’t know if a bar will end up there.” The loss of both existing commercial establishments and early commercial establishments triggered feelings of nostalgia. For the Lower East Side’s early newcomers, these places were “theirs” and important parts of the authentic community that they created. Early gentrifiers also describe the Lower East Side as a creative place, in particular its well-documented art, music, and nightlife scenes (Hager 1986; Maffi 1995; Musto 1986; Patterson 2007; Taylor 2006). They saw them as more creative than commercial, which

296 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE factors significantly in their consideration of the neighborhood as authentic. As Daniel recalls,

[It was] very diverse; it was pretty incredible. Those artists actually lived in the neighborhood and participated in the communities here and got together and had meetings in the coffee shops and played at night and all went out together after and lived here and worked here and all that kind of stuff here.

The Lower East Side fits early gentrifiers’ understanding of an authentically creative community because it was a place where artists both lived and worked (Kostelanetz 2003; Lloyd 2006; Zukin 1983). Inexpensive rents provided affordable living and working spaces for artists and musicians (Cornwell 2002, 2007; Kapralov 1974; Patterson 2007). Apartments were also in close proximity to affordable commercial storefronts for galleries and performance spaces. Residents also feel that the abandoned built environment contributed to the type of art that people made. Daniel states, “There used to be just abandoned buildings and like we’d have a party at 27 East 6th Street, you know, be there at 7. Or it would be an impromptu art gallery for the evening, and then a party in the evening.” The lack of regulation by the city and police and the overall neglect of public spaces gave residents a sense of freedom in their artistic pursuits. Public art—mosaics, murals depicting harsh local conditions, graffiti of political statements, and theatrical and musical performances—thrived in spaces that residents appropriated as their own. They used walls as canvases and vacant lots as stages, and the neighborhood fostered unique forms of creative expression. While highly varied, the artists and artistic works from this period share in common their origins in the urban detritus of a neglected downtown. In this sense, early gentrifiers argue that the singular cultural production of the neighborhood was intertwined with its social conditions and built environment, which emphasizes its irreplaceability. Most importantly, early gentrifiers (even those who were not active in the art and music scenes) feel that new residents and visitors recognize neither the relationship between art and space nor the diversity and creativity that make the Lower East Side unique. Instead, they see the places where they congregate (bars) and the activity they engage in within them (alcohol consumption) as inappropriate and inauthentic uses of the neighborhood.

POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA NARRATIVES: LABELING NEWCOMERS, THE CONTRADICTIONS OF REPAIRED IDENTITIES, AND SOCIAL ACTION

The influx of new bars, nightlife activities, and visiting revelers triggered earlier gentrifiers’ sense of loss and the construction of their nostalgia narrative. Early gentrifiers claim that nightlife has displaced much of the social and cultural environment that they remember and threatens to displace what remains. The presence of new bars and revelers symbolizes that the neighborhood, which once only drew a small and self-selected array of visitors, has been opened up to a wide swath of outsiders. Virgil claims that bars have a special quality in the grander scheme of gentrification,

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Gentrification has done a lot of this work, but the nightlife scene, is a subset of gentrification, but it’s a special one, like gentrification on steroids. It’s just wild and uncontrolled, and it’s faster than any other kind of gentrification. And it doesn’t just bring in upscale people to reside here. It brings in all these non-local folks.

For Virgil, bars accelerate the process of gentrification by attracting “upscale” people as well as outsiders to the neighborhood. Nightlife conditions simultaneously cause early gentrifiers to construct a nostalgia narrative and threaten the ownership identity that stems from it. Early gentrifiers use the narrative and their new local identity to define themselves against “non-local” nightlife revelers. This group possesses specific shortcomings that disrupt the sociocultural environment and damage their “interactional potential” (Milligan 1998) in the neighborhood. As Guy states, “Today I feel that at times that there’s no part of this [the neighborhood] I belong to. And I’m white, and I’ve gone to college—University of Chicago, Purdue University—and I went through it. I’m a white person, a WASP, and they’re [newcomers and revelers] too fucking white for me.” In a way, the situation on the Lower East Side exemplifies the classic “invasion-succession” model of neighborhood change that members of the Chicago school developed (see Park 1952). However, in this case the conflicts are not between established groups and incoming immigrants. The conflicts on the Lower East Side are also not the reverse process of when middle-class groups move into and revitalize low-income neighborhoods (i.e., gentrification) (Palen and Lon- don 1984). The Lower East Side’s newcomers and visitors are often similar to early gentrifiers in terms of race, ethnicity, and social class—White, college-educated, middle-class. But to early gentrifiers, newcomers do not share their experiences in the neighborhood, nor are they necessarily incoming residents. To them, these “invaders” compromise the Lower East Side’s diversity and creativity, and therefore, its authenticity. Early gentrifiers characterize newcomers and revelers in two ways, both of which reveal much about and contradict their nostalgia narrative and new local identity. First, they see them as a transient population that does not care about or respect the existing sociocultural environment that they constructed. Early gentrifiers’ notion of “transience” must be contrasted with their conception of their own “permanence,” which dovetails with their sense of proprietorship and affects how they understand the social character of the new population. Most importantly, early gentrifiers argue that these newcomers are not younger versions of themselves. They see young people in the neighborhood as different, but not simply because they are a new cohort in the neighborhood or members of a younger generation. As a transient population, newcomers and revelers—whom early gentrifiers often conflate—do not respect the communities that they established or the neighborhood’s diversity and creativity. By contrast, early gentrifiers see themselves as permanent, with roots that are under threat of being torn out. But since they voluntarily moved into the neighborhood, they had to develop their permanent status. They, therefore, include a degree of “acceptance” by the existing population in their nostalgia narrative. Mary is 56 and moved to the Lower East Side in 1980 to live with her sister, who owned an art gallery in the neighborhood. A writer, Mary got an editorial job in publishing before becoming a teacher. When she describes her early days in the neighborhood, she contrasts it with its current condition,

298 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE

I don’t like it now. It’s just not a neighborhood for me anymore. It definitely was, and I felt we [she and her sister] were the interlopers back then. It still was very Puerto Rican at the time, but they took us in. ...We thought it wouldn’t ever change, the way SoHo had.5 Partly because of the real estate, you know, the apartments being so small, the storefronts being so small. But then it did.

Mary expresses the common sentiment among early gentrifiers that the neighborhood is no longer “for” them. And like other early gentrifiers, she admits she felt like an in- terloper when she first moved in. Early gentrifiers recognized that the neighborhood’s existing residents were from a different ethnic group, social class, and generation from them, and many of them describe how these residents often treated them coldly. Edward recalls his Polish neighbors: “Oh, for the first two years at least they wouldn’t talk to me at all. But after a while they started saying hello to me. I guess they realized I wasn’t going anywhere.” At some point in their narrative, early gentrifiers claim to have been or allude to being accepted by the existing populations. But they see newcomers as qualitatively different from themselves. Mary contrasts her experience with that of newcomers:

The neighborhood now, from what I see, are younger, wealthier people who, it’s their first apartment in New York, maybe, and, well, it was for me, too, but it then remained my apartment. It’s their first apartment [too, but] there’s a lot more turnover. People aren’t staying long. ...They’re not staying long to raise families there the way that [we] did.

Early gentrifiers characterize newcomers by their high turnover in apartments, escalated standard of living, and different lifestyles, which they associate with nightlife consumption. Based on newcomers’ transience and behavior toward them, early gentrifiers conclude that they do not care about the community and sociocultural environment that they constructed. Edward describes new people in his building: “New people, they don’t say hello to me. They’re too busy with their own lives to get to know anyone.” In other words, early gentrifiers do not “accept” newcomers. But their own notion of neighborhood “acceptance,” which they depict in their nostalgia narrative, is flawed when we consider that it is a condition based on time. By labeling them as transient, early gentrifiers deny newcomers the possibility of acceptance. This is largely because they do not see them as interlopers, but as threats. Early gentrifiers apply this same description of transience to nightlife revelers, which contrasts with their own rootedness in the neighborhood’s nightlife scene. As Daniel describes the people of the bar scene,

It’s totally different, it’s weird. And again, I think that’s part of that transient population. Now, the entertainment is mostly geared towards outsiders coming to enjoy it. It’s sort of a derogatory term these days, but “bridge and tunnel,” whatever it’s called, that seems to be more where it is.6 I guess the main thing behind that is the artists can’t afford to live here anymore. That’s one of the main reasons. So it’s become more of an attraction.

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As we saw earlier, Daniel fondly recalls the time when artists were able to live, work, and play on the Lower East Side, which contributes to his understanding of authenticity. He used to hang out in the community-oriented first wave of bars that opened in the neighborhood. Early gentrifiers often describe the bars from their early days in the neighborhood as places that were for locals. But he feels that the people he sees in the nightlife scene today do not contribute to the same sense of community. Here, he characterizes revelers as members of an anonymous crowd whose motivation in the neighborhood is consumption rather than community-building. Early gentrifiers consider the Lower East Side’s nightlife scene to be an “attraction” akin to the “urban entertainment destinations” (Hannigan 1998) of Bourbon Street in New Orleans and the Las Vegas strip (“Disneyland for adults” is also a common epithet). For them, it has become a destination for all youth to enjoy without appreciation for its established social and cultural worlds. This characterization of revelers as transient and averse to the communities they are “invading” raises several issues that contradict the nostalgia narrative. For instance, many of the people whom early gentrifiers fondly recall as public characters had tenuous con- nections to the neighborhood, such as the squatters and homeless whose fate rested with state authorities. Many of their fellow early gentrifiers have also moved out of the neighborhood. Only a select group remains to represent the large number of people who moved to the neighborhood during its early gentrification and describe its conditions and authentic community. Third, the Lower East Side has long been a place of interest for visitors from around and outside of the city. Some, such as Sophie the photographer, were visitors to the neighborhood before they moved there. While early gentrifiers por- tray visitors from their early days as active contributors to its sociocultural environment, such as those who were involved in creative production in the art and music scenes, many were in fact passive and passing consumers attracted to the downtown scene as an edgy, alternative destination (Mele 2000; Musto 1986). Furthermore, early gentrifiers also exclude other visitors, such as groups with family or other strong social ties in the neighborhood. Finally, several early gentrifiers who complain about bars and revelers were very similar to them when they first moved to the neighborhood. For instance, early gentrifiers often label revelers as college students, and particularly students of nearby NYU. They distinguish their own movement into the neighborhood from that of contemporary students by pointing out that NYU did not have an institutional presence on the Lower East Side when they came and that their own impact was minimal. Steven moved to New York City to attend NYU in the mid-1980s and lived on the Lower East Side because it was “more affordable” than Greenwich Village. “I know, I went to NYU,” he says. “But it was different when I went there. They didn’t steamroll over tenants like they do now. And we [NYU students] were respectful of the people who were here.” Like other early gentrifiers, NYU alumni feel that they deserve credit because they are the ones who stayed and established roots in the neighborhood. But they do not actually know the extent to which NYU or any other college students participate in disruptive nightlife behavior. They also do not know whether or not NYU students will remain in the neighborhood and contribute to the community, such as by supporting community gardens or getting involved in local issues such as housing and historic preservation. Similar to how the established residents in Elias and Scotson’s (1965) classic study on a working-class neighborhood create ideologies of exclusion against outsiders, early gentrifiers also exclude revelers from their conception of the authentic community by spreading dubious rumors and gossip

300 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE about them. In short, by labeling newcomers and nightlife revelers as transient, early gentrifiers construct a new local identity based on their own permanence, which includes a form of “acceptance” by the existing population and an abiding “respect” for the community. But they also reveal several problems with their own nostalgia narrative, which imagines an authentic community that underpins this identity. The second way in which early gentrifiers characterize revelers is as inauthentic people in the neighborhood who use it improperly. They contrast the behavior of revelers to their own experiences in the neighborhood and their own uses of its spaces, in particular its streets and commercial establishments. We see the former play out on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue A, across the street from Tompkins Square Park, where a rotating cast of longtime residents and visitors congregates most nights during the week and on week- ends. One Friday night in the summer, I am standing with Guy, who is in his late 50s and has lived on the Lower East Side since the early 1970s. Guy is a photographer and writes a blog on the neighborhood. Like many early gentrifiers, Guy feels proprietary about the area: “The idea of ownership, the concept of ownership, when you talk about neighborhoods, there’s ownership, there’s a sense of ownership, even though you don’t own the bricks, maybe, you do have something there that you own.” As he has for several decades, Guy stands on the corner where dozens of people who are either from or are symbolic of the neighborhood’s past—homeless, artists, drug addicts, veterans, and radicals—know he will be. He spends the evening observing the sidewalk’s nightlife action, talking with whoever comes by whom he knows, and snapping photographs of people and activities he finds interesting. He is sometimes there until the early hours of the morning, and then documents these people and events on the Internet, where his posts often lament and take a critical stance on gentrification and nightlife. This section of Avenue A has a large number of new bars and is among the densest and busiest in the neighborhood. The crowds on the sidewalk here, and especially in front of bars, are quite thick and filled with individuals who match the profile of those whom Guy and other residents identify as transient and harmful to the social environment they knew—that is, young, White, and middle-class. I wonder why he continues to come here. Guy explains to me the importance of the corner, and why he always stands at this spot. In the second storefront on Avenue A is Ray’s Candy Store, a very small and narrow take-out food shop that has been selling inexpensive snacks such as fries and hot dogs since the early 1970s.

I used to stand here in the old days and Ray had 40 oz. Budweiser, illegal. And I’d smoke cigarettes, drink beer, talk to the hookers, because the hookers would come from the school over on 11th and 12th between 3rd Avenue and 2nd Avenue. That block was a big hooker block; that was the main school. And they’d all do a job, come over here, and they’d always walk diagonally through the intersection, because it was a direct route. And they owned the street anyway. And you always knew it was a hooker because she’d walk diagonally across there [he points to the opposite corner, where revelers are standing outside of a new bar]. And they’d go down and buy their drugs, down at the Laundromat, and then they’d come back here for a chocolate shake or something, get the taste out of their mouth.7 And I’d talk to them, you know, they’d ask for a cigarette, and I could find out what was going on over there, I could find out from the squatters that came through here what’s going on over there, the cops come in here, the junkies would be in there,

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the narcotics cops would be in there, the drug dealer would be in there, the hookers would all be in there, and they’d all be right in there [pointing at Ray’s]. And it was neutral territory. That was Switzerland. And they could all go in there and I’d stand out here and watch and talk to them.

Guy often expresses nostalgia for such activities as prostitution and drugs that characterized the public spaces of the neighborhood. On one level, he holds an affinity for the public characters that have all but disappeared. But it also signifies that the contemporary spaces are no longer inhabited by appropriate users or uses. Guy describes social symbols of the neighborhood’s past, such as its drug users and homeless population, as “ghosts who people [nightlife revelers] pass but don’t see.” Despite its location in the heart of a dense area, the corner is still a place where Guy sees not only friends, but also elements from the neighborhood’s past, and he is quick to point out the sharp contrast between the old and new. Although the surrounding social environment is teeming with activity, for Guy they are not the interesting interactions that he remembers. Like other early gentrifiers, he contrasts the people of the contemporary nightlife scene with those of the past,

You know, this used to have a lot more nightlife. You could come out here any fucking night of the week, and the bars were packed, people were doing stuff. Today, people come home, they watch their flat panel TV, they don’t go to the bars. The bars are empty during the week. You have the weekend crowds, and of course that’s why the bars encourage crowds, they encourage underage drinking, because they have to make their money on the weekend.

Here Guy points out new rhythms that nightlife has brought to the neighborhood. It has broken up a nightly round of activity that featured people “doing stuff” and replaced it with a weekly routinized pattern of infrequent interactions at specific times, while the nightlife community that they recall teemed with activity. Early gentrifiers pepper their nostalgia narrative with tales of their experiences with the neighborhood’s nightlife. They recognize the apparent contradiction between their anti-nightlife rhetoric and pro- nightlife past, and are quick to defend themselves by categorizing their behavior as a representation of the neighborhood’s creativity. When I asked Beth, who is in her late 40s and moved to the Lower East Side in the early 1980s, if she used to go out to bars in the neighborhood, she grinned sheepishly and replied, “Yeah, I did. But there was just something different about the bars then. They seemed,” she paused, “more real.” After pressing her for more detail, she explained, “There was creative stuff happening in them, and we weren’t bothering anyone.” Like those early gentrifiers who are NYU alumni, those that participated in the nightlife scene claim that their behavior was not only inte- grated into the authentic character of the neighborhood, but did not disrupt any of the existing social worlds. By contrast, many early gentrifiers characterize the contemporary activity in bars solely as acts of consumption, not creativity. As Denis observes,

I don’t think there’s a bar culture anymore with young people. I think it’s changed. We all knew each other, and it was a real meeting place for young people. I mean, these were real watering holes, you know. People went there and ideas were exchanged. ... I see young people in bars [today], they don’t know each other. And

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now, it’s not neighborhood people drinking in these bars that much. That’s not culture, that’s just trying to get laid.

Proper “bar culture,” in the early days of gentrification, consisted of “real” places where “ideas were exchanged” among new residents. New nightlife has displaced this culture, and replaced it with uncreative forms of consumption. However, this perspective is not informed by actual observation or participation (except for Guy, who maintains his role as observer of nightlife from the sidewalk). While some still go to their familiar bars (again, Guy, who goes to Lucy’s, an old Polish bar, is an example), early gentrifiers regularly admit that they do not go to the new bars and are not actually familiar with their bar culture. Patti, the musician, regularly played in its bars and clubs, when they mostly accommodated local talent. But today, she neither visits nor performs in local bars:

I don’t go to all these places. I mean, I have to live with them. I walk by them and I see a lot of the negatives, because that’s what goes on in the street. But it’s interesting, I often feel like if I hung out in them I’d probably see more, some of the positives that must exist in them, but mostly I’m contending with the vomit on my doorstep when I come out and the guy under my windows, or the group of people, very, usually, upscale-looking people standing on the street at 3, 4 a.m. drunk and yelling at the top of their lungs.

Here, Patti focuses on the external activity in the nightlife scene and admits to not knowing about bars’ internal activity. Like other early gentrifiers, she also acknowledges her own ignorance of contemporary bar culture and speculates that there must be some positive elements to it. Even Denis, whose above quote claims a firsthand knowledge of what young nightlife revelers do in bars, concludes a lengthy critique of contemporary bar culture by saying, “Of course, I never really go out drinking anymore either.” Not going to new bars represents one of the several ways in which early gentrifiers are socially distant from newcomers and visiting nightlife revelers. In doing so, they also concede that the neighborhood is no longer entirely “theirs.” The fact that early gentrifiers have been unable to exert any social authority in the neighborhood over the nightlife issue represents an important contradiction in the nostalgia narrative, which purports that they are important actors on the Lower East Side. Nonetheless, they use this narrative and their identity as its symbolic owners in their collective effort to fight bars. The most significant public forum where they do so is the local community board. Community boards represent districts throughout New York City. They are liaisons between neighborhoods and local government and are comprised of resident volunteers. State law requires prospective bar owners to appear before them and confront their neighbors before they apply for a liquor license. Since the 1990s, when nightlife began to proliferate, the Lower East Side’s early gentrifiers have organized to protest bars. It is at these meetings that they use their nostalgia narrative as a means of collective action. For instance, one evening two dozen residents from East Fifth Street attend the community board meeting to protest a new liquor license. Over the past 10 years, the number of liquor licenses on East Fifth Street has gone from one to five, with many more on nearby Second Avenue, and more to come with the impending opening of a boutique hotel on the block. These changes have brought a significant amount of nightlife activity to

303 CITY AND COMMUNITY the street, and the hotel promises to bring considerably more. The applicant is a current bar owner in the neighborhood with a relatively good reputation when it comes to quality- of-life issues. When a community board member mentions this fact, a chorus from East Fifth Street quickly replies, “We’re getting another bar!” “We don’t want another bar!” “It’s still drunk people!” Steven, the NYU alumnus mentioned earlier, addresses the applicant directly when he describes the space’s prior establishment:

“They set a precedent on this block for being little, elegant, and lovely, but it still operated as a big place, with the same deliveries, the same people outside, and the same booze. This neighborhood is like Bourbon Street and with your steep rent in the building you’re going to have to sell stuff, and that means alcohol.”

“But my impact will be so incredibly small,” replies the applicant.

“A lot of booze needs to be poured and people are going to be drunk,” continues Steven, dismissing the prospective owner’s point. “I’ve heard people say...that if you’re going to have a bar on your street, he’s your guy. But you have to see it from our perspective. It’s only bars and restaurants in this neighborhood. We’re losing our small variety shops. I own a small business on a side street and I’ll probably be gone. Landlords know, when a bar owner comes around, that the stakes go up. Now people who live here kind of shut themselves in, as people who don’t live here come to romp around, come evening. It didn’t quite feel that bad then. It felt like the people who lived here were the people who were out. This has become a shell of a neighborhood.”

In this typical exchange between an early gentrifier and bar owner, Steven demonstrates two key elements of the nostalgia narrative. First, he identifies new bars as sources of wanton alcohol consumption and noise, which run counter to his understanding of the authentic community and triggered the narrative. Second, he understands that bars have hollowed out the neighborhood, turning it into a “shell” of its former self, by displacing local businesses and familiar people from the streets, which did not feel “that bad.” Interestingly, Steven also demonstrates that while it seems early gentrifiers claim diminished quality of life from bar activities as the motivating factor in their protests, they are also concerned with social and cultural displacement. While Steven acknowledges that this particular bar owner may be better than others, it is the mere presence of another bar that leads him to speak out against it. In addition, as a small business owner, Steven has an economic as well as a social and cultural stake in the neighborhood, which not all early gentrifiers share. He fears the displacement of not only “small variety shops,” but also his own business, due to rising rents. Patti, also mentioned above, exemplifies a common arc among early gentrifiers in terms of their realization that their community was under threat and their decision to protest bars. As a young musician and performance artist, the few bars and clubs for the avant-garde music scene that had opened in the neighborhood were perfect for her.

“When I first moved down here, we had one or two bars, and I always played in them. But they did seem to still sort of cater to something that was actually in the

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neighborhood, you know, and had been here for a long time. But it just, it’s so remarkable to see what it became.” “Around when did this happen?” I ask. “Like ‘97, ’98. Around then.”

Like other early gentrifiers, Patti acknowledges the new bars of Lower East Side in her early days in the neighborhood and recalls a general time period when things started to change. Early gentrifiers name different years for when this occurred, often because bars opened gradually in different parts of the neighborhood. According to records, sometimes bars opened later than the years they suggest (Patti’s are fairly accurate). More important than historical accuracy, these years reflect the times when early gentrifiers sensed that new bars and revelers were threatening their sense of community. From her neighbors, Patti heard about community board meetings not just as forums for voicing her concerns and receiving answers to her questions, but as places where she could possibly influence what she saw happening in the neighborhood.

“So I started seeing and getting a little sensitized and educated about this kind of community upheaval, because I have to say I was totally, like most people, I was totally ignorant about it until you kind of experience it. And then I started going to the community board meetings and sitting there quietly in the back and just kind of getting more involved in community stuff as I saw it being destroyed.”

From this point, Patti became active against the things that she felt were damaging her understanding of the community. She fought for community gardens and affordable housing, both of which developers were threatening, and she especially fought against the bars that attracted revelers. With her neighbors, Patti started several grassroots groups devoted specifically to protesting bars. She educated herself on the state’s liquor license law and the community board’s policies. And like Steven, she uses her nostalgia narrative when she protests bars, and even when she confronts owners. One community board meeting, Patti goes to the back of the room and talks with a prospective owner after protesting two bars that are renewing their liquor licenses. The prospective owner, a young man in his mid-30s, asks her to explain her issue with bars.

“Look, all these new bars in the neighborhood and on my street disturb me,” says Patti. “This is a residential neighborhood that at night gets filled with bridge and tunnelers, not people who live in the neighborhood. It’s not that the bars have violations, it’s that the way they naturally act is no way to treat their neighbors.”

“My place is going to be different,” says the prospective owner. “I’m...” “No, it’s not,” interrupts Patti. “Well, I live in a Mexican building in Bushwick and I hate certain types of places that have come in.”

“Look,” says Patti, interrupting him again before he can make his point, “I’m sure you’re very nice and have good intentions, but I still don’t want your bar.”

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Here Patti focuses on the conditions that new bars bring to the Lower East Side. Once again, we see how early gentrifiers dismiss bar owners and their counter-narratives because of the threat that they represent. But as new bars continue to open and threaten their sense of community, early gentrifiers such as Steven and Patti continue to use their personal experiences and woven nostalgia narratives as the bases for their claims to social power in the neighborhood.

CONCLUSION: FUTURE RESEARCH IN THE GENTRIFIED NEIGHBORHOOD

Narratives of collective memory are powerful ways in which people make sense of their lives and the places they hold dear. The nostalgia narrative is a specific form of collective memory that concerns itself with the past, but is a stronger reflection of the present. Peo- ple weave nostalgia narratives in the face of threatened, damaged, or destroyed identities. The nostalgia narrative’s power lies in its ability to use selective aspects of the past to construct a new identity that stands up to, defines, and counters change in the present. This identity can then serve as the basis for political action against powerful transformative forces. But nostalgia narratives cannot be taken at face value. People weave them within specific contexts and for specific purposes. In this article, I have used the example of the Lower East Side to show how early gentrifiers, whose social authority was threatened by the force of commercial gentrification, weave a nostalgia narrative based on their experiences in it. At times, specifically when they mention stories of crime and violence, the narrative does not seem to idealize the past, as rose-tinted nostalgia narratives tend to do. However, they weave these negative tales with their own positive experiences in the neighborhood and with its people. Based on this narrative, early gentrifiers construct a new local identity as the neighborhood’s symbolic owners. They wield this identity to combat the social and cultural change that has developed on the Lower East Side. Their failure to improve nighttime conditions and prevent nightlife proliferation has fueled their new identity, which in turn has fueled their continued collective action, with significant implications for social relations within the neighborhood. Gentrified neighborhoods present scholars with diverse configurations of groups with competing ideologies, interests, and forms of social action. In this article, I have specifically examined the community ideology of early gentrifiers and shown how they use it to prevent social and cultural displacement. Slater (2006) criticizes scholars for aban- doning critical perspectives on gentrification such as residential displacement in favor of such analyses on gentrifiers. He calls for a return to focusing on the negative ef- fects of gentrification and more research on non-gentrifying groups, who he claims have been understudied. While I agree with this assessment, I offer two additions that this article advances, which would benefit future research on people in gentrified neighborhoods. First, gentrification’s harms take forms beyond residential displacement. These include social and cultural displacement, or the removal of a group’s ability to control its own fate and construct its own sense of community by another. Social and cultural displacement negatively impact a group’s local identity and threaten their interactional potential in a neighborhood (Milligan 1998). We must understand the meanings that

306 THE EARLY GENTRIFIER: WEAVING A NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE people attach to these conditions if we are to account for the full scale of gentrification’s harms. Second, as gentrifying neighborhoods become gentrified, it is likely that longtime residents will construct narratives out of their collective memories as a means of social em- powerment and a basis for collective action. The Lower East Side’s early gentrifiers serve as mediators between the neighborhood and city government through the community board and local groups. They often craft agendas that attempt to shift the neighborhood in a particular direction that is influenced by the harms and threats that they experience from social and cultural displacement. Early gentrifiers’ narrative of the neighborhood, its cultures, and its communities is flawed in the sense that it largely excludes the narratives of other groups and contains several internal contradictions. They have been unsuc- cessful in their efforts to translate their narrative into policy and prevent further social and cultural displacement, but the power of the narrative is its ability to influence behavior. It is, therefore, important that we continue exploring the ideologies and motives behind collective action (and inaction) among groups who both possess and lack social power in gentrified neighborhoods.

Notes

1 1993: 246 2 I obtained these and subsequent numbers on bar totals from the Cole Directory. Published since 1947 by Cole Information Services, the Cole Directory is an annual listing of names, phone numbers, and addresses for residents and businesses in major markets across the United States. I searched through the directories from these years and counted the number of listed bars on streets within the Lower East Side. I only counted those businesses that were clearly identified as bars. I did not count those I was unsure of, and the directory admits to an 85–90 percent accuracy rate. Therefore, these numbers are most definitely conservative estimates intended to be illustrative of the area’s transformation rather than statistically definitive. For a discussion of the benefits of business directories for supplementing ethnographic research, see Schlichtman & Patch (2008) and Zukin et al. (2009). 3 This number was obtained from the State Liquor Authority on April 14, 2008. Most of these establishments have one of two types of liquor licenses—418 are OP, or “full on-premise” licenses, which allow the purchase and consumption of liquor, wine, and beer; and 218 are RW, or “restaurant wine” licenses, which allow the purchase and consumption of only beer and wine. The remaining liquor licenses break down as follows: 27 EB (“eating place beer”), six HL (“hotel liquor”), 13 TW (“tavern wine”), seven RL (“restaurant liquor”), three TL (“tavern liquor”). The differences between the types of licenses are based on what type of alcohol they are allowed to serve and what type of business they are. 4 Here, Sophie refers to the plans that city, business, and real estate leaders had from the 1920s to the 1960s to redevelop the slum of the Lower East side into a residential area for the middle class (see Mele 2000; Wasserman 1994). 5 Here, Mary refers to how SoHo, the neighborhood immediately to the west of the Lower East Side, trans- formed from an area for small manufacturing into a colony for artists who lived and worked in the abandoned lofts. By the time Mary moved to the Lower East Side, in 1980, SoHo’s appeal had spread from artists to the urban middle class, who renovated lofts into a new style of downtown living, which gradually led to the displacement of artists and the neighborhood’s arts scene (see Zukin 1983). 6 “Bridge and tunnel” refers to people who take bridges and tunnels (in cars as well as on buses and trains) to get to the island of Manhattan. It is derogatory in the sense that residents view people outside the center—that is, the outer boroughs, New Jersey, Long Island, or Westchester and Rockland counties—as culturally inferior

307 CITY AND COMMUNITY because of their suburban status, even though many of these areas are quite urban and many users of the term are in fact originally from similar suburban contexts (Grazian 2008; Hummon 1990). 7 The Laundromat was a well-known place to buy drugs on the Lower East Side during the 1980s (see Curtis et al. 2002).

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Los pioneros del aburguesamiento urbano: creando una narrativa de la nostalgia en el Lower East Side (Richard E. Ocejo)

Resumen Enfatizando las consecuencias del desplazamiento social y cultural resultantes del aburguesamiento urbano (“gentrification”), este art´ıculo examina la perspectiva de los pioneros de dicho proceso (“early gentrifiers”) decadas´ despues´ de haberse mudado a la comunidad. En base a datos etnograficos´ recogidos en el Lower East Side de la ciudad de Nueva York –un area´ aburguesada en la que se han instalado nuevos bares- este art´ıculo analiza como´ la vida nocturna mas´ reciente llevo´ a los pioneros del aburguesamiento urbano a entretejer una “narrativa de la nostalgia” a partir de sus experiencias. Los pioneros usan esta narrativa para construir una nueva identidad local como los “duenos”˜ simbolicos´ del barrio, lo cual les ayuda en su accion´ colectiva contra los bares. Sin em- bargo, su narrativa contiene contradicciones internas que revelan la existencia de varios problemas con su nueva identidad. Mi argumento es que llevar a cabo un analisis´ cultural de estos pioneros revela la presencia de configuraciones sociales significativas en los barrios aburguesados y nos instruye sobre la relacion´ entre ideolog´ıa y accion.´

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