Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
By Sharon Zukin
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010

When the little wine shop appeared in the storefront across the street from my apartment in Greenpoint, I was worried. Was this trendy new installation here for me? Was I the one expected to coolly browse the custom-built wooden shelves for the perfect bottle? I imagined an elfin entrepreneur trying to anticipate my local shopping desires, feverishly pulling the levers of urban change behind a curtain of once-derelict facades. But I did not welcome this change to my neighborhood, a working-class Polish and Latino enclave. The wine shop seemed to both advertise my presence there and force me to confront what I was reluctant to admit: this patch at the northern end of Brooklyn was absorbing more and more of the educated, professional, wine-buying classes with a taste for quaint, well-appointed little shops . . . and I was implicated in that process.

The sociologist and social critic Sharon Zukin would immediately recognize that Greenpoint was in the midst of the pervasive urban process commonly known as gentrification. Zukin has distinguished herself as an acute observer of the evolving New York scene by insisting that culture must be viewed alongside capital as a motive force in urban (re)development. It’s not enough just to follow the money. We must consider, too, the cultural aspirations and consumption patterns that drive urban transformations. In Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Johns Hopkins, 1982), Zukin traced the emergence of SoHo as a posh residential address for affluent people—newcomers inspired by the artists who had appropriated loft spaces abandoned by a shrinking manufacturing sector. In The Cultures of Cities (Blackwell, 1995), a collection of essays on subjects ranging from restaurants to the museum industry, Zukin sharpened her critique of monied interests who appropriate art and culture to remake a city. Now, in Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Zukin pins her analysis of urban change on the craving for authenticity—a magical quality that includes architectural charm, unique retailing, ethnic flavor, and other talismans of local character and community.

And therein lies the rub. As upwardly mobile seekers (or “cultural migrants,” as she calls them) descend on neighborhoods in a greedy quest for authenticity, Zukin argues that they unwittingly erode the very qualities that made these places interesting or desirable in the first place. Gentrifiers consume authenticity at its own expense. At the scale of the retail environment, the spiral begins when “artists and gentrifiers move into old immigrant areas, praising the working-class bars and take-out joints but overwhelming them with new cafés and boutiques, which are soon followed by brand-name chain stores.” Zukin allows that the middle stage may yield a tolerant, cosmopolitan urban mix—as wine shops and whimsical boutiques mingle with bodegas and dollar stores—yet it is a fragile balance and difficult to protect. As gentrifiers arrive, rents rise to accommodate what the market will bear. Both longtime residents and business establishments are displaced if they cannot keep pace. And though sophisticated cultural migrants may not like chain stores, eventually these are the only sellers who can afford a place in the new neighborhood.

Naked City is organized around six New York stories. Each chapter leads with a vignette from Zukin’s own foray into a particular neighborhood or public space. Then the author launches into an historical narrative of the economic, political, and cultural crucible in which the neighborhood or space has been formed. Zukin crashes an underground arts party in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where gritty has become cool. She sips cappuccino in a trendy café in Harlem, where new businesses emphasize local roots and trade on the neighborhood’s cultural heritage. She escorts a group of Japanese college students through Astor Place and the East Village, where the expensive boutiques on East Ninth Street are “both elegant and derelict, hippie and yuppie, distinctive and diverse.” In Union Square, the bustling Greenmarket feels democratic even though it is sponsored by a private Business Improvement District (BID). At the Red Hook ball fields in Brooklyn, Zukin browses the Latino food carts, commenting on how a spontaneous local tradition became a destination. And, finally, she examines the struggles of community gardens in East New York and elsewhere to survive in an atmosphere of intense real estate speculation.

Zukin is especially interested in the way the media feeds our obsession with “locavore” food culture and its relationship to place making. She scrolls through foodie blogs like Chowhound to show how media outlets chart new, gastronomical geographies of authenticity. Local food—fresh produce from regional farms sold at the Greenmarket, Salvadoran pupusas from Red Hook food carts, or homegrown veggies raised in a community garden—underscores Zukin’s theme of terroir and the contested terrain of authenticity. In the case of community gardens, “the specific form this authenticity takes has changed over time, as the gardens shifted from a grassroots social movement challenging the state to an embodiment of ethnic identity, then an expression of secular cultural identity in tune with gentrifiers’ values, and finally a form of urban food production consistent with the tastes of middle-class locavores and strategies for sustainable development.”

Zukin’s subtitle, The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, nods to Jane Jacobs’s classic 1961 study of urban character. Jacobs’s inversion of “life” and “death” implied a hopeful renaissance for cities plundered by urban renewal. But Zukin might have returned to the more conventional construction to signal her pessimistic appraisal of the current urban scene. The city, she insists, has become a “smooth, sleek, more expensive replica of its former self.” Jacobs herself must bear some of the responsibility, Zukin argues, because she possessed the “gentrifier’s aesthetic appreciation of urban authenticity.” Indeed, it should come as no surprise that precisely the neighborhoods that Jacobs and her fellow activists worked so hard to preserve from the wrecking ball are now among the most exclusive and affluent parts of the city. The landscape of authenticity—nineteenth-century brownstones, little shops, and cobblestone streets—is too easily divorced from the complex social world it hosted.

Jane Jacobs was among the first to recognize the charming aspects of authenticity when more powerful people sought to bury them in favor of banal monumentality. Yet the recognition of authenticity is generally born of privilege, for it requires the detached, discerning perspective of the connoisseur. During the earliest stages of gentrification you must have the vision to perceive, and thus gravitate toward, authenticity. After that, you just need a little money and the ability to follow directions, as the frontiersmen with cultural capital give way to sophisticated yuppies. Eventually, if you don’t figure it out for yourself, you can rely on New York Magazine to steer you toward the next hip location. By this time, though, the neighborhood has already been discovered and ratcheted up to the next round of economic development, driven by corporations like Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods. Soon it will be derided as overexposed by the New York Observer. In other words, “authenticity,” once recognized, becomes a powerful mode of urban development, setting into motion, as Zukin persuasively argues, the forces that will destroy it. Because the irony of authenticity is that it is guileless. It is not, in fact, for sale on the market, because it does not, finally, reside only in the local buildings and storefronts but also in the people who live and work in them.

Zukin creates an alarming vision of a New York leeched of vitality and variety: “the city’s historic diversity of uses, local specializations, small stores, and cheek-by-jowl checkerboard of rich people, poor people, and people broadly in the middle has been submerged by a tidal wave of new luxury apartments and chain stores.” Although she admits that authenticity is not an a priori condition, she delights in pointing her finger at all the dupes, arrivistes, and phonies who are unwittingly colluding in the destruction of the city’s soul: she describes the IKEA ferry shoppers in Red Hook moving toward the big blue and yellow box “with a sense of purpose, like astronauts transferring from a space shuttle to the mother ship.” This wry, breezy style is part of the book’s appeal but also a sign of the intellectual imprecision of her approach. At times the author’s lament for a time when local communities organized “against wealth and power” instead for the right to a well-frothed cappuccino is acerbic and to the point. But at other moments Zukin seems simply nostalgic— not for a better New York, but for her New York, the city she discovered and made her own. And anyone who remembers the vitality and variety of Harlem twenty or thirty years ago longs for a more complicated telling of this story.

The author would be more convincing if she had spent a little time acknowledging not only the benefits that come with gentrification—neighborhood safety, rehabilitated housing stock—but also the difficulty of controlling it; many government interventions in urban planning and growth are later judged as failures. Zukin suggests “new forms of public-private stewardship that give residents, workers, and small business owners, as well as buildings and districts, a right to put down roots and remain in place,” but says next to nothing about the present landscape of rent control and stabilization in New York, or how we would get from where we are to where she would like us to be.

Moreover, is it also possible that the city is more resilient, more complicated, than Zukin allows? It constantly regenerates new social spaces of authentic, hybrid communities, even if they evade prying eyes. A walk today from Greenwich Village to Wall Street—or from Astoria to Jackson Heights—still takes you through a number of ethnic enclaves and a tremendously mixed set of communities. Even within the most upscale environments there remain informal and contested spaces. Nevertheless Zukin is underscoring a central and brutal urban paradox. Gentrifiers are people who love cities for their diversity. And yet their arrival triggers a process whereby the older, poorer groups that produced neighborhood authenticity are forced to leave.

It’s hard to see your neighborhood change before your eyes and easy to resent newcomers and media outlets for overexposing the little place you discovered on your own. We want the gate to come down just after our own arrival, to preserve what we found before it is destroyed. When the wine shop appeared, my first reaction was juvenile: boycott. I did not want to be associated with the embourgeoisement of my neighborhood, even though I knew I was a part of it. My disingenuous boycott ended when I gave in to the convenience of picking up a bottle of wine not twenty yards from my home, and over the course of a year I came to the know the owner of the store, her dog, and several other regulars. One of these, a local artist, contributed a large, whimsical chalk mural across the shop’s back wall. On Friday evenings, the shop hosted wine tastings. Local distributors uncorked bottle after bottle, carefully explaining the provenance of each, while an affable employee refilled platters of high-grade cheeses and thinly sliced prosciutto. I shared knowing looks with a few other familiar strangers from the neighborhood as we observed the Friday night crowd. These urban explorers were visiting to see what Greenpoint was “all about” and lap up its authentic charms. Although a recent arrival myself, I still regarded these people as tourists who could not appreciate the gritty quirks of the place I called home. Sharon Zukin would understand exactly how I felt.— Elihu Rubin

Beautiful colors.

Pigeons liked to relax in the azalea plant that I placed just outside my kitchen window on the fire escape.  I didn’t think too much about it until I found an egg in my plant.  I displaced the egg.  That’s all we need to say about that.  I did not want to encourage the practice of pigeon reproduction outside my  kitchen window.  Pigeons don’t sit on my azalea plant no more.

All of this is not so remarkable.  Pigeons flock to the Astral, and our back courtyard is their domain.  I was more surprised to find two pigeons INSIDE my apartment, in my Franklin Street-facing sitting room, comfortably perched in my potted pepper plant.  They had ducked under the open window.  I balked at the sight of them, but quickly regained composure and cagily approached the handsome pigeons.  I didn’t want to startle the pigeons, sending them wildly aflight in my little room like two inane bats, chirping and shitting in deranged glee.  But these pigeons had brains.  They calmly hopped out of the pepper pot, ducked under the window, and stood for a moment on the sill before flying off.  Relieved, I installed my window screen.

The appearance of the pigeons inside my apartment was the first sign of my recent animal magnetism.  The second occurred when a lithe, well-fed cat mewed at my door and pushed his way into my apartment when we (M + me) gently cracked open the door.  The cat was quickly dubbed “Alphonso.”  Alphonso was probably lost, M surmised.  He didn’t know what floor he was on.  He hid behind my clothing rack.  He hid in my closet.  But Alphonso just couldn’t stay withe me, and M picked him up (”He’s heavy”) and tried to place him outside.  Alphonso wanted back in, and it required a couple of efforts to safely evacuate him to the hall.  He mewed mournfully for a short while, but eventually found his way home.