By Jay Fox
Brooklyn, NY, USA
A bathroom
with a view catapults you to the super-luxury caliber, not just the everyday
luxury class – New York City broker
Writing about New York City makes
one confront the illusion of permanence. The city is always changing, not only
in the sense that there are people flowing in and out of the five boroughs
every day, but because the notion of what makes or defines a
neighborhood
changes, as well. Some streets change over time as one group gradually moves
into the neighborhood and another gradually moves out. Sometimes the change is
less subtle, and a class of people are given a swift boot by a towering wave of
gentrification that manages to alter not only the makeup of the people in the
area and the shops that line the streets, but the buildings in which they're
situated, too.
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| Jay Fox |
However much there may be a desire
to accept the former as normal and to reject the latter as some kind of scourge
that can be defeated with think pieces and witty critiques on social media, the
city has always been defined by movement, momentum and noise. Unfortunately,
this means development. It's not only because the city opens its doors to
immigrants seeking opportunity or provides sanctuary to young artists from the
oceans of tedium on the other side of the Hudson; it's also because the city is
on the bleeding edge of everything from fashion to tech to art. It is dynamic
and permeating with kinetic energies, and this means that it both is forced to
change perpetually and has to expand to accommodate all of those people who
want to come here and call this place home.
This presents a problem for those
who want to maintain some connection to their roots and the history of the
city, and this is where the contradictions of New York City real estate rear
their ugly heads. The city has a limited amount of space; a group of extremely
wealthy property owners who have the resources to preserve their neighborhoods;
and a group of not wealthy people who don't own their homes—and, consequently,
can't preserve their neighborhoods should their landlords want to sell to
developers. All this would be pretty volatile, but it becomes downright toxic
when you add the final ingredient to this gentrification stew: A group of
college-educated people who arrive in the city to pursue their dreams at the
expense of displacing those poor people with whom they tend to sympathize and
to the benefit of those developers whom they despise, but with whom they have
to cooperate in order to live in a part of the city that they can afford. The
result is that the townhouses in the rich neighborhoods are preserved, the poor
people are displaced, the developers are enriched and those college-educated
people eventually come to define the neighborhoods they've decided to call
home. They eventually cement their foothold in these areas once they purchase
the townhouses in the formerly poor or working-class areas because they've aged
and become respectable people. They then fight for the streets to become landmarked,
thereby making it harder for developers to get properties on said streets
upzoned. This forces the gentrification process to expand into new markets.
However, before arriving at this
final stage, the college-educated people in these “edgy” neighborhoods become
increasingly respectable. Soon, the wild bars and clubs that once made the area
so “edgy” begin accruing noise complaints because the suddenly respectable
people seem incapable of making accommodations to allow life to happen outside
of their windows when they want to sleep. Eventually, these places shut down or
get priced out. They're replaced by galleries or rustic eateries that sell
“hand crafted cocktails” and the shabby chic pretensions of farm-to-table
living. Sure, the food is good, but the streets are ghostly by ten at night,
and these types of neighborhoods begin to look less like they belong in the
city that never sleeps and more like they should be in the suburb that has an
early meeting. Traveling eastward along the path of the L train, one can see
each stage of transition: From the quietude of the West Village, to the rather
sober East Village, across the East River into the part of North Brooklyn that
has seen most of its cool bars close, into the parts of east Williamsburg and
western Bushwick where the process is now claiming cool casualties like Shea
Stadium and Silent Barn, and finally into the eastern section of Bushwick where
the effects of gentrification are starting to become easily discernible.
This process has another series of
effects on the neighborhood, particularly in its later phases. First, the
stabilized renters who had been living in the area for decades suddenly can’t
afford to shop in their own neighborhood. Second, people who don't live in the
area stop visiting for similar reasons: it is unaffordable. Consequently, the
neighborhood ceases to have the draw it once did. This is what has happened to
much of Lower Manhattan, the former the center for nightlife, music and art,
and now there are only a handful of worthwhile places that have become icons
against gentrification as opposed to the neighborhood joints they’d always
been. Meanwhile, most of the newcomers are either generic lounges jam-packed
with a cavalcade of bridge and tunnel shitshows or overpriced and bespoke bars
overcrowded with bland yuppies who look like they got lost on their way to a
shoot for a J. Crew catalog.
Eventually, you find yourself
asking why you even bother traveling to these neighborhoods. This is
particularly the case with Manhattan. It's an hour-plus subway ride in, an
hour-plus subway ride back, and then you always end up having a nightcap once
you’re back in your own neighborhood at the place where you've wanted to be
since you got on the train to the City. And as you sit there nursing your pint
or your whiskey, you realize that the allure of the City is gone, and that you
really only wind up there because of work or some social function that you
don’t really want to attend in the first place. Unfortunately, this
unwillingness to frequent these neighborhoods only accelerates the rate at
which the older places that once made areas so interesting close, only to be
replaced by demure charcuterie houses or clubs that cater to the Santacon or
finance bro crowd.
Look, I don't believe that New York
City should be a museum. It cannot be. It is alive, and to be alive is to
change. I am merely making the observation that Downtown has retained its
low-rise aesthetic at the expense of its reputation for being home to the types
of establishments that young artists like to frequent. Consequently, these
types of places have moved to Brooklyn, which has made living in Brooklyn cool,
where the process is now replicating itself. Anyone who has lived here for more
than a few weeks over the course of the past decade or so has observed this,
too. However, the integral point here is that Brooklyn's success is causing the
nightlife scene in Lower Manhattan to wither. Lower Manhattan has lost its
cachet as the city's nightlife hub, and people don't see a need to go to the
City when they go out. This means there is no longer a single hub, and that
entrepreneurs can open a new bar in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was previously
considered almost exclusively residential and be successful.
I really want to stress this point.
Up until about a decade ago, the first wave of gentrifier would move into a
neighborhood that was devoid of these kinds of establishments. Eventually, a
coffeehouse or a bar would show up, and this would announce the second stage of
gentrification. Such a process would typically take a few years. Now, the gap
between the arrival of the first wave of gentrifier and the opening of the
types of establishments the group prefers to frequent is narrowing. One
predates the other by just a few months or maybe a year because there is less
risk involved in opening such an establishment since the group of gentrifiers
now remains in their neighborhood when they go out instead of going into
Manhattan. This gives the appearance of accelerated gentrification, but it's
actually two simultaneous and distinct phenomena taking place (gentrification
and the decentralizing of the city's nightlife), not just one.
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| Holland Bar |
However, there are still a few bars
in Manhattan that are reminiscent of that old New York that people revere in a
way, and they are the ones that cater to people who don't live in cool parts of
Brooklyn. In fact, they cater to people who want to have a quick drink or two
before catching their bus or train back to the suburbs or tenants who have
managed to hang on to stabilized apartments in buildings that are just a few
years from the wrecking ball. Some are Irish pubs in Midtown. Some are
construction worker bars in the shadow of the World Trade Center or Hudson
Yards. Some are commuter bars just a few blocks away from the bus station on
Ninth Avenue. Holland Bar (532 9th
Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen) exemplifies the latter group.
Holland Bar is the type of narrow,
no-frills bar that reminds one of the types of watering holes that once upon a
time used to be found throughout Manhattan. It consists of the five components
one needs for a bar and little else. These are: booze, a chair, a bathroom,
music, and a bartender. There’s a bar there, too, but you get the impression
that little would change if it were composed of card tables and long scraps of
tin.
For the most part, Holland Bar is
where you go when you’re waiting for a bus or to escape the madness that tends
to roll up and down the blocks bouncing between Port Authority and the
methadone clinics and shelters off Eighth Avenue. It’s the type of place where
you will inevitably find yourself in a long conversation about a single subject
with an older man who doesn’t get to talk to a lot of people should you enter
alone, where every hour sees the Zeppelin and AC/DC quota dutifully filled,
where baseball games drag long into summer evenings, where you can sling
bottles of Bud and shots of whiskey with ease while staring at the forest of
dollars posted behind the bar (which are evidently there to wish the owner good
luck), and ponder the identities of all of those who decided to give up a buck
as a form of benediction.
From the assorted cast of
characters, “Butt Slut,” “Irish Dave” and “MN Nice,” among others, you can tell
that the bar has a diverse set of regulars and drop-ins, and you can also tell
that it’s long been used as the type of place that one can escape to before the
long commute home or the fancy Midtown dinner you’re obligated to attend. It’s
something of a way station that allows you to collect yourself before you have
to emerge into the commotion of Ninth Avenue and figure out the best way to get
yourself home.
However, these types of places are
vanishing at an alarming rate. And while I run the risk of being yet another
singer in the sanctimonious choir belting out dirges for a New York City that
hasn't existed in more than a decade, my point here is not to bemoan the loss
of a punk rock venue or another place that broke creatives like myself like to
frequent. It's about there being a need for places where any person can come
and have a drink after a long day of work and before getting on a bus or a
train home.
The larger point is that this is
about having a tiny slice of space within a neighborhood that remains open to
all. It's about the idea that every inch of this city does not need to cater to
artists or the upwardly mobile or those who have reached the top of
capitalism's food chain. It's about the idea that a city, New York City in
particular, isn't supposed to be so stratified and tame and homogeneous that
the only things distinguishing one neighborhood bar from another are the décor
and the tap list, and that there's virtually no difference between the person
sitting next to you and the reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
Ultimately, when this happens, New York City ceases to be dynamic or kinetic because everything is the same. It's places like Holland Bar that keep that from happening.
Link:
Jay Fox
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Jay Fox is the author of The Walls and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
