After flying through the night over an ocean of darkness, New York City approached like a glowing beacon splitting the skyline. It looked like everything I had envisaged after seeing thousands of iconic images on television, art works and postcards. The moment I first approached the city I had obsessed over for years previous, was a near spiritual one. I knew that I would now get the chance not only to see the city in the flesh, concrete and neon, but to live in the city for several months, to experience New York, though time would show that my preconceived notions had been a little off.
With nothing arranged beyond a pickup from the airport, my companion and I quickly found a shady hostel in mid-town and went out to set up base. After a few days we managed to acquire ourselves a small studio apartment in the heart of Greenwich Village, an area which has been the cultural hub of the city and the country for the better part of the last 60 years. However, after taking our first probing stroll round our new neighbourhood we were struck by something unexpected. There were no drum circles, no performing arts on the sidewalks, not even a damned mime to be seen. Instead the paths of my teenage Mecca had been overrun by tiny dogs in purses, middle aged men in squash uniforms and trophy wives wearing sunglasses with the same price tag as a used car.
Yes, we soon learned that the gentrification of New York City had all but killed the culture which had for so long been a key component of the City’s identity. While many of the famous hotspots I had read about were still standing today, the clientele that frequented them were a far cry from what I had pictured. I entered the venue where a young Bob Dylan played his first show only to find it overrun with New York University frat boys throwing up on beer pong tables (and idiotic game involving table tennis balls and low morals), and the bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death one famous night was now infested with yuppies sipping Chai Lattés and ordering their next shiatsu massage. It seems that the “gentrifiers” had caught scent of the low-income artists who un-intentionally formed the bridge from the original poor community to the yuppies. The artists like certain kinds of buildings, big spaces and lofts with stimulating architecture, they also fuel the nightlife which attracts those with the wealth to move in and take advantage.
But does this mean that the art culture of New York is dead, now that the earth of its artistic centre has been salted by fashionistas and trust-fund-babies? Where did all the artists go? Did they really sell their easels and amps for night courses in business diplomas? No, they simply did what every section of society does when things get too heavy in the homeland – they emigrated. Yes, the artistic community packed up their meagre possessions and took the L-train underwater to the promised land of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Just over the East River lies the corner of Brooklyn which has long been populated by the Hasidic Jewish community and Mexican immigrants, each of whom have a mutual yet quiet disdain for the other. Then about five years ago a spate of new residents moved in, attracted to its cheap rent and large apartment spaces. When I first arrived in Williamsburg it was clear that the newly residing art community had already taken over the previously quiet neighbourhood. Every wall was covered in mural graffiti, the streets were littered with twenty-something hipsters trying to flog their nouveaux art pieces or demo tapes and there were free and spontaneous concerts and bloc parties to be found everywhere. It was the closest thing I could have imagined to the Greenwich Village of my fantasies. The culture had not died, it was in hiding. Out in Brooklyn where the wealthy could not find them, where their rent prices would not be driven up exponentially by those who can afford to pay – at least for now anyway. It won’t be too much longer until the newly flourishing scene that has come out of Brooklyn will become a blip on the radar of the Manhattanites and the same process will be repeated all over again. The residents of Williamsburg will move on once more, to some new remote corner of the Five Boroughs. But for now at least Williamsburg remains the last bastion of the culture that many have held so dearly for so long.
