【09.11.23 泰晤士报】New York has lost its edge

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New York has lost its edge
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/usa/article6927383.ece

November 23, 2009



Readers of Time Out magazine recently voted New York to be the greatest city in the world. Stefanie Marsh begs to differ

There is always a tinge of sentimental pride in my friend Roger’s voice when he recalls the story of how he was humiliatingly mugged as a teenager in his home town of New York. Roger, a paradigm of that species of neurosis-laden, neophytic, obnoxious intellectual that used to inhabit the city in droves, was at the time 13 and hanging out with two equally nerdy friends, the way teenagers do, outside a petrol station for no reason in the middle of the night.

Somehow they were leapt on by a gang who robbed them not only of their money but all their clothes. For good measure the gang spray-painted their tag across the naked chests of the three boys, who were forced to walk home naked, petrified and yet altered: “That day” Roger likes to reminisce, not altogether ironically, “we became men.”

Those things don’t happen in New York any more. But some people wish they did. Perhaps it’s because in their minds there’s a correlation between the crackdown on crime in the city — which started in the Giuliani era and was cemented by Michael Bloomberg, the current Mayor — and the perceived loss of the city’s cultural supremacy, a gradual nose-dive that began some time after September 11 and snowballed once the economic crisis was in full tilt.

September 11 was important because America’s borders became less porous, which meant that some of the creative folk who might have settled there from abroad chose other countries and cities instead: Berlin and London spring to mind. The collapse of Wall Street as a source of overreaching authority in the global economy suddenly left Bloomberg’s assertion that New York was a “luxury product” seeming tasteless and out of step with the new culture of austerity: many of the shiny, faceless condos that have become ubiquitous in the city now stand half empty.

The bankers who populate them and much of Manhattan have turned into some of the most reviled people on earth. Even The New York Times has pointed out that: “The sudden downturn has affected the very industries that give New York its identity — finance, media, advertising, real estate, even tourism — with real prejudice. The result is that some New Yorkers feel that the city is losing, along with many jobs, its swagger and sense of pre-eminence.”

As an exercise in damage limitation, some nightclubs in the city have now refused to renew annual membership to those working in the financial sector. “We want to distance ourselves from bankers, even if they helped to set us up in the first place,” one told me. “They’re pariahs. Money is just not cool any more.”

The problem for those who would like to see a return in New York to its edgy past is that Manhattan, as more than one New York-based blogger has claimed, is still “a gated community for the rich”. The cultural critic Julian Brash has complained that under Bloomberg the citizens of New York have been turned into consumers — it is a place where everything is about what can be bought and what can be sold.

Among artists and writers there is a general sense of loss. Jeremiah Moss, who runs a blog called Vanishing New York, believes that the city has become not only sanitised but a sort of parody of what it once was. “I think the idea that New York is an edgy place has vanished almost entirely,” he says. “It used to be immune to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-brow America. Now that has taken over completely. It’s a nice town — safe and clean — for tourists and investment bankers. You used to come to New York to get away from Middle America, but now you show up here and there it is.

“Is New York still the centre of the Earth? Well, if your definition of the centre of the Earth is McDonald’s and Starbucks, then yes it is.”

New Yorkers such as Moss are particularly dismayed by some of the new architecture in the city. They don’t like what has happened to Times Square, and the prevalence of “this very cold, sleek look made of glass with no exterior walls.”

Many citizens are appalled by plans to rid the city of its newspaper vendors, one of its hallmarks. The newspaper shacks are to be replaced by glass and chrome pods, half owned by the Spanish corporation who will build them. The dividends from the commercials that will appear on the side of these pods will be divided between the city and the company.

Moss also points out “a weird trend in New York for making a simulacrum of the original.” As an example he mentions the cult punk bar CBGB, once the “home of underground rock”, where Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads and The Ramones have all performed. The venue closed in 2006 and was eventually bought by the high-end men’s fashion designer, John Varvatos, who turned it into a boutique.

“He’s kept a lot of the original interior, so you feel like you’re walking into a rock ’n’ roll space,” Moss says. “But actually you’re walking into a super high-end boutique that sells $700 Ramones T-shirts.”

It was eventually announced that the alley behind the club would be converted into a pedestrian mall, a step that provoked Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys to tell the New York Post that “all of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords”.

One struggles to think what actually comes out of the city these days, creatively speaking. The Times fashion desk speaks disparagingly about the “commercialism” of the city’s fashion industry following the release of the recent documentary The September Issue, about US Vogue and its legendary and previously mysterious editor, Anna Wintour.

There are more general problems. America used to be the place where things happened first. But new films now have global release dates and the States has shown itself to be behind in some of the more entrepreunerial strands of new technology. You can get your iPod there first, but speculative start-ups such as Spotify do not exist in the States because of industry regulation.

Perhaps its lower rents — house prices were down by 23 per cent in the first quarter of this year — will encourage the return of young people and artists. Meanwhile, “Yes it’s still fun,” concedes a friend who used to live there, “but it’s cheesy. Jeez, they even have a Whole Foods on Bowery.”