Nostalgia, it can be a wonderful journey through the past, where faint memories find a form more colorful, sensuous, more gripping than the actual event. It’s why the lament, “the good old days” so often finds itself on the lips of those who traverse down memory lane. Its mesmerizing influence has the potential to plant seeds of inspiration grown stronger in foreign soil. But like all things in nature, it has an equal and opposite contingent, which can be a suffocating grip, immobilizing the romancer and crippling the very environment that spawned its vitality.
Nowhere more do you see this phenomena embodied than in a city like New York, where for the past two centuries, with the constant influx of new people, it has become a powerful influencer worldwide in everything from the currency you spend to the clothing you wear.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It’s the statement emblazoned upon the statue that has greeted millions of ship-weary foreigners and the backdrop that has enabled those seeking a better life a way to it. Which isn’t to say every immigrant who reaches these shores has a better life, in fact for many it was and continues to be merely a stepping stone that requires a huge step back, before even attempting a move forward. Yet, it is this struggle that has colored the past two centuries and made what New York City is, but as we come to the close of the first decade of the 21st century, something has shifted. There’s an oddly mixed sentiment brewing, you’ll hear it in every corner in manhattan, you’ll see its head reared full-faced as landmark buildings and shops throughout the city give way to large developers whose buyers and tenants have equally large pockets.
Take one look down the Bowery, the oldest American thoroughfare and you’ll be overwhelmed with the changes. CBGBs, whose walls reverberated with the sounds of rock icons like the Talking Heads and Blondie is now a John Varvatos; the east side of the street lined with luxury hotels and high-rise condominiums, a far cry from the flop houses. Of course, it’s not exactly a bad alternative to the alcoholics and drug dealers that it displaced, but what exactly has replaced it?
I took a walking tour recently of the Bowery with Rob Hollander, an adjunct professor of linguistics at NYU and a New Yorker through and through. We talked about the Bowery and its history, he reminisced about the freedom that one used to feel; that while yes, you might have had to step over more than a few drunken bodies, but there was still a freedom, albeit a little reckless that drew people and artists like Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Eva Hesse to its dilapidated, light-filled lofts. It was an independence outside the mainstream that allowed the artist to, in the words of lady liberty “breathe free.” He’d go on to mourn the new developments, and denigrate the gentrification that seemed to suck the area dry of it’s colorful and more than a little messy historic culture. But at one point, it reminded me of an article in the NY Observer about No Longer Empty’s “Never Records” exhibit, that almost inadvertently grappled with an uneasiness with a nostalgia that was no longer a wafting warm and fuzzy memory but something more akin to a paralyzing rheumatism.
After empathizing with the lower east side’s developmental plight, I asked Rob what kind of development could he see that he would endorse…he paused, noted it was a good question and then responded with, “I hate to say it, but I don’t think there is any.” And yet, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it, it wasn’t a romanticized notion of how much better it would be if the homeless alcoholics and prostitutes were left to run the streets, but more a lament for what had gone up in its place and what the erection would inevitably trigger. Some could argue that every generation feels that longing for a time past…even Rothko in his Bowery studio felt it,
“One day while his one-man show was still on in New York, Rothko and James Brooks sat talking on the stairway in the building at 222 Bowery…Rothko “declared at length…the reason for his deep melancholy.” “His work had reached such an acceptance that it now inhabited the investment world as much as or more than the art world,” leaving Rothko “bereft of the only thing that meant anything–the love that many people had for his work. Now he no longer felt his work was admired for itself, but that it was a rising commodity quotation on the stock market.”[1]
But there is a single, very crucial difference to take note of between the 1960′s and 2010—the environment of creation. Art of any given period is not only a reflection of the men and women who created it, but inescapably a mirror of the times; for the Bowery artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, struggle and strife were rampant. It led to the creation of art from an almost empathic impetus.
Rothko writes in his essay “The Romantics were Prompted..”
“The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artist to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation. Freed from a false sense of security and community, the artist can abandon his plastic bank-book, just as he has abandoned other forms of security. Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible. [2]
So when a designer men’s clothing store becomes a more viable platform for launching a music career than an actual music venue like CBGB’s what is the effect? It begs the question, what kind of culture is cultivated when nurtured not necessarily by a common human struggle but by brand generation and capitalism?
Hollander, bespoke of homogeneity and the loss of the individual. I think we all feel it, we comment about it at art shows and social events over complimentary glasses of wine and conveniently mourn the passing of New York’s historic gems..but we relish the cleaner streets and more often than not welcome the homogeneity if it comes with a reduced price tag. But if there is one thing that New York City has in abundance, it’s those in search of the struggle and that healthy hostility Rothko mentions. On the Bowery it may just be that the whiskey-breathed and homeless are being traded for the well suited and higher heeled.
References:
[1] Breslin, James E. B., 1935–Mark Rothko a biography, The University of Chicago Press, 1993
[2] Rothko, M., “The Romantics were Prompted…” Possibilities, New York, I, 1947, p. 84
