Wait.  You mean i can post in red now?  Rock on!

 

Well, i'm doing pretty good today.  Actually left the apartment for more than the customary-and-not-particularly-psychically-healthy, given its historical resonances and the whole "tracing the contours of the gentriied strip mall amusement park city" thing,-walk up to Columbia and back, meeting Vic in union square, eating really, really cheap Sushi ($2.12 per avocado roll!!!) and then we hung out in Brooklyn (where Vic is living) for a while before i got back on the train and wound up bumping into a friend from college and his brother in the 42nd street subway station.  Still digging through the excellent new Davila book.  I'm a little more than halfway through.  Most of my reading has been done sitting on benches in Strauss park in the middle of my walks.  The upper west side's gentrification, having metastasized and entered progessively more advanced stages over the last decade and a half or so, with the omnipresence of chain drugstores, banks, tanning salons and luxury clothiers, is in a very different place from that of neighborhoods like El Barrio, Loisada, or many areas of Brooklyn.  but it's worth remembering that thirty, forty years ago, swathes of the west side were working class ethnic neighborhoods, destroyed by development schemes (like Lincoln Center) and by rent increases and property speculation.  I need to go back and read more of Christopher Mele's excellent work on the Lower East Side, but i think what i'm trying to get at with this is like a historical view of the shit i've seen happening in this neighborhood ever since Barnes and Noble destroyed the Shakespeare and Company store (featured prominently, by the way, in When Harry Met Sally - it's where they meet for the third time.)  Since i was old enough to articulate any kind of critique of these processes, i've been calling it a regentrification, or, more properly, a post-gentrification - already gentrified space becomes even more corporatized and privatized.  But i'm not certain that this analysis really describes the complexities of the situation.  If anyone has any thoughts, please post comments.