The sad thing about gentrification is that the developers KNOW they aren’t cool, that they are replacing vital communities that sell the area – the artists, the squatters, the radicals, the punks, the minorities, the queers, all these different cultures mixed together – with boring dullness. Grey square blocks crushing gardens, inner city villages and creativity. Life at a more human level replaced with smallness and the almighty dollar.
So what do they do? They try and steal that cool, they try and pretend that nothing’s changed, or that they are ‘paying tribute’ by destroying the legacy of those communities by selling expensive food, clothes and drinks off the back of it. One case is the Indigo Hotel with it’s Mr Purple bar – ‘Adam Purple’ aka David Wilkie who was vegetarian, avowedly anti-capitalist, anarchist, off-grid, green and a pioneer guerilla gardener – so they sell burgers and expensive cocktails using his image, shortly after he died. You can hear and see more about him in the amazing short documentary above – how the City of New York could destroy something like that, I don’t know…
Ditto where the Yippies used to print their paper, it’s now the Overthrow gym, and CBGBs is an expensive clothes shop.
I guess you can see this in London too, from Dalston which in the last decade has become the new Ditch, Hackney with it’s ironic graffiti and bars in pretend-squat warehouses, Peckham and the Leake Street tunnel – somewhere that’s been empty for decades, and revitalised by graffiti jams is now going to get swanky bars. They’ll ‘protect’ the graffiti, i.e. put it behind glass and use it to flog stuff, I’m guessing the bars will attempt to be ‘edgy’ by theming themselves around a sanitised version. Lame.
Even near me the terrible new safety deposit boxes in the sky (low-rise version) advertised themselves on hoardings using 80’s and 90’s tickets and flyers from rock venues that are long gone, and even with these nostalgic new residents they won’t be coming back (they are super evangelical churches now – interestingly ones that seem to actually care a lot about the old Gaumont and National cinema buildings than the developers, so more power to them). I’m reminded of the Hacienda in Manchester too, terrible Saville knock-off hoardings and signage, ‘You can buy a piece of the Hac!’ – but as they knocked down the wrong bit, none was preserved so you just get this non-descrip block of yawnful flats. Meh.
In part it was ever thus, but taking the actual image of activists as a brand to make your expensive tat more cool is a new low….I guess last time that happened was Che Guevara, but at least some of the revolutionary meaning came across. (not you, Madonna) (via Pom Deter)
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