I Could Have Been

Last week, a restaurant in my neighborhood closed.  This happens everyday throughout the city, restaurants or shops or businesses or whatever opening and closing, and since I've only lived here a few months it would be slightly self important to get too worked up about it (seems like that's kind of the role of someone who's a little more attached).  I may have eaten there a disproportionate number of times for how many times I've eaten out this year, but that's still not that many times, and I didn't have any sort of connection to it otherwise.


Getting worked up about places closing seems to be a bit of a tradition around here, although it manifests itself differently for different people.  The divide between lovers of "old" New York - the gritty, crime-ridden, "real" New York of yesteryear - and "new" New York - current, tourist-friendly, generic, "Disney-fied" New York - seems to be ever-widening as trends like urban gardening, coops, condos, etc spread to previously "low-rent" areas (neighborhoods that are less glamorous for various reasons, possibly including poverty or inconvenience).  On the one side, bringing in things like nicer buildings, nicer shops, nicer restaurants and cafes can be...well, nice.  On the other side, increases in rents and costs of living don't necessarily mean salary increases for long time residents who had been enjoying anonymity and community in a previously ignored neighborhood.  The new residents brought in by changes may not have a connection to the established identity of the area.


On a more emotional level, the look of a neighborhood represents for many an important part of the identity of the individual residents who choose it as the setting of their lives.  Where you are is a pretty big part of who you are, and if you don't believe it, ask anyone who's gone through a school merger or, worse, a town just petering off into dissolution (I guess you have to go back to Old West ghost towns for that, though).  Telling someone where you live tells them something about you, what's important to you.  The ever-changing landscape of a neighborhood changes the connotation of claiming that neighborhood.  Some people, much more invested in their neighborhoods than I, dedicate whole blogs to finding throwbacks to a New York with a few more roots and a smidge more character than a local Target/Whole Foods/Ikea/Best Buy/Costco mall (although my neighborhood did just get a mall with more than one of those).  Some people don't want their neighborhood to be interchangeable with a hundred others, indistinguishable from them but for the zip code itself.


While I most certainly applaud any and all effort to keep in touch with a neighborhood or address or city's roots, part of the character of New York is that it's character changes so drastically with each generation and wave of immigrants.  And I'm a part of that, as a middle class, middle American WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Prostestant) living in Latino (currently very Mexican but previously very Puerto Rican), Catholic, generally low income East Harlem, NYC.  Gentrification is a double edge sword, and I enjoy poking fun at faux-nostalgic hipsters reveling in someone else's past as much as the next person.  But I do hope a new Mexican restaurant moves into the old one's place in my neighborhood.

listening to: one of these things first/nick drake