Follow up to the Gentrification of Queens article
So it appears that I wasn't the only one that was upset by the possible gentrification of Queens. Check out this letter to the editor in this week's New York magazine:
Our Town
I’m a Queens native, and I enjoyed “The Queens 50” [July 18]. But I also found the tone of the article not a little ironic: A publication that targets the sort of upwardly mobile readership largely responsible for gentrification ends up lamenting the supposedly inevitable gentrification of Queens. In ten years, if Queens is overrun with hipsters and yuppies and the working people have been priced out, please don’t shake your heads solemnly as if you had nothing to do with it.
—Dave Stork, New Paltz, N.Y.
Take that New York magazine!
posted by Jlyn at 6:00 PM
1 Comments:
Oh, don't worry, some day you will be able to afford to live in Brooklyn ;) I kid! I Kid!
Gentrification will always be a sort of Catch-22. A neighborhood, often ignored by the people who aren't living there is suddenly seen for the unique and charming place it is, and all of a sudden people want to live there in this Unique charming place... So they move in and immediately change it to resemble the less unique less charming areas they come from.
You could even argue that NEW YORK CITY as a whole is suffering from Gentrification, or maybe more accurately homogenization. Look at the intersection of Houston and Broadway. Once the center of the art gallery and fashion boutique world, is now home to a few Banks, a Pottery Barn, a Crate and Barrel and an Adidas store. Honestly, if they get rid of the Angelica, I'll be able to write the area off for good. But people aren't willing to get on a shuttle bus and go to Elizabeth New Jersey to shop at Pottery Barn, so they sacrifice a piece of the the area's soul for it, and in ten years once it is all chain storesand megaplexes, no one will want to live there.
How entirely frustrating. Especially since it tends to the artists, the writers, the musicians who seek out the charming neighborhoods and which makes them trendy, only to be displace a year or two later by the hordes that seek to be "cool" by living with and near the artists, who ironically are living there because they were driven out of the last "artsy" area by the same hordes who moved in drove up prices and closed all of their charming little coffee shops to make way for J.Crew. Its funny because sadly artist, authors, and musicians tend to make far less than the average person with an "office job" and that is why they tend to live the way they do in the areas they do, and then folks with money seem to want to EMULATE a life style born out of less than ideal financial situations. How Absurd?!?!
Anyway, just thought I would post some thoughts there and let you know your blog gets people thinking! ;)
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