Your to-read list for the day

-Flavia's post on some not-useful new-pope commentary.

-Stephen Metcalf on the brand that is Brooklyn.

-Robert Huber on race in Philadelphia, and responses from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Conor Friedersdorf.

-Lisa Miller's NYMag story on feminist housewives.

-Dina Kraft on how women's desire to be thin is greater than whatever it is that divides Jew and Muslim. Although I don't think that's what one was supposed to take away from the piece.

"Luxury"

Gawker and I are, amazingly, in sincere agreement: young children brutally murdered by, it seems, the babysitter is the story. Not how fancy-schmancy the journalist feels their lifestyle appears. This is not a story only if the parents are rich, but it doesn't become less of one if they are. Yes, it's unusual for this kind of horrific crime to happen in "luxury" buildings, but it's not an everyday thing among regular-folk Americans, either. Barring the most extreme circumstances, I'm going to guess that most human beings live in relative comfort that their kids won't be bludgeoned to death. It's not some privilege specific to Manhattan's finer zip codes. The NYT article - which has apparently been edited a bunch since first going up (the word "luxury" removed, for example) - gave the impression that this was somehow the comeuppance of a family that had been too new-New York - fanciness, strollers, none of the grit or low-rent-ness of back-in-the-day. How exactly was this the place for a conversation about gentrification/blandification, or (ugh!) how Moms These Days hire other women to care for their kids? Ugh doesn't even begin to describe it.

Nostalgia for auto-parts

Jeremiah Moss's nostalgia for the West Chelsea of recent yore makes for a nice bit of anti-High-Line contrarianism, but doesn't add up. Fair enough, 10th Avenue isn't Park Avenue, and yup, it's getting posher, but when, precisely, were its residents "working-class"? Certainly not just before the High Line arrived. Manhattan, esp. below 96th, has had its dingier moments (the pre-Giuliani era, which I kind of remember), but didn't become high-end out of the blue. Remember those other four boroughs of the city? That's where those priced out of Manhattan have been living since forever. There were some housing projects in West Chelsea, and having been there yesterday I can confirm there still are those housing projects. Market-rate apartments have been high-rent, I suspect, for a good long while.

Most amusing to me personally is that one of the restaurants Moss picks as representative of the dwindling, scrappy days-of-yore is La Lunchonette, which just happens to be where my now-husband and I had our most expensive meal out as a couple while living in New York. Like, so expensive that we talked for years about the time we had that crazy expensive meal at La Luncheonette. (I remember that we shared a half-bottle of wine, and nothing outrageous, so that wasn't what did it.) Not Per Se, but not exactly a dive.

There are other issues as well. For one thing, residents are drawn to the city for many of the same reasons as tourists. If the city's main draw were an auto-parts store, the very folks whining about tourists probably wouldn't be living there in the first place. There are allegedly people who move to the city because of "Sex and the City"; once residing there, they too count as New Yorkers.

And I'm not sure what use an auto-parts shop has these days in West Chelsea. I'm quite certain there's no vibrant tradition of working-class Manhattanites owning cars. I mean, it sucks for the people who worked at those businesses, but maybe this is something the center of the city doesn't need? A better example would be if places Real New Yorkers went to were closing, but last I checked, no-frills West Chelsea supermarket Western Beef isn't going anywhere.

For another, it's clear that Moss was basically OK with the Meatpacking District North being overrun by the glamorous, and that his real problem is with the kind of tourists who clog up narrow spaces. (Doesn't call them fat. Not in so many words.) "I’ve gotten close to a panic attack, stuck in a pool of stagnant tourists at the park’s most congested points," Moss writes, leading me to wonder why someone with this reaction to crowds would possibly think of living in New York.

In other words, the op-ed reminded me of the worst of the anti-NYU-expansion-plan arguments, the ones that focus not on legitimate concerns about what NYU will do with the space, or how the profs in faculty housing will deal with X years of loud construction, but on the ickiness of the plebs traipsing around their brownstones. It's not that no one should be allowed to complain about blandification, mallification, etc. It's that it's disingenuous to present these as gentrification complaints.

If what you don't want to see is a bunch of middle-American (or middle-class European) riff-raff sullying what you feel is your turf, don't present this as a social-justice concern. If you'd prefer a couture atelier to an Abercrombie, and you spin yourself as a supporter of small business, others will roll their eyes. See also: complaints about the waste of "fast fashion" that urge high-end luxury purchases as the alternative. Moss's op-ed, for all its populist angst, seemed to be of that genre.

"'It's going to feel like up north now.'"

These are words I never thought I'd read: "University of Chicago bought the former Borders bookstore at 1539 E. 53rd St. in Hyde Park. Trendy clothing chain Akira will set up shop in the space this fall." Consider my mind blown: I think it means that these shoes will soon be available for purchase in Hyde Park, Chicago. Yes, the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. I have just learned (via) that Hyde Park - yes, that Hyde Park - is undergoing some kind of transformation, and is on the verge of becoming... pleasant. Yes, gentrification, yes, how tragic for the U of C brand, that the neighborhood will now god forbid include options beyond bookstores and Walgreens. (I now live somewhere where the only store worth going to is a bookstore, but for quite the opposite reason. There is a Kate Spade, a Lilly Pulitzer, a lacrosse-gear shop...) I mean, OMG shoes! Shiny, space-age shoes! You could go admire them on a study break (even if it's too cold and icy to wear them)! And with this, expect applications for Paris study abroad to drop exponentially.

Shelter

I wanted to like this doggy essay, by Robert Lipsyte, I really did. I mean, I remember liking the novel the author's son wrote that's referenced in the piece, the one whose protagonist inspired the name of the dog-protagonist of this article. And the comments tell me other dog owners, including poodle owners appreciated it. And this Milo is super adorable!

But something about it seemed like the canine equivalent of food-movement or anti-fast-fashion piety, with a NIMBY twist. We have: a couple who split their time between their garden-having "duplex near Union Square" and nearby country house.

There is a part of me, however, that wants so desperately to hurl a YPIS. Must stifle YPIS! But it's so, so warranted! Although there's a more precise critique to be made. Here goes:

The author, who with his wife splits his time between a garden-having "duplex near Union Square" in Manhattan and a nearby country house - is incredibly proud of himself for having purchased - with a loan! no privilege here! we're just regular 'mericans! - the land adjacent to the house on Shelter Island, saving it, rescuing it, from becoming a "McMansion" god forbid, because his dog needs to roam (the duplex's garden is only a lil' city thing) much more urgently than tacky nouveau riche sorts need to house themselves. But the author likes his houses -houses - old and rustic, and is just doing his part. He knows the names of the trees, and will write while looking out the window at the woods. His potential neighbors are probably neck-deep in Pinot Grigio and a RHONY marathon.

And the dog for whom he's saved that land from theoretical neoclassical ick isn't just any dog, but a rescue. And not just any rescue, but one that had been rescued from Real America:

[A] cocker spaniel with soul, humor, deep tolerance and possibly an appreciation for both opera and Nascar. It had recently been saved from a South Carolina kill shelter. It was beseeching us to claim it. Its name was Snoopy. When I told Lois I could never live with a dog named Snoopy, she sensed I was caving. [....] [The newly-renamed] Milo was about 6 years old, the veterinarian told us. He had had heartworm and a skin disorder. He was overweight from what had probably been a diet of junk food.

Canine kale emergency here! Unclear if what's meant is, the dog had been eating Wendy's or Zabars, or that the pet food it had been fed by its evil previous owner(s) (who could well have been, I don't know, someone isolated who died or became to ill to care for the pet, and not an animal abuser?) failed to provide sufficiently high-end dog food.

I suppose what's off-putting here is the sense that the author can't just enjoy his two houses, his charmingly no-nonsense-sounding wife, his successful-in-same-field son, his cute dog. It all has to be somehow about how he is making the world a better place, saving not just this dog, but precious land in a NY-area vacation spot. It is all part of a broader mission to save the entire planet. With the exception of deer: "[...] I often fantasize about us hunting. We’d share the venison with shelter dogs and shelter people."

How to mesh this with the fact that this is a story about a couple with one already-basically-two-houses home in Manhattan, who are so protective of their second home that they've taken out a loan to make sure no one else builds what could well be a first-and-only home on that land. The author cares about "shelter people," but not the people who might have wanted to build a place next to theirs, because what if the house was not to their aesthetic tastes? And do homeless people really want to eat from the deer some guy from the city scrounged for with his dog? Do they like being called "shelter people" and lumped in with dogs?

So yes, it's kind of like when food-movement-aficionados can't just prepare and savor local-seasonal food, but have to insist that by going to the farmers' market, they're voting with their dollars, and of course throw in a few jabs about the horrible people who get fast food or order in. Who conflate doing what makes them happy - what makes them happy largely because it allows them to identify as UMC-or-higher, sophisticated, educated, etc. - with advocacy.

But maybe why the article so rubbed me the wrong way had more to do with its oddly aristocratic bent than the air of yuppie smug. (Never heard of this concept, "aristocratic"? See the second letter, re: Barbours, here.) A stretch of land is put to better use when employed for hunting with a spaniel than when housing insufficiently tasteful humans. This notion of terroir-but-not-in-the-wine-specific-sense, that someone who appreciates dirt and animals in a kind of stately way has more right to ownership than someone who, horrors, could just write a check.

Of Brooklyns old, new, and international

Ah, Brooklyn. The borough whose newish residents can't help but sneer at the even newer arrivals. Ha! one will say, I moved here back in 2005, when Williamsburg was only a little bit extremely popular and unaffordable.

The bizarre misconception underlying this painful rant about a NYT "36 Hours" travel feature on the borough is that the Times is some kind of coherent entity, whose readers and journalists are all cut from the same cloth, all inhabiting the same stodgy patch of the Upper East or West Side. When in all likelihood the writers for the paper who are under 40 - and many over as well - live in Brooklyn. But, when writing what is, after all, a travel feature, they assume that the person they're writing for isn't a prissy Manhattanite daring to dip his pinky toe into the L train, but rather a visitor who lives outside NY if not the US entirely, and who doesn't want to waste what limited time he has in the city on what one not especially NY-specific subculture - hipsters, if we're still calling them that - thinks is most important.

There's enough to do in NYC that it's not a given any tourist would visit Brooklyn at all; someone looking to see a side of the city not represented in Manhattan would do well to consider, for example, Queens, rather than spending 45 minutes on the train for what are essentially extensions of the Lower East and Upper West Sides. These are writers who know Brooklyn just fine, who no doubt have their own favorite spots, but who are describing it for a broad and middle-aged audience - broader and more middle-aged still in the case of a travel story. It's not that they're getting it wrong, but that to describe what would appeal to a particular sort of 23-year-old would be an odd choice, even if, granted, New Brooklyn caters largely to a particular sort of 23-year-old.

The response is incoherent in the way that defenses of Brooklyn can often get. On the one hand, we're meant to Celebrate Diversity, or, more accurately, to celebrate a kind of socializing among other college-educated white people that reveals courage in the face of having perhaps walked through two streets of a black neighborhood to get to the bar: "Is the New York Times trying to tell us that only bars full of upper-middle class people are safe? If that’s what you think, go to Connecticut or something. They have nice quiet white bread bars there, too." On the other, god forbid anyone imagine Brooklyn to be so uncivilized a place as not to have all the frou-frou amenities of Manhattan: "[C]ontrary to the Times' gentle suggestions to the contrary, there are tons of cabs on Court Street, especially in the dinner hours. It’s still a major street, even though it’s in Brooklyn." Which is it? Is Brooklyn so hardcore that those who can't take it must be exiled to New Canaan? Or are those who dare doubt that Brooklyn is, in fact, as nice a lily-white suburb as the best of 'em the problem?

Meanwhile, there were some valid complaints to be made about the "36 Hours," most notably the fact that much of New Brooklyn is inaccessible to much of the rest of New Brooklyn, such that anywhere in the Park Slope realm and anything any realtor has ever called "Williamsburg" are in fact far more difficult to get back and forth from than is either destination from Manhattan. Contrary to contrary to contrary to, even gentrified areas of Brooklyn are low on cabs, so even those willing to pay for what on the map looks like it should be a short trip may well end up on that delightful combination of Q, L, and whatever else if they decided to do all of New Brooklyn in one go.

One could also point out that the "36 Hours" feature is a guide not to Brooklyn, but to New Brooklyn, and as such ignores, with the exception of Sunset Park, the neighborhoods where Stumptown coffee does not already flow from a spout in every kitchen. This, if anything, would be the authenticity critique. The rant's author "imagine[s] that certain parts of the article could be a little obnoxious to Brooklyn natives," the cites as an example of this that the article had the gall to suggest... the wrong New Brooklyn rock clubs. Huh?

I suppose, though, that my objection here is less to the response as a Defense of Brooklyn, than its place in the ever-growing canon of travel advice not exactly aimed at hipsters, but that conflates 'where the hipsters are' with 'where one finds local color.' The old-as-time popularity of telling people how to find 'off the beaten path' restaurants, of how to (as is written, preposterously, on the side of tourist vans near Battery Park City) "Come a tourist, leave a local," has morphed into a kind of parallel tourist industry, in which there's an assumption that everyone's looking for pretty much the same thing around the world, namely the equivalent of Williamsburg or Wicker Park of whichever locale they may find themselves in. This is the real-life travel equivalent to the street-style blogs depicting identically-quirkily dressed 20-and-30-somethings, whose locales one can only discern from their ethnicity. (Naturally platinum blond and in the '70s-inspired uniform-of-the-moment? Helsinki. Dark hair and a rockin' post-army bod in the same outfit? Tel Aviv.)

It's precisely this approach that sends tourists in Paris - Paris! - to the Canal St. Martin area, which is good and well but... the 6th and 7th Arrondissements! The Seine! One doesn't go to Paris for hipsters who happen to speak French and own a bit more striped stuff. One goes for the beautiful everything, for the 60-ish women who look like a young Catherine Deneuve, for the bichons frises with their own chairs in a café. As I thought in 2004 and continue to think in 2011, it's all about the poodles-and-pearls. Or if you're interested in a particular immigrant community and how it and Paris have mixed - the Queenses of Paris - that's also something Paris-specific worth checking out. But hipsters? The globalization that leads to that international subculture of like-minded sorts certainly facilitates friendships and relationships across borders, but if you're going somewhere different on account of it's different, why go that route?

Cafés to NYers: get your own damn wifi, chairs

Rather than taking the bait and responding to the 20-something article, I'm saving my rant for another NYT trend piece: coffee bars in NY have decided it's too pedestrian and bourgeois to have seats. And so, in keeping with their Victorian-hipster image, they've invested in mutton-chops and vests for the staff rather than wireless.

Not sure why the Stumptown in Ace - which happens to have the city's best iced coffee - is included in the piece. Yes, the coffee's served at a bar, but anyone who wants to can take that coffee to the adjacent, comfy-seat-filled hotel lobby, get a wifi code from the front desk, and park. Meanwhile, I'm not shocked that Café Grumpy - home of the $12 coffee and regular coffee drinks so expensive that I once went to their Park Slope location after tutoring nearby, judged that the iced coffee would set me even for the day, and left empty-handed - is on the new-ways-to-rip-off-the-gullible bandwagon.

It's reasonable, on their end, that coffee places wouldn't want patrons to hog seats for hours on end for the price of a $1.50 coffee, and it's annoying for their other patrons when Mr. Sweatpants is checking his Facebook account for the 50th time from one of the place's three tables. Why can't they just come out and say this?

Instead, it's all about how "Italian" and "convivial" it is to not be able to sit down while having a coffee. Which is such a load of bunk. It's much cheaper in Paris to get a coffee at the bar (where there are often, I should note, comfortable enough bar stools that if you're alone you might as well), and of the many, many, many, many, many, many such coffees I've had in that situation, I've witnessed minimal conviviality, and not been involved in any personally. Your chances of ending up in a random conversation are greater while walking down the street, or in the allegedly silent areas of the BNF. Nor would I want to make plans with people to meet up just so that we could stand for three minutes, have a coffee, and leave.

To be fair, it's a tough concept to sell: 'Here, please, keep spending $4 on your lattes, but be uncomfortable while doing so.' They can't exactly market it as a return to a slower-paced existence, because it's all about getting customers to leave as soon as possible. And the difference between outside-coffee and brewing some at home is mostly the atmosphere - remove that and why, exactly, are we going to coffee shops in the first place? Drinking coffee at a bar is just a more awkward version of getting one to go. The only possible advantage I can see is that it means fewer disposable paper cups.

What I predict - and you heard it hear first - is that New Yorkers will be seeing coffee shop patrons, laptops open at the coffee bar, trying desperately to pick up a signal from nearby apartments.

West Soho not what it used to be

The café best known for its brownies and second-best known for its Keanu Reeves, the one that so perfectly epitomizes The Coffee Shop, has closed. This annoys me not in a there-goes-the-homey-neighborhood way (we are, after all, talking about Soho), but in a where-else-can-you-get-best-in-the-city-brownies-in-the-company-of-heartthrob-actors one.

The Joy of Muggings

I could be wrong, but I'd thought the market on essays about how New York Isn't What It Once Was, on how the city is now one big Chase Bank, Duane Reade, and Starbucks-filled mall, had long since been saturated. But no. Kevin Baker's vaguely Obama-themed piece in the Times yesterday was a fine example of an article that's been written so, so many times since the Clinton years, if not earlier, that it reads as parody. Particularly lines like, "I fell in love with an artist who lived at the Salvation Army’s Evangeline residence for women, and we walked the slate-blue paving stones around Gramercy Park for hours, talking about art." Is this for real?

Francophilic anti-gentrification

I'm confused. I want to know what the man (an Aron who goes by A-Ron, unless this was a typo) profiled in the linked, endlessly fascinating T Magazine blog post means when he explains that he's called his show at Paris 'concept' store Colette "Off, Off Bowery" as a result of the following inspiration: "The way things happen in NYC, the Bowery is so gentrified. That’s living in the city, that’s reality. But me and my friends are more like, off-Bowery."

What am I missing? He and his friends find the Bowery gentrified. Agreed, it is. So this inspires him not to flee to the exurbs or to the developing world, but to open an exhibition in an upscale Parisian shop that offers the likes of Marc Jacobs, Puma, Swarovski, and other brands unknown to gentrified New York. I'm not understanding how he got from point A to point B, but again, I can't look away.

This much I understand: in the tradition of those too posh for gentrified (blandified?) New York, this gentleman is off to Europe, where, as we all know, there's nary a McDonalds. "Paris is an amusing city. I just came over from Milan. That’s cool, but it’s special here. The people here have a good bloodline. They’re very pretty. And I love the cafes. You sit and talk about love and life, and you take some time."

OK, my confusion has just grown beyond what I'd thought possible. Fleeing gentrification, this man has gone from Milan to Paris, and I'm assuming he does not mean the banlieues. As for the "good bloodline" that makes French people so lovely, maybe it's them, but maybe it's just some really great shampoo. As for Paris having nice cafés, I mean, again, agreed, but one would think this fact has already been remarked upon enough that the bar for further such comments would be rather high.

In seriousness: I can't tell in cases like this whether the 'ugh' an interview elicits in me should be directed towards the interviewee, or towards the interviewer. I don't want to be unfair to A-Ron, who may have been misrepresented, nor to his interviewer, who may have portrayed the man with utmost accuracy. At any rate, it's more of a bemused 'ugh' than the ones much of the real news produces, so no harm done.

New York with blinders on

You know you've made it in New York if you can, without leaving city boundaries, lead a life that in no way resembles... life in New York. If things go well, you can mow your own lawn in Manhattan or park your very own car in a garage. Next, the elite of our city will have their very own personal Walmart, a members-only megachurch, and other exurban delights that the less well-to-do among New Yorkers think of as things no one in New York would even want. This may seem absurd, but the new fetishization of farming--tied to the organic-foods movement, and popular especially with the wealthy--is just one more way New Yorkers fantasize about life anywhere else while paying massive sums to stay put.

Obviously, there are certain New York experiences we'd all (or most) gladly pay our ways out of. The subway, for one, although I'd sooner trade it for a walk than a drive to work. The walk-up apartments. The impossibility--due both to the size of apartments and the necessity of cars outside the city--of purchasing anything in bulk.

In a sense, these elites just want the best of both worlds, a chance to live close to interesting job opportunities and museums, without an accompanying need to bring laundry to a laundromat. The people who use their wealth to recreate fantasy versions of poverty, who pay tons to live in pseudosqualor in Williamsburg, are the city's most-mocked demographic. But this approach is both less popular and, at any rate, ceases to have much appeal to those over 23. The common goal to which most now strive is to be as sheltered as possible from all that is urban. To an extent this is nothing new, but I get the sense that today, with the city much safer and wealthier, with more people living here to work in banking and fewer doing so to escape what they perceive of as the suburban conformism of their childhoods, there's now this significant population of New Yorkers who all-out hate city life.

I find this depressing. Not as someone who love-love-loves New York, but as someone who's from here and who, like anyone from anywhere, sees my hometown as normal and everywhere else as odd. It's parochial pride more than anything making me ask, is it really that bad to live in New York? Is Wall Street really the only reason to live in this town? Just as we forget the reasons we as a species first abandoned the 'organic' lifestyle, many New Yorkers forget why they left home for this place.

Red Hook, Brooklyn:

A bucolic wonderland, all-Caucasian, and with no housing projects whatsoever.

“After East Harlem,” he said, “this is the final frontier.”

Gaaaaaaah, can people not hear themselves? Does this man not realize he's supposed to complain about gentrification?

As for the slide show itself, I was under the impression that that it was no longer done to talk about land up till now inhabited only by non-whites as a recently-discovered "prairie," and to call the new white inhabitants "pioneers." Well, it shouldn't be acceptable (legal, but not acceptable), so now's as good a time as any to point out that political correctness can be a good thing.

Argh!

It's a good thing I've got months' worth of pasta and years' worth of reading material, because I am never leaving the apartment again.

Prediction:

Sarah Jessica Parker, the woman many hold responsible for all that is irritating about New York City today, will get a lot of flak for lamenting the "new," mall-like Manhattan. And rightly so.

And, from the are-Jews-white? department: Emily Nussbaum, in her New York Magazine profile of SJP, notes that both the actress and her husband are "half-Jewish," the other half being...? White, presumably, since it's not worth noting. We later learn "That Sarah Jessica was, despite her newcomer status, a very New York type: the ethnic girl nerd with crazy hair, a schnoz, big eighties glasses." As anyone who's ever dared to leave New York knows, "a very New York type" is code for "a humongous Jew."

It seems we are to believe that SJP's... unconventional beauty is the result of her Semitic blood. So, for the record: the look that the less polite among commentators have deemed "horse-faced" is not an "ethnic" look. There are women who look like this of all backgrounds. I'm sure you could go to tiny villages in Asia, Europe, and Africa and find at least one woman in each who has such features.

The natural order of society

The fight against gentrification is 1% about keeping rents low enough for people making not so much money, and 99% about all sorts of other things, some of which I've enumerated here, and which The Onion dealt with far more elegantly here. The Onion was dead on about "aristocratization," only the aristocrats are never the new arrivals, but the rich who, in a given neighborhood, preceded the very-rich. Somehow the struggle of the wealthy to maintain the sanctity of their neighborhoods gets mixed up in the collective urban consciousness with the battle against gentrification. When the two are really not the same thing at all.

The NYT provides several examples of this trend. To start, there are letters from West Village residents who feel the "soul" of the Village will be lost if a new hotel is built in the area. If the NYT letter-writers own and do not rent, they could make use of the neighborhood's newfound glamor, sell their apartments and leave for somewhere more authentic but also architecturally charming, say, the South Side of Chicago.

Then there's the next article, about someone whose name sounds like Van Der Woodsen, but who's actually a real person, the president of the Carnegie Hill neighborhood association, who's leading the fight against making a really big townhouse out of several... big townhouses. It's apparently "'extraordinarily conspicuous consumption'" to live in a really big townhouse, whereas to live in just a regular old $10-million one is tasteful and understated. We also learn, if we didn't know already, that "'Part of the joy of having a brownstone in Carnegie Hill is having one of those rear yards.'" Oh is it, really? I'm intrigued. This is a cause the masses can get behind. Then there's this gem: "To radically alter the rear of the three town houses, [a neighbor] said, would 'be as if someone added a line to a poem by Wordsworth or a new act to a Shakespeare play or two new floors to the Flatiron building.'" Yes, yes, we get it, having a nice house in a city in which everyone else lives in a non-metaphorical closet isn't about life being unfair, it's art.

And finally, in case you weren't concerned, the very laws of physics are being defied by one man's attempt to build a very big house out of several other big houses: "But Mr. van der Valk said this tussle was something different, in part because he feared it could be a harbinger of a possible new trend in which the richest of the rich would try to defy the natural limitations that come with choosing to live on the island of Manhattan by combining single-family brownstones." A "single-family" unit in NYC is, remember, the size of at least four apartments.

So to conclude, I'm not (contrary to above-expressed sentiment) a communist, and think it's wonderful and fair that those with the good sense to find banking interesting get a bigger place than those who are drawn to less lucrative fields. What is a problem is when concerns among the rich about property value or even just the prettiness of a neighborhood they feel to have been invaded by richer people, or the nouveau-riche, become one and the same in people's minds as the fight to keep NYC livable for people who do something other than work on Wall Street. Again, not the same problem.

Woes of Gentrification UPDATED

A close relative of the First World Problem is the Woe of Gentrification. An example would be the barista of a hip coffee bar complaining that the neighborhood is getting too upscale. Another would be using the fact that a French bistro is closing to signal that the gentry have arrived. In other words, a woe of gentrification occurs whenever someone uses the term 'gentrification' or insinuations thereof to denote the arrival of a cafe or shop he happens not to care for--or the closing of one of his haunts-- in a neighborhood that was already charming and expensive.

UPDATE

Not sure if this counts, but comparing restaurant sushi to "ghetto sushi from Whole Foods" has an air of woes-of-gentrification about it. It's all about the shifted scale on which the new slums are all areas except 5th and Park Avenues and the new diet of the poor includes an $8 lunch.

Blandification

What do you call it when an already gentrified neighborhood gets gentrified? This is happening all over NYC, and has been for some time. My friends and I discussed the phenomenon this evening, but no revelations, I'm afraid.

Gawker bemoans the opening of a Starbucks on the Lower East Side. Well, a Whole Foods is set to open at Bowery and Houston, so Starbucks is nothing, really. I don't quite see why Starbucks, of all places, is a sign of gentrification and not just blandification. Starbucks branches are in parts of Chicago far less upscale, and with far lower rents, than the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Without a doubt, Starbucks will be one of the less expensive cafes (if you could call it a cafe) in the area. If a Gap, or even a J.Crew, were to open on the Lower East Side, it, too, would be one of the cheaper places of its kind around. Tucked-away cafes and boutiques, if they maintain an independent, run-down, and cutting-edge atmosphere, don't seem to count as gentrification, even if they rely on and encourage housing prices to rise. Such places as boutique TG-170 sell clothing that costs as much as what's found in stores in SoHo or on the Upper East Side--clothing by the same designers, even--but somehow their existence doesn't get the gentrification-fearers to worried. $3 lattes, though, are unacceptable.

What's annoying people such as the Gawker folk is that Starbucks makes the Lower East Side more like the rest of the country. Other coffeeshops with more expensive cappuccinos, but without the tell-tale green awning, are encouraged. Yet a common complaint about trendy parts of NYC is that there's no room for the middle class. Starbucks falls somewhere between the real dives of Delancey and the pseudo-dive hot-spots on Ludlow. Is that such a tragedy? Can't a bit of mainstream America add to the area's diversity? The only complaint I find at all justified is that Starbucks takes the place of other, more interesting middle-of-the road establishments. But again, this is a complaint about blandification, not gentrification.