《first published in the首先发表在》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《first published in the首先发表在（2页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Gentrifying the Lower East Side Does gentrification of a run-down inner-city area necessarily result in the dispossession of the existing population, or can it work to their advantage? Lenny Quarts analysis of the Lower East Side of New York City holds lessons for city planners everywhere. Lenny Qua
2、rt is Professor of Cinema at City University New York, former head of the Graduate School of CUNY in Statten Island, and is a frequent contributor to the Berkshire Eagle, where this article first appeared.The Lower East Side was the center of Jewish immigrant life in New York from the 1880s until th
3、e advent of WW1. Streets like Orchard and Hester stretched for blocks filled with peddlers with packs and stalls selling everything from carp, pickles, and dried fruit to bandannas, suspenders, and tin cups. Above the swirling noisy crowds were six-story dark, foetid, airless tenements (“great priso
4、n-like structures of brick”) whose overcrowded apartments sometimes doubled as shops in which women did garment piecework. It was a picturesque and intellectually intense world filled with Yiddish theatres, newspapers, political groups and ideological debates, but also a world where crime, poverty,
5、and disease were common. By 1916, however, many of the Jews had begun to move to other sections of the city like Harlem, Brownsville, and the East Bronx. The Lower East Side was no longer the centre of Jewish culture in New York. In 1998 there are still many Jews in 28 middle income co-operative apa
6、rtment buildings on Grand Street (from Essex Street to the East River), and there are a number of synagogues left on East Broadway. But just as the Jews and Italians replaced the Irish in the 19th century, the dominant immigrant groups are now Hispanics and Chinese, and the area is dotted with bodeg
7、as and Pentecostal churches, and cheap Cantonese and Fukienese restaurants. In fact, a number of the Orchard Street bargain clothing stores are now owned by Chinese and East Indians. But whats most striking now about these streets is not the Bangladeshi grocery or the store selling kitschy Buddha st
8、atues, but the gentrification that has begun to take place. On grey, treeless Ludlow amidst shops like the La Esperanza bodega, there are vintage furniture and clothing stores, an avant-garde basement theatre called Todo Con Nada, and a stylish pub, The Local, offering a wide variety of connoisseur
9、beers. Altmans Luggage, Friedmans Clothes, and stores with sidewalk stalls are still in business on Orchard Street, but trendy boutiques and a brick-walled bar, the Rivertown Lounge, are increasingly visible and more of their ilk are in the works. Its not only the shops that are being gentrified. Te
10、nements whose windows have been bricked and boarded up since the 1930s are being renovated with one-bedrooms renting for $1400 a month. Even the building on East Broadway that once housed the fabled Yiddish Social-Democratic daily, The Forward, is now being converted into condominiums. The housing s
11、tock and visual look of these streets remains run-down and charmless, but that wont stop the flow of artists and the hip young, who have been priced out of the East Village and Soho, from moving here. (Whatever the areas defects its still Downtown, and not the South Bronx.) Gentrification of this so
12、rt often elicits a reflexive, negative response where the moneyed are seen as renewing a neighbourhood only to sacrifice the poor in the process. According to this scenario, store and apartment rents rise, the poor are pushed out of their own neighbourhoods, and elitism triumphs. The only building t
13、hen left that will remind us that poor immigrants once lived on the Lower East Side will be the one the Tenement Museum (which provides programs focusing on the immigrant experience) has worked hard to restore. The building is on Orchard Street, and contains apartments of 19th and 20th century tenem
14、ent inhabitants so visitors can remember where they came from. The old Lower East Side then merely becomes a theme park so suburbanites can celebrate their roots. However, this scenario is much too dire, since the hip and well-heeled can never really dominate the area. There are seven public housing
15、 projects with 9,465 apartments in the neighbourhooda critical mass of low income people who will neither be eating nouvelle cuisine nor moving out in the near future. And there are a number of non-profits building affordable housing in the neighbourhooda further sign that the Lower East Side will n
16、ot be transformed into another Soho. Still, one shouldnt be blithe about the consequences of inflated rents. Obviously, a number of small traditional stores will be displaced, and affordable apartments in privately owned buildings will be hard to come by. Gentrification and rehabilitation, however, dislodge far fewer people than disinvestment and housing abandonment. Also, most low-income people move from their homes for other reasons than gentrification
