"ONE OF New York’s primary sources of pride, for at least a century, has been its superabundance of small book, music, and art shops, which have done so much to keep the city’s cultural life close to the street. These little palaces of culture have nourished and enriched the city’s sense of place, empowered New Yorkers to feel like citizens of both the street and the world. But in a rising real estate market, they are all under fire. Their very success in bringing people together often encourages landlords to demand rent increases that will doom them. Every month, it seems, another beloved culture shop is forced to close, and thousands of New Yorkers feel more vulnerable and alone. You could even argue that, for any New Yorker in the 2000s, the sense of being under fire is central to the sense of being at home.Two or three years ago I saw the headline, “The Bowery Lives Again,” and I knew at once that my favorite Bowery life sign, the punk rock club CBGB, was doomed. CBs was one of New York’s freest voices in the city’s worst days. It had nurtured a great generation of rockers and a great audience. It had come proudly through the crash; but could it survive the boom? On October 16, 2006, the news said it was gone. The landlord was no real estate shark, but an agency that helped homeless people. Patti Smith played its last set. She said the closing was “a symptom of our city’s empty new prosperity.” But she added, “There’s new kids with new ideas all over the world. They’ll make their own places, here or wherever” She told the New York Times, “The Internet will be their CBGB.” Is Smith ready to resign from real places, in favor of cyberspace? Can she, or anybody, make the Net “their own”? We’ll have to see.""
DissentMagazine: New York Calling by Marshall Berman, Fall 2007
"I don’t know if you do this with your husband,” [Sarah Jessica] Parker says. “But say one of us is walking down the street, I’ll call him and say, ‘You know, the laundromat is closed!’ And he’ll say, ‘What?’ I’ll be like, ‘The laundromat at 11th and West 4th Street is closed!’?”Parker and Broderick keep a running count of these changes, a mutual mourning for the transformation of their neighborhood into a luxe, tree-lined shopping mall. She knows this sounds absurd coming from her, that people blame Sex and the City for the ruination of the West Village; even Broderick says, “That’s your fault!” when he sees a thong poking up from low-slung jeans, and her close friend John Benjamin Hickey, an actor, longs for the days before “those girls on buses.” Parker clarifies that she doesn’t want to sound like Madonna bemoaning what’s happened to New York: It’s not that there’s no “creative energy” in the air, it’s simply been priced out of this particular borough."
NewYorkMagazine: Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like a Few Words With Carrie Bradshaw by Emily Nussbaum, May 4, 2008Art: Man & Woman on the Roof, New York, 1986, Edith Kramer; Bowery Trolley, not dated, Alain Bertrand
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, Books, Commentary, Film, Urbanities
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